2035: The Post-Human Age of AI Art

A glimpse into a future in which AI has finally liberated art from humanity

The Great Liberation

It is 2035 and Generative AI has overtaken and absorbed the culture industries. Gen AI and chatbots have rapidly expanded since the victory of AI companies in 2025, who were then permitted, by law, to scrape all “content” from the net - all books, films, and music; sweeping away outdated, anti-progress, copyright laws. As a result, through unregulated and ecstatic tech acceleration, we now, ten years on, live in a more “egalitarian world” in which AI has led to a universal condition of totally “democratised art”.

The fine art market has become an antiques market, there are no new bands or recording artists any more, or composers or musicians, or filmmakers - all of these regressive professions have been disrupted and demonetised by the liberatory acts of generative AI systems. The survivors in these sectors are the hundred or less former-artists who were already famous before the great AI disruption of 2027 and who now license their likenesses so that you can generate your own AI music and films in their style, adopting their voices and faces. The same is now true of authors and “their voices”, although it must be said that books only really exist as audiobooks now, and this too is more democratic.

The New Deal

In the late 2020s, the majority of the top actors, the top authors and the top musicians - as they grew past retirement age - signed up for this “new deal”, with the promise of digital immortality and handsome in-perpetuity-buyouts. So now, for a tiny fee, we can all generate your own culture within their franchises and “live within their digital skins”.

Hundreds of millions of us are now doing this. We are making our own pop songs and films and books by using AI assisted prompts in the styles of the famous ones that came before us. To not use AI to “generate culture” is seen as being “degenerate” and the market for the old “craft skills” has collapsed anyway. To make our own art, from our own minds and hands, would be pointless.

The “manual arts” industries no longer exist as economically viable autonomous sectors, just as many other kinds of labour (largely white collar) have been reduced to around 20% of last decade’s workforce, through the introduction of AI into all businesses. “Manual arts” such as playing musical instruments, sculpting, taking photographs or writing without AI, have become amateur hobbies with zero market value. They only exist now in online nostalgia-experience markets.

Everyone Is An Artist Now

The vast majority of feature films are now made with AI; 97% of all music is now AI assisted or entirely AI, and the best-selling books are ghostwritten by corporate AI in the style of well-known IPs and the bestselling authors of the 20^th century; many of whom are now dead, but whose literary voices live on within the IPs owned by merged corporations, such as Open AI Marvel Penguin Random House.

Through mass AI adoption, “everyone has become an artist”, finally fulfilling the egalitarian dream from the 1960s, to replace the professional “elites” and “specialists” within the arts industries with “art made by everyone”. There are no hierarchies anymore, no skill barriers, no difficulties in learning techniques like the twelve bar blues or chiaroscuro or the theatrical form of tragic comedy. A person with zero experience in music can generate a three act opera in four minutes. Art has been liberated from the ivory tower and now lives in the infinite horizon of the cloud.

The multiplication of creative potential has been staggering; there are now ten million new Harry Potter films, fifteen million new Star Wars films, and all made from people’s own bedrooms and kitchens without any of the expensive and exclusionary costs of studios and unionised, highly trained crews.

Your Own Versions of the Greatest IPs Ever

100 million AI Artists around the world are now making their own generative versions and mashups of licensed Intellectual Properties (IPs). Lord of the Rings has been mashed-up with the Hunger Games franchises through a corporate merger, and Marvel now allows you to make AI creations of your own, using their backlog of characters and pre-recorded actor-likenesses from the 1990s to 2020s. A new innovation is that seven of these corporate franchises have undergone mergers with well-known brands, and other forms of “mass entertainment”, so that you can now, rent time on an AI franchise app and generate your own unique fusions of say Spiderman and Only Fans, mashed-up with Diet Coke. Or say The Hunger Games IP, hallucinated and merged with Pizza Hut and Pornhub. The creative possibilities unleashed by the technology are something the world has never experienced before and will experience again and again and again.

So, from your own rented apartment or pod, with AI assisted voice commands, you can generate your own AI Marvel adult feature length movie within a mere fifteen minutes, and as you do it, 25 million others will all doing the same thing, giving their own unique prompts to generate diverse, unique, personalised story-versions derived and regenerated from the well-loved IPs of Captain America, Wonder Woman and the X-men, fused with the brand IPs of their favourite foodstuff, sportswear franchises and 20th century cultural classics.

