Stop Kirning About Your Art. AI Will Never Be You.
Walter Kirn is one of my favorite commentators, full stop. Sharp, funny, occasionally unhinged in the best way. Lately, like many creative intellectuals, he’s been focused on AI, calling out the way it trains on copyrighted work, questioning the policies that allow it, and sketching a future where machines rise by quietly absorbing the life’s work of every writer, artist, and inventor. Let’s call this reaction Kirning. It’s the mood, the instinct, the slow-burning sense of betrayal felt by people who’ve spent their lives creating original work and now find themselves edged out by something trained on their own output.
Kirning is what happens when creators start to see the social contract fraying. For decades, the deal was simple. You make something original, and in return, society protects your rights to it. That deal now feels like it’s being quietly replaced. The new message sounds something like this: thanks for the material, it has been processed, and your continued involvement is optional. Books, songs, and styles that once took years to refine are being mimicked in seconds. Generative systems don’t just imitate form, they synthesize tone, rhythm, and even personal voice, all without permission or attribution. It’s like hearing your own laugh piped into a room full of strangers and being told to enjoy the show.
And it’s not just the automation of style that stings. It’s the exclusion. The very people whose work made these systems possible have been left out of the conversations shaping how they’ll be used. Copyright protections that once encouraged risk and originality are now being repurposed to define creative work as raw material. Meanwhile, artists are told to keep going, to keep producing, even as the market signals that their efforts are increasingly viewed as training fodder. Kirning captures this unease, this sense that something foundational is being lost in the rush to automate, and that the value of human creativity is being slowly, steadily hollowed out.
At least this is what they think, but are they wrong?
Creativity is rarely linear. It’s a system of loops, pivots, and second guesses, built from half-baked ideas, happy accidents, and an endless stream of course corrections. The painter steps back, tilts her head, and suddenly sees the problem. The engineer mutters to himself at the bench, knowing full well the part he just installed is coming out again in five minutes. The musician hears the room tighten during a bridge and drops the next chorus down a key without asking anyone. This isn’t mysticism. It’s the process.
Start with recognizing value in the unexpected. This alone separates humans from machines in most meaningful ways. AI notices unusual patterns. Humans notice what matters. One flags a statistical anomaly. The other gets goosebumps. Not quite the same.
Then there’s variation. AI generates more, faster, wider. No contest. Throw it a prompt and stand back. But volume isn't depth. Most of those variations are paint-by-number riffs unless someone with taste walks in and says, that one, but with purpose.
Now comes the choice. Not the computed kind, but the personal kind. The decision to pursue one version over another, not because it scored high but because it hits something deeper. Tension, timing, resonance. Humans bring criteria that cannot be plotted on a chart and often cannot be explained until long after the choice is made.
And just beneath the surface, there is a final, more fluid skill already at play. The pivot. The reframe. The moment when the artist gives up on fixing the piece and instead changes what it is trying to be. The mind shifts. The rules change. The problem evolves.
Not a single note has changed. Not a brushstroke. But the whole thing is now pointing somewhere entirely new.
That move, the reframing, is the quiet superpower behind every breakthrough painting, novel, theory, device, or design. And it is the one move AI hasn’t even come close to faking.
Framing is not a task. It is not a parameter. It is not a setting you can toggle. Framing is the act of deciding what something is. What it’s for. What question it is answering. And when the original frame starts to wobble, reframing is the decision to change the whole game rather than fix what’s broken. It is maybe this isn’t a violin solo, maybe it’s a funeral march. It is what if the villain is actually the hero. It is this app doesn’t need another feature, it needs to be an entirely different product.
Framing is why a doodle becomes a logo, a scene turns into a story, and a lab accident turns into penicillin. It is not the change in what you see. It is the change in how you see it.
This is not just style. This is not aesthetics. This is tectonic. Framing is what turns creative work into new work. And reframing is what lets the creator crawl out of the rut they didn’t know they were in.
It happens constantly. A novelist is writing a story about a man who wants revenge. It is slow. Clichéd. It’s not working. He strips it down and realizes it is not about revenge at all. It’s about grief. Same plot, different orbit. The shift reframes the tone, the pacing, the ending. Now it has teeth.
Personally, when I write, I don’t begin with a conclusion. I let the research take me to the story. That act of noticing where things want to go, and allowing the shape of the work to change under your feet, is framing in action. That shift in direction isn’t a detour. It’s the discovery.
None of this requires new inputs. It requires a new lens. That’s the trick. Reframing is not a content operation. It is a context operation. Content is what AI rearranges. Context is what humans reinterpret.
And here is the part that should keep everyone calm. AI does not do context. Not like this. It follows it. It simulates it. But it does not bend it. It does not walk away from a prompt halfway through and say, wait, this whole setup is wrong. It does not say, let’s burn it down and rebuild the meaning. It does not ask, what else could this be?
There is no framing module. There is no subroutine called second thoughts. It does not experience friction between intent and outcome. It does not get uncomfortable when the tone drifts or the meaning falls apart. It just keeps producing.
Which means it does not flinch. It does not second-guess. It does not hesitate, spiral, doubt, or daydream. It does not chase the thread it was not supposed to notice. And that is exactly why it does not reframe.
Humans reframe constantly, often involuntarily. A joke dies in the room. The comedian reframes. A character takes over the novel. The writer reframes. A glitch in the soundcheck turns into the signature moment of the show. Reframe.
It is not always graceful. Sometimes it looks like quitting. Sometimes it is quitting. But that act of stepping back and asking, what am I really doing here, is core to every creative discipline that actually pushes a form forward. You cannot script it. You cannot force it. But without it, nothing gets truly new.
Framing is what makes the creative process feel alive. It is what allows risk to turn into direction. It is what lets accidents become art. And it is what makes the difference between finishing something and finding something.
Until a machine can get stuck for three days and then realize it was asking the wrong question all along, the heart of invention and the soul of creativity still belong to the people doing the framing.