By Jo Howell, Artist and Photographer
About the Artist
Jo Howell is a visual artist and experimental photographer based in Sunderland, in the North East of England. Since 2009, she has built a career combining analogue photography, cyanotype printing, and community-led creative projects. Her work celebrates human connection, material processes, and the unpredictable beauty of light itself. Beyond the lens, Howell is also a writer and educator who reflects candidly on the challenges of sustaining an artistic practice in the modern age. Her writing captures the complex intersection of technology, creativity, and cultural evolution — often questioning what is lost and what might be gained as digital systems become inseparable from our lives.
Introduction: Quietly Feeding the Monster
Here in 2025, we are quietly feeding the monster. Every time we type a prompt, upload an image, or click “generate,” we offer another morsel to the algorithm — a digital entity that learns, evolves, and consumes faster than any of us can comprehend. It’s easy to believe we are simply participating in a creative revolution, but beneath the surface, something deeper — and more disquieting — is happening.
We are lurching toward an inevitable cultural calamity, one that blurs the boundaries between creation and consumption, authenticity and automation. The question that has haunted me lately is deceptively simple: when AI makes culture, is it really culture anymore?
The Nature of Culture and the Living Growth of Ideas
Culture has always been alive — a messy, collective growth nurtured through lived experience. It evokes the organic: petri dishes teeming with possibility, ideas multiplying and evolving through shared stories and human touch. Art, language, and ritual — all of it, at its core, depends on the living essence of human experience.
But what happens when machines start to participate — not as tools, but as agents? When creativity is outsourced to an algorithm, do we lose that living spark? AI doesn’t feel, doesn’t dream, doesn’t wake in the night struck by a sudden idea. It doesn’t doubt itself, it doesn’t fail, and it doesn’t hope. And yet, its fingerprints are spreading across our cultural landscape at an astonishing rate.
The Shadow of Techno-Feudalism
The rise of AI isn’t happening in isolation. Alongside it grows a new form of economic and social order — something I call techno-feudalism. It’s a phrase that’s been tossed around by thinkers and activists, but to me, it feels disturbingly literal.
In the feudal systems of old, the majority of people — the serfs — worked the land owned by a privileged few. Their labour kept the system running, yet they owned none of its fruits. Today, the land has become digital: platforms, data, and infrastructure controlled by sprawling tech conglomerates. We, the users and creators, till this virtual soil — producing content, feeding algorithms, and generating profit for entities that have no real accountability to us.
Techno-feudalism means dependency. It means our creative labour, our words, our art, and even our likenesses become commodities traded by corporations. The “lords” of this new realm aren’t monarchs but CEOs and algorithms, shaping the landscape of opportunity according to opaque calculations of engagement, virality, and profit.
If the Middle Ages were defined by castles and cathedrals, our era will be defined by data centers and cloud servers. And just like the serfs of history, we may find ourselves bound to these digital estates — subservient to systems we no longer control.
Approaching the Singularity
The AI singularity has long been the stuff of science fiction — a theoretical point when machine intelligence surpasses our own and accelerates beyond human comprehension. But in 2025, it no longer feels fictional. With quantum computing on the horizon, the speed of AI learning will only increase.
It feels as though we’re marching toward something immense and irreversible. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Even those who build these systems admit they can’t predict exactly what comes next. For artists, for creatives, for humanity itself, this raises terrifying and fascinating questions:
- What will creativity mean when AI can emulate every style?
- What happens to human culture when its reflection in the machine becomes more compelling than the real thing?
- Can art survive when the artist becomes obsolete?
The Creative Collapse: Losing Work to Algorithms
When asked in an interview recently how I feel about AI and what it means for creatives, I found myself struggling to answer neatly. It’s too vast a topic. The truth is, the creative landscape is already changing — rapidly and unevenly.
I personally know two people who have lost their graphic design jobs because their companies switched to AI tools that can generate brand materials in seconds. The same is happening to illustrators, copywriters, photographers, and even video editors. The tools that were once meant to assist us have become our competition.
For now, I still manage to earn a living — just about. But the margins are thinner every year. Opportunities in the North East of England were already scarce before AI began automating parts of the creative sector. Commissions have dwindled, pay rates have dropped, and the expectation of doing “more for less” has become normal. It’s a constant scramble for survival in an economy that increasingly undervalues human craft.
