Maybe the chatbot can reproduce variations on technical artifacts with similar formal characteristics as the Candy Crush game. But the reproductions don’t come with the essence of what made it important: its cultural novelty, the whimsy of its graphics, the freshness of its addictive mechanism, its arrival when people had smartphones and were fishing around for what to do with them, its timing before its competitors dialed in even more potent attention sinks…
“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
I can make a photo or video with my phone camera anywhere, anytime, and I can do so essentially for free, in essentially unlimited quantity. Then Sean Baker turns around and makes Tangerine with his iPhone 5S… and if anything, I’m even more sensitized to the way good photography has something above and beyond what I’m doing.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [0] comes to mind.