A Conversation With My Son at MIT
For my son, on the occasion of his graduation from NTNU - Friday, 4 June 2026
Tomorrow, my son graduates from NTNU (Norwegian University of Science & Technology)
On such a day, a father’s mind naturally travels backward and forward at the same time. I think about the child he once was, the young man he has become, and the future he is about to enter.
I also find myself thinking about a conversation we had during my visit to him at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston.
We went together to an art gallery. It was one of those quiet father-and-son moments when a simple walk becomes something deeper. We looked at paintings. We talked. Somewhere between the colors on the walls and the thoughts in our minds, the conversation turned to artificial intelligence.
My son asked a question that many young artists, designers, writers, and musicians are asking today:
Does AI steal from human artists?
It was not a casual question. It was not only a technical question. It came from someone who has an artist’s mind.
My son has always lived with one foot in science and one foot in art. He studies engineering and robotics, but he also paints. Every summer, when he came home on vacation, he often created a painting. He makes origami. He plays the violin whenever and wherever he has time. He has played with student symphony orchestras in both Boston and Trondheim.
So when he looked at AI image tools and said that they could create a painting in minutes, while a human artist might spend days, weeks, or years developing the skill to create one, I understood his concern.
He was not simply defending artists as a profession. He was defending the value of human effort.
The Pain Behind the Question
To someone who has never created art, the question may sound simple. If a tool can make an image faster, why not use it?
But an artist knows that the final image is only the visible surface. Behind a painting there are years of observation, practice, failed attempts, frustration, patience, and small discoveries. Behind a violin performance there are scales, rehearsals, tired fingers, imperfect notes, and the quiet discipline of returning to the instrument again and again.
When AI creates an impressive image in seconds, it can feel as if the machine has skipped the whole human journey. It is like arriving at the mountaintop by helicopter while others have climbed with tired legs and bleeding feet.
That feeling of unfairness should not be dismissed.
Many artists worry that AI systems have learned from human artwork without permission. They worry that their styles may be copied. They worry that clients may choose cheap machine-generated images instead of paying living artists. They worry that society may begin to value output more than effort, speed more than craft, and convenience more than meaning.
These concerns are real. But the question still has another side.
No One Creates From Nothing
Scientific discoveries do not appear from thin air.
Each generation prepares the road for the next generation. Earlier scientists ask questions, build instruments, make mistakes, discover patterns, and leave behind knowledge. Later scientists inherit that knowledge and continue the journey.
Newton did not create physics from emptiness. Einstein did not think in an empty universe. Modern engineers do not begin by inventing mathematics from the beginning. They inherit the work of previous generations.
The same is true in art.
A painter learns by seeing other paintings. A musician learns by listening to other musicians. A writer learns by reading other writers. A violinist learns not only from the notes on the page, but also from teachers, conductors, friends, orchestras, and centuries of musical tradition.
When my son plays the violin in an orchestra, he is not stealing from Mozart, Beethoven, or the musicians who came before him. He is participating in a tradition. He learns, interprets, transforms, and gives the music something of himself.
Human creativity is never born in isolation. Every artist carries an invisible museum inside the mind. Every musician carries an invisible concert hall. Every writer carries a library of voices, memories, and sentences.
We create from what we have seen, heard, loved, questioned, suffered, and remembered.
AI also learns from previous human creations. But it does so at a scale and speed no human life can match. A human artist may study thousands of works in a lifetime. An AI model may be trained on millions of images.
So perhaps the difference is not that humans learn from the past while AI does not.
Both do. The difference is speed, scale, permission, and lived experience.
The Camera Once Entered the Gallery
When photography appeared, many painters feared that painting would lose its purpose. If a camera could capture a realistic image in seconds, why would anyone still need a painter?
At first, the fear made sense. For centuries, one important role of painting had been to preserve the appearance of people, places, and events. A camera could do that with mechanical speed and accuracy.
But photography did not kill painting. Instead, painting changed.
Artists began to explore what the camera could not easily capture: emotion, dreams, movement, abstraction, memory, inner life, and personal interpretation. Photography itself also became an art form. The new tool did not end creativity. It moved creativity into new territories.
AI may be another camera entering the gallery.
At first, it feels threatening because it can produce images quickly. But speed alone does not decide the value of art. A camera can take a photograph instantly, but not every photograph is meaningful. A piano can produce sound immediately, but not every sound is music.
The tool can help produce. It cannot decide why something should exist.
What AI Can Do
AI can generate images based on patterns it has learned from human-created data. It can combine styles, imitate visual forms, and produce surprising results.
That is powerful. It is also unsettling.
AI can create a picture of a violinist. It can create a picture of an orchestra. It can create a picture of a young engineer standing beside a drone, or an artist painting in the summer light.
But it has never practiced the violin when it was tired. It has never folded paper carefully into origami. It has never stood nervously before a concert. It has never spent a summer afternoon painting because something inside wanted to become visible.
