By — Utkarsh Suman
Abstract
Public debates surrounding AI have largely focused on one question- will AI steal jobs of human artists? Honestly this is just a massive distraction. The real shift is happening much closer to home, right in the audience’s brain and not in the capabilities of AI. The attention economy has already begun rewarding cheap engagement over artistic value. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism the article argues that AI assisted creative output detaches artistic value from labour. Hence the decline of creative employment is not the central problem but the consequence of a culture of what society considers worth creating and worth paying for.
Introduction
Open Instagram on any given evening and spend five minutes on it, we are guaranteed to hit the exact same loop the algorithms have stored for us. We will see a standard Messi or Ronaldo highlight clip ripped apart and turned into some insane Blue Lock anime style. An average match now suddenly looks like the massive climax of a shonen finale, with every single dramatic frame generated out by ai models. None of it required years of artistic training associated with animation, still why are millions of viewers drawn to these synthetic sequences over the work of trained professionals? It is easy to blame AI generators but the more interesting observation these edits reveal is about audiences, about platforms and eventually about labour.
The standard defence to this is more or less the same: AI is ‘democratizing’ creativity, which is lowering technical barriers so that tools that were once reserved are accessible to all. A random kid typing a text prompt in his bedroom can now spit out visuals that used to take a whole room of artists, compositors, and animators weeks to build. But access and value are not the same thing, and the Blue Lock edit is the proof- it is circulated by millions, yet almost none of that circulation returns as income or recognition to anyone who could be called as an animator. Hence democratizing the tool has not democratized the reward.
Attention economy
It is easy to paint AI generators as the bad guy here. But let’s be real, artificial intelligence didn’t invent the internet’s obsession with faster, louder and stimulating content. The algorithms running our feeds did that years ago. Just look at the official 2026 ranking guidelines dropped by Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. They openly admit that the whole game is rigged entirely around watch time, completion rates, and shares. Those Blue Lock football edits blow up not because anyone put actual artistic love into drawing them, but because their timing is literally engineered to hack those specific platform parameters. It’s all hard cuts, relentless movement, and a cheap dopamine hit every three seconds. AI didn’t invent this toxic setup. It just became the quickest, cheapest shortcut to feed it. This distinction matters because it changes what the rest of this article is tracking, not replacement of artists but a reward system that was already indifferent to artistry, now running at industrial scale.
Benjamin’s concept of Aura
The popularity of these AI edits illustrates something Walter Benjamin anticipated decades ago. Way back in the 1930s, long before anyone even dreamed up an algorithm, he argued that a real piece of art holds an “aura” which comes from its unique presence in time and place. It’s the specific originality, the specific human decision making which none can fully carry it forward. Old school animation is full of such messy traces. One sees the rough revisions, the intentional flaws, and the gut instincts an artist spent decades developing. But AI completely flips it. It copies the final look while throwing out the actual human experience. The clip looks perfectly polished while not a single frame inside it was decided the way a human mind actually thinks. Once a broken internet economy starts rewarding this cheap counterfeit, having an “aura” stops being an asset. It merely becomes a cost which only a few studios can justify paying for. Thus when uniqueness becomes economically inefficient, audiences gradually stop expecting it and the algorithms start feeding it.
Baudrillard’s Hyperreality
Once people stop caring about whether art is original, things get way unsettling. It’s not just that audiences accept the counterfeit, they actually start preferring the copy over the real thing. This is exactly what Jean Baudrillard meant by “hyperreality”. Its a simulation detaching from whatever it once referred to, until it feels more compelling than the reality it replaced. A live football match has its own natural drama. But a wild AI made a Blue Lock mashup of that same match? It’s hyper-dramatic. It is custom-built for the feed, hitting your brain with an immediate dopamine spike.
The real danger here isn’t simple imitation, it is substitution. If a person spends hours scrolling through these hyper-speed clips before bed, and then tries to watch a hand-animated short film the next day, their brain is going to reject it. They will find it terribly slow, not because the human art is bad, but because the algorithm has literally rewired their eyes to crave for speedy, flashy sequences. Once their taste gets hijacked and the copy becomes their preferred choice, the question of who, or what actually built it stops feeling relevant.
Marx: Commodity Fetishism
This hits exactly what Karl Marx called commodity fetishism– when a product’s value gets completely detached from the human labour that built it and the object magically seems to possess that value all on its own. When someone shares an AI Blue Lock edit, they are reacting purely to the flashy surface, the speed, the hype, they don’t give a single thought to the labour behind it. And why would they? Most of the time, there literally isn’t any. The basic human connection, who actually drew this and did they get paid completely vanishes from the screen. This isn’t just some minor side effect. It is the exact fuel running this whole machine. A culture that ignores the human behind the work has already chosen convenience over fairness.
The real-world fallout is already brutal. California’s animation and movie sectors bled thousands of jobs through the middle of 2026. State labor numbers prove that studios are aggressively leaning on software to fake a finished, high-end look without paying for the actual human craft beneath it. The true crisis doesn’t start when the layoffs hit. It starts the exact second a society decides that human artistic effort isn’t something worth paying for anymore.
A Fair Objection
There is a fair historical objection that is worth taking seriously. Painters once feared that the invention of camera and photography would end painting but it didn’t. Painting evolved, and photography turned into an incredible new art form in its own right. It’s a highly tempting parallel to draw. But if you scratch beneath the surface, this analogy has a limit. A camera requires a photographer, it takes a human being standing behind the lens making deliberate, difficult choices about framing, angles, waiting for the right light, and catching the perfect frame. Those deeply personal decisions are exactly how Benjamin’s “aura” managed to bleed through and survive inside a brand-new medium. However generative AI completely shatters this process. The entire goal of typing a text prompt is to bypass the very creative decision-making that used to define what an author even is. The real worry here isn’t just that software can generate clean images. It’s that, for the first time in human history, we have built a tool that succeeds specifically by erasing the exact human element that every previous piece of technology preserved.
Conclusion
Every AI clip we swipe past or watch for a split second is doing a lot more than just showing off how fast technology is moving. One can go ahead and blame the algorithms for constantly pushing cheap media down our throats and blame the AI software for mass-producing it. But the real, uncomfortable question here has absolutely nothing to do with the code. It is about us. What kind of audience are we turning into if we reach a point where we don’t even care if the art on our screens required a human soul to create it in the first place?
About the author
Utkarsh Suman is an undergraduate student of law at O.P. Jindal Global University. He has a keen interest in AI and Digital laws and how it is paving the way to a new societal revolution.
Image Source: https://img.magnific.com/premium-photo/human-machine-hand-reaching-each-other_332679-2631.jpg?w=2000
