AI Gentrifies Culture
And Why We Need Shitty Artists
2025 was a remarkable year. This was the year the “dead internet theory” shifted from conspiracy to reality: roughly half of what is published online is now run by bots, for bots.
Children of AI gods such as Shrimp Jesus and Tralalero Tralala have become prominent cultural figures on and off the web and carved out their own niche in culture and in dictionaries. “Slop” is the word of the year.
And this generic, attention-optimized content drives out what came before.
But this is not new.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
We call it gentrification.
Dotville is changing. Property prices rise, small shops become cafés and galleries, rents climb, sidewalks get renovated. The street looks modern, but longtime residents are gone. What made them secure—community, affordability, belonging — vanishes into comfort for newcomers: aesthetics, amenities, predictability.
Now the space doesn’t need to be physical.
Digital artists pioneered online culture.
Culture hasn’t died; it is sure moving away.
Taking the L-train
Down in the L-train tunnel connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn’s trendiest neighborhoods (Williamsburg, Bushwick, the whole corridor where physical gentrification played out over two decades), you see posters: “AI is not your friend.” The artists who got priced out of Manhattan, then priced out of Brooklyn, are watching it happen again, digitally this time.
Same tunnel, same displacement, different medium. They know how this story ends because they’ve lived it. First, the artists make the neighborhood cool; then the market notices; then the developers arrive; then the artists are priced out and leave. Leaving us all generic coffee shops painted in “cloud dancer” instead.
(An artist argues there is no reason for artists to like AI: no real benefit to it, TikTok via @why_bread)
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
Humans respond to incentives.
We create the system, then the system shapes who we are. Even artists need to eat and pay the rent. For many, maintaining a content pipeline matters more than refining craft. (The digital economy continues to be the fastest-growing part of the US economy, and has now already reached 18% of total US GDP)
So, regardless of how much artists dislike AI, there is no way around it. Without any AI content regulations, market competition kicks in, and it is either adapt or watch someone else occupy your space. With little choice, creators used AI tools to capture attention and optimize output for reach. Today, 86 Percent of global creators use generative AI.
The language shift tells the story: “artists” become “creatives.” “Art” becomes “content.” “Communities” become “brand experiences.” This isn’t casual drift; it’s structural. Artistic risk gets replaced by market utility.
Creators have always catered to audiences, but what makes them so different today is that their most rational behavior is catering to an audience of one—the algorithm.
In this algorithm-dominated environment, we as viewers are left with super-engaging, yet super-nothing content (aka, brain rot).
(TikTok via @katotokibaya, 16M likes)
The hostage situation: the algorithm-optimized content engine
A TikTok creator I work with has roughly 30 million followers. Brands worship him; he goes viral every few days.
He hates it.
All of it.
What started as a joke became a machine demanding precise feeding. Step one pixel away from the formula, and his reach collapses. He isn’t a creator anymore; he is a caretaker for the algorithm-optimized content engine he made. He’s not a musician anymore, he’s a man on the footplate of a steam train, shoveling coal.
On LinkedIn, VC gurus offer prompts and tools to maximize content reach effortlessly. They teach you how to sound more human while scaling production. For example, according to Business Insider, more than half of creator economy startup investments went to companies building AI tools to help users speed up content creation.
These aren’t just annoying—they’re the property developers.
They’re selling the tools that enable mass displacement. They promise you can compete with machines if you just optimize harder, automate smarter, and scale faster. They’re gentrifying creativity itself, turning it into a service you can outsource.
The case for shitty artists
But here’s what we lose when we optimize out the rough edges: we lose the shitty artists. Not shitty in skill, but shitty in market terms: uncommercial, experimental, failing in interesting ways. These are the artists who try things that don’t work, who make unmarketable weird stuff, who haven’t figured out their voice yet. They’re the ones who, in aggregate, create the cultural compost that breakthroughs grow from.
Have you heard an early Post Malone song? Before creating “Congratulations”, he had to go through the “Why Don’t You Love Me?” era. And it wasn’t good, so don’t click it. But the pain of being shitty made him good (much later). It took Post Malone two years to grow this:
“Our love was as hot as a torch
But you couldn't take it anymore
Why don't you love me?”
to this:
“I dreamed it all ever since I was young
They said I wouldn't be nothing
Now they always say, "Congratulations"“
It took Charli XCX fifteen years to find a unique voice, forge a creative vision, and build a global phenomenon; Sabrina Carpenter took a decade.
The shitty versions of Post Malone, Charli XCX, and Sabrina have already had it all to create cultural moments that will become anthems to their generations; what they needed the least was algorithmic optimization of their shitty version. Not back then, not now. Because AI-optimized nothing is still nothing. Shitty Art doesn’t need to be optimized for attention; it needs to fail.
AI gentrifies culture. The question now is, can we find a new home?
We built a system that treats culture like real estate, and now we’re surprised to find ourselves living in a perfectly hollow place. Or homeless.
Gentrification’s endpoint is always the same: the original thing that made the place valuable gets erased. The dive bar that drew the artists becomes a cocktail lounge. The rehearsal space becomes luxury condos. The culture that created the value can’t afford to stay.
We’re watching the same pattern complete itself online, just faster. It looks alive, busy. But it’s empty.
The culture that made it worth visiting has already moved away.
So, the real question is — where will the humans go when there is no more space for them online?