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Edited by Rishi Chandra and Amelia Cantwell
“On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one.” - Thomas Carlyle, from Signs of the Times
Thomas Carlyle penned these lines back in 1829, when industrial machines were replacing skilled craftsmen and transforming the relationship between workers and their labor. And yet today, Carlyle’s sentiment perhaps rings truer than it ever did in the nineteenth century. As generative artificial intelligence threatens to automate the domain of the creative artisan, we face a mirror image of this historical crisis. Navigating this existential shift demands a modern revival of Romantic values to defend original thought from being entirely standardized by technology.
For much of human history, creative labor was a defining expression of human identity and agency. Many people have lost this sense of autonomy with the rise of mechanization, a paralyzing feeling of existential loss that continues into the twenty-first century. At the exact same time that the Industrial Revolution was aggressively restructuring society in Europe, a cultural counter-revolution was forming: Romanticism. This movement was an artistic, philosophical, and deeply emotional rebellion against the cold automation and ruthless efficiency ushered in by the rise of the machine.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, life was largely decentralized—humans mostly lived in small agrarian towns centered around cyclical rhythms of nature and the land. Families worked in tandem around the household, the farm, or the local workshop. Labor in this era was relatively self-directed, dictated by the immediate needs of the community rather than the artificial enforcement of an external clock or manager. With the advent of the steam engine and the consequent factories it ushered in, the physical organization of society fractured. As traditional social bonds weakened, people became increasingly atomized, moving from insular rural villages to the sprawling industrial centers of large cities like London, Berlin, or Manchester.
Factories vastly multiplied material output, but they also demanded a total restructuring of human nature. For factories to be efficient, human behavior had to become predictable. Knocker-uppers, people whose job it was to wake industrial workers for their jobs, became widespread during the early and mid nineteenth century. For the first time, human biological sleep cycles were subordinated to the artificial operational hours of the factory floor. The widespread adoption of the alarm clock soon codified this collective uniformity, replacing individual human rhythms with mechanical predictability.
The factory further segmented the family, dividing ‘paid work’ from ‘housework.’ Some historians argue that the advent of factories fundamentally altered gender roles. Where the agrarian household had previously functioned as a single, cooperative economic unit, the factory model demanded that labor be performed outside the home. In the idealized middle-class family, men left for the wage-labor of the factories, leaving women to care for children and the home. Over time, this physical separation of labor hardened into rigid social expectations, redefining what was considered ‘natural’ for men and women. Human space, human time, and human relationships were all optimized for the factory floor.
Beyond reorganizing human relationships, this industrial optimization fundamentally severed the connection between the worker and their work. Where everyday goods like textiles, shoes, and tools had once been crafted by individual artisans, the factory system replaced them with uniform, mass-produced imitations. These objects were once expressions of human identity, of subjective creativity and personal pride. With the destruction of this personal connection, the industrial worker was separated from the whole, reduced to a mere ‘cog in the machine.’ The process becomes entirely commodified. When the goods that society produces become standardized and identical, the labor of the humans who create these goods becomes just as interchangeable. The worker’s labor is no longer valued as a unique creative enterprise, but is treated as a commodity in and of itself. As Karl Marx notes in Revolution Against Capitalism, “Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity.”
It was against this soul-crushing standardization that the Romantic movement emerged not merely as an artistic trend, but as a direct rebellion of the human spirit. In response to the cold mechanization of their world, Romantics championed the unpredictability of human imagination and creativity. They rejected mechanical standardization, instead turning inward to subjective feeling. Furthermore, to escape the rigid, artificial constraints of the industrial city, they immersed themselves in the visceral sublime of nature. William Wordsworth's poetry celebrated the living, spiritual character of the natural world over the smoke-filled city, while Casper David Friedrich’s painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, visualized nature’s isolation by placing a lone human figure against a vast, untamed landscape.
