Creating and Selling AI-Generated Digital Products for Steady Income
Creating and Selling AI-Generated Digital Products for Steady Income: A Meditation on Art, Automation, and Agency
“Is the creator still an artist if they no longer touch the brush?”
This ancient question, reminiscent of Plato’s dialogues on the nature of authorship and creativity, reverberates louder today than it ever did in the Athenian agora. As artificial intelligence begins to generate music, design logos, write poetry, and produce photorealistic images, we are confronted with a paradox that is both technological and deeply human: Can something made by a machine, yet sold by a human, be called a product of human creativity?
And more provocatively—can the steady income from such creations be considered “earned”?
The Ghost in the Algorithm: A Philosophical Inheritance
In Phaedrus, Plato warns us about writing: it is a “pharmakon”—both cure and poison. Writing, he claimed, would weaken memory and authentic understanding. Yet millennia later, it became the cornerstone of civilization. Today, AI is our new pharmakon. It allows us to create without effort, design without drawing, compose without hearing.
But in the Taoist tradition, Laozi might have smiled at this. “The Sage acts without doing, and teaches without speaking,” he wrote in the Tao Te Ching. To create by not creating—wu wei—isn’t that precisely what AI-generated products enable? The Taoist would say the river flows whether we push it or not; the wise simply redirect its currents.
From a Western perspective, this might feel alien. The Protestant work ethic, embedded deep in Western capitalism, equates moral worth with labor. As Max Weber observed, productivity became sanctified—a sign of divine favor. In this view, passive income from AI-generated digital assets—be it stock images, eBooks, or generative art NFTs—might feel like sacrilege. But should it?
The Psychological Shift: From Mastery to Curation
Modern psychology offers another lens. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” emphasizes immersion in the process of creation. When AI handles the process, where does flow reside? Perhaps it moves from craftsmanship to curation. As with the Renaissance patrons who didn’t sculpt marble but commissioned Michelangelo, perhaps the new creator is not a sculptor, but a selector of prompts.
This raises a cognitive dilemma. According to Daniel Kahneman, our brains favor the illusion of agency. We feel in control when we initiate action, even if the result is generated elsewhere. The AI prompt becomes a ritual—like the shaman’s chant—imbuing the algorithm with direction, meaning, and perhaps even a soul.
And what of motivation? If income flows steadily from AI-generated coloring books, resume templates, or voiceovers for e-learning platforms, is the creator an entrepreneur, an artist, or simply a techno-capitalist monk meditating on passive monetization?
Digital Products as Postmodern Relics
Let us consider the real world. Etsy shops filled with AI-designed wedding invitations. Amazon Kindle stores stocked with algorithmically written genre fiction. Music streaming platforms pushing lo-fi playlists composed by neural networks. There’s money here—sometimes tens of thousands a month—but also an ontological unease. Are these artifacts authentic? Or are they Baudrillardian simulacra, copies with no original?
A digital product is unlike a hammer or a chair. It exists in the interspace between presence and absence, like Derrida’s différance. It is endlessly replicable, unbound by scarcity. And yet, it sells—often based on the illusion of originality. Here, the buyer isn't purchasing an object, but a momentary aesthetic resonance. A vibe.
Economics, Entropy, and the Eternal Return
In thermodynamic terms, AI is an entropy engine—recombining patterns, diffusing novelty, flattening peaks of genius into plateaus of utility. And yet, in Nietzschean fashion, we find ourselves looping back to eternal questions. If a digital painting sells a thousand copies while its creator sleeps, is that not the dream of the capitalist Ubermensch? Self-overcoming, not through toil, but through intellect and systems design?
Yet there’s a danger here, too. As history teaches us, commodification always begins with tools and ends with the human spirit. Karl Marx warned that in capitalism, man becomes an appendage to the machine. In the age of AI-generated income, does the entrepreneur risk becoming an appendage to the algorithm?
The Unexpected Analogy: AI as the Modern Oracle
Consider this: In Delphi, the Oracle of Apollo never spoke directly. She muttered, entranced, and the priests interpreted her utterances. Perhaps AI is our new Pythia—spewing outputs from a deep place we don't fully understand. We, the prompt engineers, are merely the priests translating divine data into products for Etsy, Spotify, or Gumroad.
It is both mystical and transactional.
Toward an Ethic of Algorithmic Creation
In this brave new economy, perhaps the question is not “Is it real?” but “Is it meaningful?” As Viktor Frankl suggested, meaning is not found in the product, but in the intention and experience surrounding it. A digital product generated by AI but curated with love, context, and cultural awareness might bear more ethical weight than a handcrafted object made for exploitation.
We need a new ethic—not of labor, but of resonance.
Final Reflection: A Paradox to Ponder
So, we return to the initial riddle: Is the creator still an artist if they no longer touch the brush?
Or put differently: If an AI creates endlessly in your name while you sleep, earning you a steady income—are you the creator, or are you the product?
