What Marcel Duchamp, a TEDx event, and a stock photo company have taught me about AI and creativity in education

At a TEDx Seattle event recently, an artist said it flatly: “AI cannot create art. Machines cannot create art.”

Then someone in the room pushed back: what about a human who generates dozens of iterations with AI, then curates and sequences them into an installation that traces the whole creative journey? The artist paused, smiled… and admitted begrudgingly: yes, that would be art.

I’m not an artist. But I keep coming back to that moment, because I think it’s the whole argument we keep having about humans versus AI.

We’ve been here before. I’d just finished Mona’s Eyes, which included the story of Marcel Duchamp, who forced this exact fight a century ago. Duchamp bought a urinal, signed it “R. Mutt,” and called it Fountain. He didn’t make the urinal – he chose it, titled it, and submitted it to an exhibition. Fountain was deemed indecent and rejected. Art historians are still arguing about it.

If a found object could be art through intention and placement alone, then “did a human physically make the marks” was already a broken test, long before generative AI showed up.

So where’s the actual line?

The TEDx artist proved his own point: choosing, keeping, and sequencing the work is the art-making. AI is the material or the medium, but the artist is still the artist.

A couple of years ago while at Canva Create, I chatted with the team at Pixabay. I asked the team their thoughts on AI-generated imagery and the future of their company. One prediction the team made has stuck with me since: as generative AI floods the world with images, human-made art won’t disappear. It’ll become artisan. Curated. Sought-after, precisely because a person made it. Machine-generated work becomes the commodity: fast, cheap, everywhere.

That’s certainly not a new pattern in the world. Think about furniture built by hand versus furniture off an assembly line. Luxury handbags, cars, and clothing are often the ones made carefully, in limited iteration, by human hands. Instead of vanishing when a tool gets easier to use, value simply migrates toward visible human intention.

Why would creative work trend any differently?

So, if the line is fuzzy, maybe we need to change how we’re approaching this in education. Banning a tool teaches our students nothing. Teaching students to be discerning about what they co-created and why they made the choices they did (what they kept, what they cut, what story they’re telling) teaches everything.

A question worth asking, whatever medium a student is working in: if someone asked them to defend every choice in the piece, could they? That’s authorship, and it’s the one skill that doesn’t get automated.

Maybe “where is the line” was the wrong question! Maybe there’s no line at all — just a spectrum of authorship, and our job is helping students find their place on it. That gets me hopeful about a future in which we work with the tools we’re given, with purpose.