The Great Escape: Why Artificial Intelligence Cannot Win

As a trial lawyer representing survivors of high-profile sexual assault and personal injury cases, I am often asked about my feelings on artificial intelligence (AI).  Having taught philosophy and literature across the county before becoming a lawyer, I have often had trouble answering this question directly.  Below is my small effort.

It is a brute fact that the recent public work of every professional, intellectual, artist or person who has contributed to the printed world has been absorbed by AI and its large learning models (LLMs).   Thanks to behemoths like Gemini, Grok, Anthropic, ChatGPT, and Deepseek, it is now available to all of us—at least in forms resembling the Cliffs Notes of old, those yellow cheat sheets that once helped ordinary high school and college students through their introductory classes.  Now the Cliffs Notes are on our phones and tablets, bulleted and beautifully expressed, in bite size snippets, like gas station snack foods.

As soon as your writing, or your lecture, or your art hits the internet, it has become the potential output of the new digital age.  It is no longer yours in any meaningful economic sense.  Your work can be rearranged, duplicated, synthesized, and repurposed instantly by anyone.  And the ideas you have brought to the LLM will now live forever (or so long as the LLMs live on), as the property of the magnificent technology companies of our time, in this new world of ideas: the world of artificial intelligence.

The work of art—now duplicated, summarized, and forever reconstituted—becomes  nothing, because it is everywhere and nowhere.  It is now severed from the person who created it—and even from itself.  (This is because the original work is no longer needed, or used.  What is used are the pieces or portions repurposed by the LLM, a problem that has resulted in mismatches we oddly call hallucinations instead of structural malfunctions.)

For this thought experiment, let’s call every person affected by this dynamic an Artist, with a capital “A.”  Is your work accessible by AI?  Have you taken a photograph of a local park and posted it on a social networking site?  Have you written a recipe on how to cook with rosemary?  Have you posted a webpage on new strategies for handling sexual assault litigation?  Or written a book on Boltzman machines and quantum theory?  If so, you are an Artist for our modest purposes here.

The things Artists create remain their work until they are “published.”  Once published, this work is absorbed by AI.  Then it forever becomes the content of the LLM.  (Just as will happen with this short essay, which, at the point of posting, will no longer be my own.)

A Self-Annihilating Nothing

In an essay entitled “A Self-Annihilating Nothing” in a slim masterpiece entitled, The Man Without Content, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben asked the following question, taken from Hegel:  Is art still the essential and necessary place where truth happens? Writing in 1994, long before the internet changed the world, Agamben wondered whether the art had lapsed into pure form, “pure nothingness” or empty content.  He wondered if art had become only the celebration of art, and nothing more.  Something like art for art’s sake.  In other words, that art no longer sought to give us any answers about the world, or our human condition.

In asking these questions, Agamben had the incredible philosophical mind, or accidental brilliance, to anticipate the peculiar condition of the Artist today, in the world of AI, where the artist’s ideas are absorbed into the digital world of ideas at the moment of AI’s “discovery” of its existence.

The worry is that the loss of one’s work itself is “now immediately identified with the [Artist’s] own consciousness.”  We all know our work is no longer our own.

Once the work of the artist is repurposed into content, the only thing that the Artist retains is her own sense of self, her own artistic impulses, alienated from the work we have created: the Artist is the man without content.  Meanwhile, the content which has been absorbed from the Artist lives forever.  From another point of view, it is unable to die.  The work is left on perpetual life support in the infinite possibilities of synthesis and recombination by AI and the LLMs which hold it.

The Great Escape

Does this leave us with nothing left to do? With something that looks like meaninglessness, pure consumerism, and complacency?

My argument that structurally speaking, AI cannot win, at least in its complete embodiment.  The impulses and work of all people, in their singularity and common humanity, are worth more than this.  We are more elusive. More resistant.  And for the time being, maybe even smarter, more unpredictable.

Agamben’s essays often lean to the messianic, to some vision or hope of transcendence.  Here, in his short masterpiece, he leaves open a space for us to think.  He twists and turns with the thought: “As long as nihilism secretly governs the course of Western history, art will not come out of its interminable weight.”  What could this strange statement mean here, in our world today?

Maybe it could mean that AI, as the great absorption and synthetic spiller of beans, will never create real Art, the kind that is fundamentally human.

What is the Great Escape?  Is it an effort to make work that is so fundamentally human, so laden with the content and forms of our own lives, that it is obvious and crushing how much is lost when the original is repurposed and transformed into AI?

Part of me wishes that the Great Escape could come by creating work that is so human that its digitalization is an obvious and empty farce and monstrosity, meant for no one and meaningless to everyone.  Here, I point to a work of art to be published soon, Cream Psychosis, by Mary Walling Blackburn (MIT, 2025).  I do not think the LLMs could ever capture what is human, brilliant, and engaging in her incredible work.  Work like hers can only be appreciated in the original.

In my own practice as a trial lawyer, representing survivors of high-profile sexual assault and personal injury cases, I imagine that my own Great Escape is the fact that I must create my work product only for the human condition, and only for my clients, one case at a time.  If my work is absorbed by the LLMs, and changed therein, it is the LLM that is the “man” without content, not me—because my content means nothing to it all.

To me and my clients, the work of Artists means everything that can be valuable in the struggle to be better—at being human.