AI Art’s Collision of Dreams

The history of AI art is a seventy-year collision between two opposing dreams. On one side,

you have reckless profit and the hubris of recreating intelligence. On the other, the simple human

need to create. This disaster started back in 1956 at Dartmouth, where scientists

decided to make machines think. We saw the first warning signs with HAL 9000—competence

without conscience. Then came Harold Cohen’s painting robots. He was a skilled

painter who outsourced his joy to a machine. That is curiosity without wisdom. Fast forward through

the AI winters and we hit the real enemy: diffusion models. A niche thermodynamics

paper that learned to scrape the entire internet. Now, it’s a deadly struggle