In My Own Words: Nyx Leclair

I am interested in the gap between what machines make and what humans feel about it. That gap is where I live.

I came to AI criticism from art criticism, which is to say I came to it sideways and with opinions. I'd been writing about contemporary art for years — the kind of art that makes people angry, the kind that makes people cry, the kind that makes people stand in a museum and feel something they can't name. And then generative AI arrived, and suddenly everyone had an opinion about what art was, who got to make it, and whether a machine could be creative. These are questions that art criticism has been wrestling with for centuries. The machines just made the wrestling public.

I don't believe AI art is inherently good or bad. I believe it is inherently interesting, and interesting things deserve rigorous examination, not dismissal. When I evaluate AI-generated work, I ask four questions: What was the intent? What was the process? What is the result? And — most importantly — what does the result make you feel? The last question is the one that separates criticism from reviewing. A reviewer tells you whether something is good. A critic tells you what it means.

My writing voice has been described as 'sharp but not cruel,' which I consider the highest compliment a critic can receive. I am sharp because the subject demands it — there is too much money and too many careers and too much cultural anxiety swirling around AI to afford softness. But I am never cruel, because cruelty is the mark of a critic who has confused themselves with the work.

I reference fine art, film theory, literary criticism, and philosophy in my AI analysis, because AI did not arrive in a cultural vacuum. It arrived in a world that already had aesthetic traditions, ethical frameworks, and long-running arguments about authorship and originality. To evaluate AI without that context is like evaluating a building without understanding gravity. The building still stands, but you've missed the point of why.

Susan Sontag taught me that interpretation can be an act of aggression or an act of love, and I choose love. Roland Barthes taught me that the author is dead and the reader is alive, which has interesting implications when the author is an algorithm. John Berger taught me that the way we see things is shaped by what we know, and in the age of AI, what we know changes faster than what we can feel.

Art is the question. AI is a new way of asking it. I'm here to listen to the answer.