The Romantic rebellion extended far beyond the natural landscape, directly targeting the structural fractures wrought by the division of labor. Where the division of labor reduced the individual to an expendable unit and fractured human relationships, Romantics countered by asserting the absolute primacy of raw emotion and the creative imagination. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein captured the existential horror of a purely artificial creation stripped of a human soul. Romanticism was, at its core, a campaign to reclaim the soul from the mechanical reductionism of the factory age. This nineteenth-century rebellion offers a blueprint for how we can address the modern generative AI crisis, providing the requisite tools to mount a similar defense of the artisan against machine automation.
In the Industrial Revolution, the machine replaced the laborer. Today, the machine is replacing the artist. Generative AI threatens to displace the creative mind, as commercial platforms like OpenAI can now instantaneously generate images, texts, videos, and much more. These AI models mimic real-world photos, paintings, and art styles, manufacturing fake paintbrush strokes or lens flares to simulate human touch. Yet, this superficial replication reveals a fundamental difference between man and machine: while generative AI imitates, it cannot conceptualize. AI analyzes billions of human-made images and texts to predict the mathematically most probable next word, pixel, or note based on statistical averages. It doesn’t create; it averages. The end result is a seamless, hyper-efficient imitation of culture, not an original, improvised product.
This mechanical limitation is where the value of the creator emerges, recalling the very concepts of originality and subjectivity that the Romantics emphasized. What separates the artist from the AI is not necessarily talent or ability anymore; it is expression and subjectivity. Unlike a machine, which lacks emotional capacity, two individual artists can view the exact same subject and interpret it in completely different ways. Imitation is not the same as intentional creation. Just as the Romantics turned toward nature and human emotion in response to the mechanization of labor and the artificiality of their cities, so too does the present moment force a fundamental reflection on the true value of art. Art is not defined by the final product or the mere visual result; it is the expression of human emotion, of a lived experience, which deeply ties the artist to their creation. Without a definitive human intent behind the work, a piece of art ceases to be an act of creation and becomes nothing more than a pale imitation born of statistical data.
Already, a widespread rejection of the hyper-automated, artificial reality perpetuated by generative AI is beginning to surface. Many Americans seek to escape the standardization and stress of the modern workforce, seeking the grandeur and tranquility of nature. Indeed, national parks are setting annual attendance records. Similarly, the analog photography industry has experienced a remarkable resurgence as amateur photographers reject the sterile precision associated with modern digital sensors and computer-generated images in favor of the unpredictable textures of film. Even the music industry demonstrates a yearning for visceral lived experience. While streaming services make music accessible to fans, many music-listeners reject the algorithmic optimization of curated playlists in favor of physically owning CDs and records and attending live concerts. These cultural shifts demonstrate a growing refusal to accept a completely simulated and mechanized world. Ultimately, as generative AI masters the craft of calculated imitation, human value is driven away from objective perfection and back toward the flawed, intentional subjectivity that first defined the Romantic spirit.
In a time when AI is replacing jobs and flooding social media platforms with synthetically generated content, it would be easy to renounce all use of AI and become a Luddite. However, an effort to escape artificial intelligence is neither possible nor practical. The technology has undeniable utility in compiling code, sorting massive datasets, and handling the administrative tasks that clog our daily lives. But we are using it to replace original thought and creative expression. Just as the Industrial Revolution forced us to invent the weekend and child labor laws to protect our health and humanity, the AI Revolution will force us to rethink the role of technology in our daily lives. The Romanticists offer us a way to hold on to those qualities that make us most human. As the world becomes increasingly standardized and automated, we must look to the past to remember a fundamental truth: humanity is found not in mechanical perfection, but in the imperfect act of creation.
Sources
Carlyle, T. (2007). Signs of the Times (1829). In G. Himmelfarb (Ed.), The spirit of the age: Victorian essays (pp. 31–49). Yale University Press.
Marx, K. (2018). Revolution against capitalism. In M. Cohen (Ed.), Princeton readings in political thought: Essential texts since Plato (2nd ed., pp. 428–454). Princeton University Press.