Cory Doctorow argues AI lacks intentionality, unlike human creativity
Essay frames AI-generated content as fundamentally different from art because it embodies no chosen intent.
What to know
- Doctorow argues AI-generated content is fundamentally different from human art because it lacks intentionality—it is 'extruded, not chosen.'
- Humans reflexively attribute intent and authorial purpose to creative works, but cannot do so with AI systems that have no mind directing them.
- The distinction hinges on whether something was deliberately chosen to communicate meaning, which AI cannot do even if its outputs appear meaningful.
- The essay gained significant traction on Hacker News, sparking discussion on AI ethics and the nature of creativity.
Cory Doctorow Writer and technologist
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Essay gains traction on Hacker News
The essay reached Hacker News frontpage with 83 points and 77 comments, drawing significant discussion about AI, intentionality, and human creativity.
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I can tell whether AI responses in subject matter I am (or was) not familiar with are correct when I can "make them work" for me, i.e. whether they actually solve my problem, and on the whole they have been pretty solid.Coding of course is something I know well and it obviously works very well for me there, but computer vision was not, and it has…
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The Claude Delusion L: https:// pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/sun setting/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9787765 posted on 2026.09.21 at 10:30:24 (c=0, p=4)
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Wait, hold up. LLMs may be non-deterministic, but they're not _random_.Take the author's sunset argument. What if I painted 2 pictures of a sunset, then put them up on a webpage and randomly picked one for you to see. Would you say there's no intentionality, only randomness? Of course not. Both paintings are still human creations.LLMs are trained…
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Doctorow publishes essay on AI and intentionality
Cory Doctorow posted "The Claude Delusion" essay on Mastodon, beginning with a reflection on how atheism changes perception of sunsets, then building to an argument that AI-generated content lacks intentionality.
“To look upon an AI-generated text or image is to look upon a thing that was extruded, not chosen. You can slip and prompt an AI-generated image of a sunset, and it will embody no intentionality on anyone's part.”
— Cory Doctorow -
1 outlet The Claude Delusion
first by HN Frontpage, 5d ago
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One of the less remarked-upon aspects of being an atheist is how it changes the way you see a sunset. If you believe in an omnipresent God, then sunsets are one of God's intentional creations, which means that the beautiful colors refracting through the darkling sky were *chosen* to produce the effect. - If you'd like an essay-formatted version of…
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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection! Here's today's edition: https:// pluralistic.net/2026/09/21/sun setting/ -- If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is ad-/tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "💰️". Suggestions…
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What people are saying 15 voices from 1 site · best of 21 · verbatim
- Sep 21
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I've done this despite also feeling silly about it, but then was surprised to get value from the response. Like something I didn't think about or would have otherwise forgotten to do.So now I do it regularly.
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This article is missing discussion of something that I recently read: as people interact with LLMs more, they end up seeing other people as less human.In other words, the more you talk with claude, the more you tend to interpret all messages as coming from an LLM, and less worthy of respect
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It's ironic that real atheists like Richard Dawkins (whose work I believe inspired the title of this post) are public about their own degree of skepticism in favor for the "personhood" of AI. And I'm confident that there are plenty others who are convinced to the tune of total disinterest in the issue of "personhood" altogether—AIs and humans…
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Interesting, I do that and haven't really thought embarrassed about it. I consider it akin to putting away tools once I'm done with them.Likewise, speaking collaboratively or capturing emotion ("We did it!") would just align with any ongoing interactive and/or personal context of the thread.
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The technology is there to assist you. It can provide valuable feedback to you about what aspects of your studying were particularly productive or less so based on your test results. There is real meaning to developing this kind of interaction with an object, no different than how children use dolls to develop prosocial behaviors.
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I don’t think it’s that silly to tell Claude you passed. That feedback is useful context for that chat session; and could theoretically be used to improve future models.
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> when we interact with an AI, we hallucinate the person on the other side of the interaction. Those hallucinations are far more common and far more consequential than any AI-generated "hallucinations" (these are more properly called "errors" or "defects").I recently used Claude to study for a technical exam. I had uploaded the official…
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> systems that cannot form intent, that have nothing to form intent withI wonder if the OP has read https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace - it seems like it directly addresses this
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If you go far enough in a field, you start to recognize areas where your personal opinion differs from the “best practices” usually recommended.I think by design an LLM can’t do that. It’s built to reflect the distribution of the knowledge it has been trained on.
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> (e.g. writing English in a captivating way) because I read their output and have taste.Concur. In addition to taste, we also have a point of view, a unique voice (nobody loves corporate- or group-speak), and can iterate on our message as we deliver it to an ever wider circle of people.
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It seems to me that often experts from some field will think less of other experts, basically because they have built a different understanding framework. So they both may be equally competent but perceive the other as less competent, and that is just based on the material, excluding some ego stuff.
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The more you know about a subject the better you can prompt AI, steer it toward the correct path, and recognize when it hallucinates or strays. Current generation AI is an automated memory-enhancement and thinking-accelerator tool, not a substitute for understanding or something that eliminates the need to think. A "mech suit for your brain" is…
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I think part of this comes from the fact that LLMs are surprisingly good at logic but roughly about as good as expected on information accuracy.LLMs are not convincing to me in the domain I did grad school...but neither is Wikipedia, or Reddit, or random pop sci books. And LLMs are basically just summarizing those things.But when made to work…
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I think to me LLMs had the effect of noticing much more the author, the intention behind human-made works of art (books, movies etc.). Before LLMs, I used to frequently consume media in a way as it were generated by a mindless process. Now it's like everything which is not AI-generated has more meaning than ever before, a bit like hypomania.
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> Of course, the more you know about a subject, the less convincing the AI's responses are.This is said all the time by AI skeptics and I think it's right in some areas and massively wrong in others.I know (or at least assume I know) a lot about certain coding domains where frontier models also show convincing ability. And we know that frontier…