Diversifying to Survive
I’ve learned to diversify. My skill set spans photography, teaching, writing, and digital outreach. I’ve thrown myself into online projects, teaching analogue photography techniques, and running workshops where people can still touch, feel, and make something with their hands.
But even with all that, it’s a slog. I’ve spent the last year experimenting with ways to build income online: my YouTube channel, my blog, my Patreon. None of them pay much yet. My blog draws a decent readership, but monetisation feels like a labyrinth — ads, affiliate links, sponsorships, all designed to feed the same algorithms I question daily. I make about £100 a month from Patreon, and I still rely on face-to-face work just to make ends meet.
Commercial photography, once a steady income stream, has nearly vanished. Many businesses now use AI-generated imagery because it’s faster, cheaper, and endlessly adaptable. I suspect stock photographers are suffering the same fate. AIs can produce “perfect” images — but perfection isn’t the point of art. Art is about imperfection, perspective, story. And yet, in a market driven by cost efficiency, the imperfect has little economic value.
Holding on to the Human
Still, I believe there’s something AI can’t replicate — at least not yet. Teaching, for example, is a deeply human act. It involves intuition, empathy, and an understanding of how people learn and feel. Machines can simulate instruction, but they can’t inspire in the same way.
When I teach analogue photography, I watch people experience genuine awe as they see an image form in the developing tray. That small, quiet magic — that moment of discovery — is what keeps me grounded. It reminds me that art is about more than the end product. It’s about connection, process, and play.
So, while I do plan to incorporate AI into some of my future projects — perhaps in writing proposals, exploring text generation, or experimenting with hybrid ideas — I won’t be generating images. I don’t need to. I can take real photographs, with real light, through real lenses. That authenticity, that physical act of seeing and creating, still matters to me.
The Ethical Tangle of Creation
There’s also a moral dimension to all of this that we can’t ignore. AI systems are trained on vast datasets that include the work of countless artists, writers, and photographers — often without consent or compensation. In effect, the creative output of millions has become raw material for corporate profit.
When I see AI mimic a photography style eerily similar to mine, I wonder if my work has been scraped too. The irony is almost unbearable: the very technology that threatens to replace me might already be built from my unpaid labour.
We have entered an era where ownership is murky and value is detached from origin. Copyright law can’t keep up. Ethics are blurred. The creative commons has been transformed into a digital plantation, and we — the artists — are both the crops and the caretakers.
Creativity as Resistance
But I refuse to be entirely cynical. Creativity has always adapted to technology. The invention of the camera didn’t destroy painting; it reshaped it. The digital age didn’t kill analogue; it revived it in new forms. Perhaps AI will provoke a similar response — a counter-movement that values human touch, physical materials, and authentic collaboration.
Maybe the future of art isn’t about rejecting technology but reclaiming it — using it consciously, critically, and creatively. That means refusing to feed the monster blindly. It means asking hard questions about who owns the tools, who benefits from the data, and what we truly value as a society.
Looking Ahead: The Artist in the Age of AI
The future of creativity won’t be evenly distributed. Some will thrive by harnessing AI tools; others will struggle to adapt. But if we’re to preserve any sense of culture as living, we must remember that art is a dialogue — not just a product.
AI can generate images, poems, and symphonies, but it cannot experience joy, grief, or wonder. It cannot hold a camera in trembling hands and capture the fleeting light of a winter afternoon. It cannot stand in a community hall and share stories that bind people together.
That is where our humanity lies — in the imperfections, the limitations, the tactile and the temporal. Culture is not code. It is lived experience.
Conclusion: Choosing What We Feed
We are all complicit in feeding the monster. Every search, every upload, every click contributes to its evolution. But we also have agency — the choice to feed it wisely, to question what it consumes, and to hold space for the human amidst the machine.
If we are entering a new epoch — one of algorithms and automation — then let’s at least enter it with awareness. Let’s remember that culture is not just about what we make, but how we live. And for me, that means continuing to make art with light, chemicals, and care — even as the digital tide rises around us.
Because in the end, the monster only grows if we let it.
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