The Stakeholder Algorithm

When you strip an artist’s intent away from the final piece, the work becomes hollow. It creates a vacuum where the “soul” used to be. You can follow a recipe perfectly, but unless there is care behind the execution, it isn’t art. It is just a product created out of necessity rather than an expression of love.

The real danger here is the erosion of expectation. If we flood the ecosystem with soulless work, the audience eventually learns not to look for depth. The visual literacy required to interpret intent and emotion begins to fade. Once that appreciation is lost, the incentive for humans to create original art vanishes. Why toil over a canvas if the viewer has forgotten how to see the difference?

Just as “vibe coding” allows non-engineers to build software, AI allows people without traditional artistic skills to guide a visual generation. The user acts as a conductor, steering the machine where they want it to go. In this instance, the output may still lack a soul (the human hand), but it possesses a clear intent to convey emotion.

This brings us to an uncomfortable parallel with the professional design world.

Think about what happens when a stakeholder forces a designer to alter their work. When the creator’s intuition is overridden to fit a client’s specific demand, the soul of the artwork is diminished. The vision is injected by someone else; the artist becomes a mechanism for delivery rather than a source of expression.

So, we have to ask: Does it actually matter if the work is generated by an algorithm or diluted by a stakeholder?

In the end, both scenarios produce the same result — a visual product where the artist’s heart has been traded for a specification.

The way we work is fundamentally changing, and understanding those shifts is the key to thriving in the decades to come. My book, “Future Work,” explores the trends shaping our professional lives and how you can leverage them to your advantage.