Anu Atluru on Art, Sport, and What Remains Human in an AI Age

Anu Atluru asks what stays human when machines can do most of the work. After conversations with founders, investors, operators, writers, AI builders and people whose jobs are affected, she offers a working theory for thinking through the question.

As a writer, Atluru normally tries to say something new while sounding like herself. Recently, she says, she has also found herself trying to sound recognizably human. As AI learned to write in familiar styles, readers began treating certain patterns as evidence of machine authorship.

Her first example is the em dash, a punctuation mark she likes but now sees associated with AI. She jokes that she briefly protested before adding a note to an essay explaining that its em dashes were inserted by a person. She also cites words and contrastive sentence structures that have become suspect.

The suspicion extends beyond individual words: editing can seem too clean, sentences too uniform and prose too tidy. Atluru says that as models become better at imitating human writing, writers feel pressure to keep changing how they signal their humanity.

Some writers respond by becoming messier: keeping unusual asides, speaking directly to readers or retaining stories they would previously have cut. Atluru describes this as making one's voice more distinctive while still trying to say something novel and useful.

She connects the uncertainty to what Kevin Kelly calls an age of ambiguity: questions about technology, geopolitics, jobs and what is real online. For her, one of the most interesting uncertainties concerns how people define the human in life and work.

Drawing on Stewart Brand's pace layers, Atluru suggests technology has moved ahead of culture. She argues that AI affects fashion, commerce, government, infrastructure, culture and eventually nature at once, making it hard for people to adapt at the slower pace to which they are accustomed.

In negotiating what remains for people, she says, the task is to distinguish the useful part of work from what is specific to an individual. Producing or lending labor was once readily understood as a human contribution; AI forces a new question about what people can do that machines cannot.

Atluru asks which forms of obsolescence society will accept. Calligraphy was once useful and now persists as art; she predicts that driving may increasingly resemble horseback riding, something people do for enjoyment or sport. She looks to past reactions to displaced skills for clues.

When machines beat people at sport, she says, the initial shock does not end human competition. Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, yet people still celebrate chess champions. She contrasts machine and human running records to argue that audiences value the drama of people testing their own limits.

In art, Atluru observes a different response: people may reject or label work differently when they know AI produced it. She thinks AI can make intricate, beautiful or moving things, but asks whether these are art in the familiar sense. She cites scrutiny of published writing and debates over film awards as signs of the dispute.

Despite their differences, she sees common features in art and sport: mastery and ingenuity, the vulnerability of being judged or failing, and a particular person at the center. Audiences identify with the struggle and triumph. She recalls a Pixar storytelling principle about admiring a character's effort.

Her long-term provocation is that each skill moves toward one of three fates: art, sport or extinction. By extinction she means people no longer regard the skill as something humans need to learn and leave it to machines. She argues that finding its artistic or sporting dimension is one way a skill might remain meaningful.

In the shorter term, Atluru says, people are unbundling their roles and distinguishing what is specific to them from work another person or machine could do. Engineers reviewing AI code, lawyers checking generated contracts and radiologists approving AI-read scans are examples she offers of people supervising tools that perform portions of their work.

Atluru sees entrepreneurship at the intersection of art and sport. A founder's vision—what to build, what not to build and how to build it—makes the company an artistic artifact. The competitive work of building is the sport; different founders may be drawn more to the craft or to the game.

She applies the idea to ordinary roles, from executive and engineer to writer or operator. Some work is useful and could be done by others; some reflects what a particular person uniquely contributes. She suspects the latter has historically taken up a minority of most people's time.

Atluru proposes reversing an illustrative 80/20 split: instead of spending 80% of time on broadly useful work and 20% on what is uniquely one's own, she imagines a future closer to the opposite. She finds that prospect freeing and frightening. A slide presents the proposed reversal.

In her terms, artists want to make something beautiful or moving and realize a vision; athletes want to win, set records and push their limits. She suggests organizations should look less at headcount as a measure of achievement and more at the distinctive contributions of their artists and athletes.

One way to discover those qualities is to ask where one thrives amid ambiguity. Atluru says an artist may not know the argument of a piece until a third draft, while an athlete must cope with uncertain weather or opponents. Each works with uncertainty in a different part of the process.

Organizations, she argues, must both recruit such people and create conditions for them to flourish. Standardization may elicit average output from many people but make exceptional output from particular individuals harder. She calls for treating people as specific individuals rather than interchangeable workers.

Returning to her opening questions—what can only humans do, and what do people still want humans to do?—Atluru answers with art and sport. She lists related qualities often discussed in technology, including taste, grit, care, craft, story, purpose and meaning, and predicts that ‘soul’ will become a more common term.

Atluru acknowledges objections: art and sport may seem distant from many jobs, relevant only to an elite, or too soft a frame for inequality and economic pressure. Her response is that people have long wanted their work to matter and wanted to be recognized as a particular person who made something specific.

She argues that newness and abundance depend on unlocking what is distinctive in individuals, not only on larger labs and products. Machines are forcing people to make their values explicit. Her closing invitation is to understand art and sport literally or as metaphors for the individual contributions people choose to preserve in their own fields.