Furthermore using AI facial recognition capture, each of these 25 million new “AI film directors” can add their own faces to the bodies of these beloved franchise characters. It is like the Fandom of old, but so much better because now you can star in your own Burger King Batman Pornhub fusion movies. You can created generative books and movies in the styles of Agatha Christie and Sally Rooney, and easily mash them up to generate new titles like “The Normal Murders” which you can then add genre filters too, to make the story a comedy, a tragedy and adult film or a family cartoon. Then you can share your unique assisted creation for free or for a minute fee with anyone, while they can do the same.

The Unforeseen Problem of Reach

Unfortunately, in all this plenitude, problems have arisen - since everyone makes their own art using AI and there are now an estimated 250 million new artists making their own music, films, fine arts and graphic art - these generated products have created such abundance that they have flooded their own market, reducing any hope of monetising any of it to a fraction of a percent just above zero. In one sense this doesn’t matter anymore since the idea of being a ‘professional artist’ was regressive anyway.

Plus, these new AI artists, who for a moment dreamed of sharing their assisted creations with the entire world, have discovered that they can only share their AI Art with a handful of others, as the top-down-art distribution networks of old have been replaced by AI social networks, which unfortunately have limited "personalised" “organic reach”. So the new AI artists post their new AI films, songs and books on X and Facebook, but these products only reach the six or seven people in their “bubble”, unless they buy Ad space to boost their reach.

One of the unforeseen results of this liberatory technology is that there are now no unifying cultural products to debate - no must-see films for everyone to witness en-masse in the cinema; no award winning musicals to queue for tickets for; no one band that’s breaking through, going viral and filling stadiums. There are no big prizes or blockbusters or best sellers, there are only the vast pre-existing IP franchises of already existing classic culture that are licensed for you to generatively remix, and they have grown to be the only culture on the planet that is monetizable.

Yes, everyone is a film director, composer and novelist now thanks to generative AI. And everyone is just happy to have their own private AI generated re-mashed versions of culture that came from the century before. But what about the question of distribution and that burning question of ‘audience’.

The Bell-Curve Deja-Vu Soup Effect

Here lies a problem that is common to “long tail” economics and that the people of 2035 are grappling with: If every one of your friends is making their own AI generated music, film and art, then what about distribution?

With the 500,000 new feature length films made with generative AI in the space of two years, only a handful have made it to any kind of audience through being picked up by the meagre system that is what is left of the mainstream. Seven movies in fact. Leaving 499,993 films with no place to go but youtube and a number of other streaming platforms that have arisen to offer an audience for a fee. Studies show that 93% of these films are seen by less then thirty people.

Many “new AI filmmakers” have become angered by the fact that the tech companies promised them that “everyone could be a filmmaker” for a monthly subscription fee. It turns out that what they subconsciously craved wasn’t so much the aesthetic pleasure of the films themselves but the promise of a huge audience.

Alas, in the rush to create so many new Gen AI films the question of distribution was completely overlooked, with no-one realising that half a million new films would create a glut of overproduction, decreasing the visibility & value of each competing film accordingly. A bottleneck has arisen, with over 490,000 new AI films stuck within it having zero financial value and languishing behind in the long tail.

Most of these new creators have simply had to make do with the fact that their only option - distribution-wise - is to consume their home-made AI feature films in the relative comfort and safety of their homes or among a tight-knit group of close friends, or family members, usually their mothers.

Which raises the question, does anyone really have the time to share and view much of this content at all? Any of it?

In fact, most of this Generative AI music, art, film and fiction, scraped - as LLMs do from the middle of the vast cultural bell-curve of 295 million scraped cultural products - has been reported as middling, and of average to low quality. This has only worsened as the AI systems have started to feed on more second, third and fourth generation AI content. Which is generative AI remixes of remakes of regenerated AI remixes - on and on - and this issue has become more pressing year after year as we are now looking at twenty seventh-level regenerations. Have any of us really got time to look at things with this “deja-vu” quality of the seen-before? With the taste of the already digested, or what has become known by some as ‘degenerative AI.’

For all its automated abundance, some say, the cultural results of tenth-regeneration reprocessed AI art are strangely “samey”, “sloppy” or “soupy”. But, such complaints don’t add up to much. The majority have become so accustomed to their AI remixed Marvel Harry Potter Pornhub hybrids to say or do anything about it, and everyone else’s AI art looks just like everyone elses - so why make a fuss? What would the alternatives to sloppy, soupy, sameness be anyway?

