Brandon Sanderson: The Hidden Cost of AI Art

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite fantasy authors. In December 4, 2025 Sanderson gave a speech titled The Hidden Cost of AI Art at the Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025. The video is titled We Are the Art on YouTube, and the whole transcript is available at Sanderson’s blog.

I’ve watched the video and read the transcript several times. I think the question about what is art, and why are we making it, applies to any creative endeavour.

In anything we humans do, the final output is important, but the process we went through to arrive there is as important as the output itself. It’s in that process that we learn, grow, and thrive. Sanderson says that “the most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you. (…) Because in the end of it all, you are the art”.

AI may replace jobs and tasks, but it cannot replace us in the creative process because we are part of what is changed through the process.