About a week ago, I was in Boston for my sister’s college graduation ceremony from Berklee College of Music. When the president took the podium to make a speech, I braced for the inevitable—the acknowledgement of the reality this class was graduating into, a world pushing AI into every aspect of work and living, where CEOs like Suno’s Mikey Shulman hop on podcasts to bemoan the tedium of making music. Instead, the president leaned into positivity, encouraging students to embrace it as a tool to elevate musical creativity rather than eliminate it.
Like so many other commencement speakers around the US, he was met with a resounding chorus of boos.
Earlier on Monday, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt faced similar backlash. In an interview with USA Today, Daunt affirmed that Barnes & Noble would be open to stocking and selling AI-written books.
Daunt: “So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them.”
I am not sure how much of a clearer message the general public could be sending to CEOs and tech moguls about the presence of AI in creative spaces. Daunt’s inconsequential attitude isn’t a good look—it echoes the greedy, opportunistic flair of someone less interested in protecting the integrity of art, and more interested in capital gains. In the same interview, Daunt also admitted it’s likely some AI-generated books have already slipped into the fray to be sold to an unsuspecting audience.
The boos of college graduates and the outcry in response to Daunt’s interview are both answers to the same essential question:
What is it we truly value about art?
Is it the outcome, or the process? Do we revere Picasso because of his paintings, or do we revere the paintings because they were created by him?
These days, virtually every aspect of our lives has been restructured for automation or convenience. Our food, our social interactions, our shopping habits. We’ve conformed so deeply to this reality that words “hand-made” or “intentional” function as attractive marketing bids. There was once a time where these qualities were integral: there was no such thing as anything made without intention or by a machine.
For the most part, all forms of artistic expression—writing, composing, drawing, filming—have avoided totally conforming to convenience. The same skills required to write a book in the 18th century are still necessary today, it’s only the tools that look different. We’ve gone from ink and paper to keyboard, paint and canvas to digital brushes.
I’m with Berklee’s class of 2026. One cannot make the argument that generative AI is just another tool in the belt of creatives. That’s like saying a food critic is the same as the chef—one only tastes the outcome of hard work while the other actually learns the skills to create a meal.
If you let AI write a book for you, prompting the subtle changes necessary to fit your vision, you’ve only made yourself a critic, not a writer. All of the creative work involved—the storyboarding, sentence formation, characterization—was outsourced from the writers whose work formed the baseline of the AI’s training.
Unfortunately, that’s not a tool. It’s just repackaged plagiarism.
While Barnes & Noble is largely unconcerned with whether or not it’s carrying books written by humans, start-ups like Quibble and ProudlyHuman are working to create a space for human made art and writing to thrive, with transparent practices to ensure readers get to choose the media they engage with.
The resounding answer to what we as a society value about art is clear: it’s got to be human.