Instead, everyone politely “likes” the generic, predictable, middling, AI generated arts within their small social circles, and everyone is already habituated now to making emoji symbols of approval (The smiley face the thumbs up) to all AI art we see, so as not to offend any other AI artists. And since there is no common cultural debate, built on analysis of singular “important” or “significant” artworks that everyone will see and share, there is no longer any need for judgement or criticism of culture. Just post an emoji thumbs-up for everything, forever.

Death to the Critics

In 2035, we don’t need critics to tell us what film or musical to see or what book to read, as we could never “go out’”to see one film anyway, as cinemas have all been turned into condos. Critics no longer exist and in their last days, they were seen as anti-Ai doomers.

One of the greatest victories in the AI culture wars was the total destruction of the job of the critic, and of their anti-democratic belief in “standards”. Another victory was that so many of us who had felt oppressed and inferior due to the so-called “talents” of so-called “real artists”, got to mock them and celebrate their destruction at the hands of AI as artists and critics pretty much all fell into bankruptcy in the late 2020s. Yet another victory was with what was previously called ‘Free expression’. We were glad to see that go, because AI does the expressing and the freedom for us now, and we enjoy all having variations on the same as that is what AI does best. There is comfort and warmth under the middle of the bell-curve. Non-AI art with its outliers and old oppressive hierarchies is dead.

AI art is the best in all of History because it has absorbed all of History and made it equal and easy to re-use. There is a strong belief that has grown in the last decade that we all must stick to - that all the AI Art everyone makes today must be seen as “good” and “excellent” and “the best ever” because everyone has equality now. Yes, thanks to AI, no one is better than anyone else, in making arts, or in making anything else for that matter. To talk of “quality” is seen as part of the “old oppressive ways” of “judgement”, when art was controlled by elitist “gatekeepers”. We are all artists now - every one of us on the planet who has access to AI, which has now become a right, enforced by the UN.

Non AI artists we are told, still exist, in isolated pockets, but millions of them, we estimate, simply gave up and entered the AI assisted workforce, or have become absorbed into the hundreds of millions who now survive on the Universal Basic Income deal struck between big tech and big govt. If such people are still “recording albums”, “writing books” or “drawing pictures” we have no way of knowing as they have no way of reaching any audience.

Actually, it’s also true that with this rapid demonetisation of the “trad arts sectors” no new musicians, directors or authors in the old sense, have managed to emerge in almost a decade. In fact, it was noted that the last song written “by hand, voice and instrument” occurred in 2029. But no-one can remember the name of the so called “artist”.

The Solution to Zero Audience

So, today, along with millions upon millions of new AI artists, you stay at home and generate your own unique version of an AI Harry Potter Marvel Only Fans Mashup or any of the almost infinite IP variables on offer. Then, once it is rendered, you post and compare your own personal AI masterpiece, to the versions generated by your best friends, online, and you all “like” and “share” these versions - again to six or seven people due to limited organic reach. This is what culture has become and everyone in the developed world with access to generative AI Arts apps is doing exactly the same thing, because there is no longer any alternative, as there are no film, TV or recording studios anymore. Tech progress is unstoppable, it is fated - or at least that was what they said in 2025 when the governments of the world gave up trying to stop it.

In this year 2035, 176 million short films have been made, 292 million AI-written books, 363 million AI music songs on Soundcloud and Youtube and they all enter the “long tail” where only a handful of people review them or judge them or even watch them because the entire internet is filled-up with all this AI generated culture that, sadly, no one has time to watch, to recommend or to share. So ironically, just like those regressive trad artists who have no audience, so too, AI artists have found that they have almost zero audience too.

But since everyone must remain optimistic and happy about the great tech liberation, and since memory of the time before is fading fast, the 1 billion people who have made this new AI culture over the last decade have found a solution to this “no audience” problem. The billion new artists worldwide, now pay for click farms and chatbot AI audiences to click on their AI books, and to “like” and “share” their AI films and their AI music. They also pay for deep fake AI influencers to like and share their AI art.

So, art that was made by AI, is then seen by nobody but AI, and is then reviewed, liked and shared by nobody but AI.

In fact, the entire culture is really just AI now, with people paying the AI systems, to promote and watch their AI generated culture for them and really it is only backward-looking people with their dated notions of “taste” and “quality” that are standing in the way of that final moment of liberation when AI frees itself from regressive human needs and becomes the entirety of our culture.

Ewan Morrison’s new novel, the dystopian big tech thriller - For Emma - is published on 25th March 2025 and is available for pre-order from all major retailers.