AI can generate an image of a refugee boat on the sea. But it has never been on that boat.
This matters.
Human art is not only the object produced. It is also the life behind the object. It is the memory, the wound, the joy, the patience, the love, and the purpose.
AI has breadth. It can absorb patterns from more works than any person could study in a lifetime.
Humans have depth. We have lives.
So, Is AI Stealing?
My answer is not a simple yes or no.
If an AI system copies the style of a living artist too closely, allowing others to profit from imitation without permission, credit, or compensation, then there is a real ethical problem. If companies train AI systems on artists’ work without transparency or respect, then society has a serious issue to solve.
Artists deserve protection. Their labor has value. Their names, styles, and livelihoods should not be treated as free material for everyone else’s profit.
But if we say that AI is stealing simply because it learns from previous human creations, then the question becomes more complicated.
Human culture itself is built from learning, borrowing, transforming, and responding. Every generation receives something from the previous generation and adds something new.
The real problem is not that AI learns. The real problem is how it learns, who benefits, who is credited, and who may be harmed.
Therefore, the better question may not be:
Does AI learn from human artists? Of course it does.
The better question is: How can AI learn from human culture in a way that is fair, transparent, and respectful?
The Future Artist
I do not believe AI will end human creativity. But I do believe it will change the role of the artist.
The future artist may use brushes, cameras, tablets, code, and AI tools. A digital creator may use AI not as a replacement for imagination, but as a new instrument. The creative act may shift from making every stroke by hand to directing, selecting, refining, combining, and giving meaning.
This does not make the artist less important. In some ways, it makes human judgment more important. When images become easy to generate, taste becomes more valuable. When production becomes faster, intention becomes more important. When tools become powerful, responsibility becomes essential.
When photography was invented, some people feared the camera would replace artists. Yet history showed something different. Cameras became instruments in the hands of artists. The most celebrated photographs were not created by cameras alone. They were created by human beings with vision, patience, and imagination.
I suspect AI may follow a similar path. The technology will become increasingly powerful, but the most meaningful works will still come from people who bring curiosity, judgment, experience, and purpose to the process.
The future masterpiece may be created with AI, just as a photograph is created with a camera. But in both cases, the true artist remains human.
Fathers, Sons, and New Tools
When I was my son's age, I did not have AI.
Later, when I wrote my master’s thesis, I had to fight many battles at the same time. I had to study in Norwegian, read research papers, conduct research, learn academic writing, and improve my English. There was no AI assistant available day and night to explain difficult concepts, summarize papers, or help polish sentences.
My generation learned computers when computers were still strange to many people. My son’s generation must now learn AI.
Every generation meets a new tool that feels powerful, strange, and sometimes threatening. The printing press changed knowledge. The camera changed art. The computer changed work. The internet changed communication. AI is now changing creativity, learning, research, and many parts of daily life.
The wrong answer is blind worship of technology. The wrong answer is also blind fear. The better answer is the path humanity has followed for generations: to learn, adapt, and use new tools wisely, transforming them from sources of uncertainty into instruments of opportunity.
Learn the tool. Question the it. Use it carefully. Improve it if possible. But do not stand outside the future only because the future arrives wearing unfamiliar clothes.
For my youngest son
As I think back to that conversation in Boston, I do not want to dismiss your concern.
Your concern came from love for art. It came from respect for the human effort behind creation. It came from the part of you that paints, folds paper, plays violin, listens, experiments, and tries to make something beautiful with your own hands.
That part of you should never disappear. But I also hope you does not become afraid of AI. You belongs to a generation that will need to understand it, guide it, challenge it, and use it responsibly.
Perhaps one day you will use AI in your research on autonomous marine drones. Perhaps one day you will use AI in your art. Perhaps you will also help shape the ethical rules for how such tools should be used.
But whatever tools you uses, the curiosity behind the research and the soul behind the art will still be yours.
The machine may generate an image but only human gives it meaning.
Conclusion
AI does not create from nothing. It is built on the accumulated experience of humanity. But humans do not create from nothing either. We learn from parents, teachers, books, music, paintings, science, history, and one another.
The difference is that humans transform what we learn through lived experience. We attach memory, emotion, purpose, and responsibility to creation.
So perhaps AI is not the end of art.
Perhaps it is another mirror, another instrument, another camera entering the gallery. It will challenge artists. It will disturb old assumptions. It will create ethical problems that must be solved.
But it may also open new doors.
The important task for the younger generation is not to run away from AI in fear, nor to use it carelessly. The task is to learn it, question it, guide it, and use it with human judgment.
Tomorrow, my son graduates.
He steps into a world where art and technology will meet more often, not less. I hope he carries both courage and caution with him. I hope he remembers that tools can become dangerous when humans stop thinking, but powerful when humans use them with wisdom.
The future will not belong to AI alone. It will belong to humans who know how to remain human while using it.
