Ginger HawthorneI saw this post in Bluesky, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.
I find it fascinating that 3D printing is on its way to being revolutionary while AI is a dead end, yet I only ever really hear about 3D printing from hobbyists while AI is pushed everywhere. I guess it's because 3D printing requires actually making things and doesn't scale well for infinite growth.
— Cassie, Anxious Millennial Pixie (@cassieceleste.bsky.social) Nov 11, 2025 at 3:32 PM
For me, 3D printing and AI are completely antithetical to each other. And in trying to explain why, I realized in an important distinction I make regarding tools for creatives.
3D printing takes the mechanical aspects of manufacturing and puts it in the hands of creatives. The most touted uses for AI take the creative aspect of art and put it in the hands of corporations. That’s not just a difference in industries, it’s a fundamental inversion of power and control. By putting mechanical production in the hands of individuals, 3D printing allows makers to design and produce items directly at home, with very little dependence on corporate involvement. Even printers can be built out of spare parts and filament can be spun from plastic bottles.
This goes beyond just individual benefit. By keeping the creative and mechanical aspects back together, in the hands of the people who need it, 3D printing restores a lot of personal autonomy that’s been lost to capitalism. It’s a very human-centric approach to production. For generative AI, I’ll speak specifically to its capacity to write prose and poetry, create pictures, produce music, etc. Unlike the mechanical nature of 3D printing, these capabilities are meant to replace the creative aspect of art production.
This can be a little harder to think about, so consider writing a novel. The creative aspect would be developing the setting, characters, plot, choosing the right words and phrasing for each character and situation. These are all things we traditionally expect authors to do. Some mechanical aspects would be typing into a document, breaking it up into pages, basic copy editing, creating a table of contents from chapter titles, etc. These tasks have long been handed off to machines like typewriters and computers, or other humans, like secretaries or interns. (Ghostwriting is a bit of a mix here, because creative work is offloaded in the same way that mechanical work would be, but at least in that context, everyone involved has agreed to the specific roles they play in the process.)
Corporations have always had a major part to play in the mechanical side of things. Typewriters, synthesizers, sewing machines, textile looms, etc. Humans have always used tools to simplify and replace mechanical processes, and corporations excel at producing tools. But by putting creative work directly into the hands of corporations, not in the form of employees but baked into an otherwise mechanical process, that same autonomy that was provided to creatives with 3D printing gets given to corporations instead. They can bypass human involvement in creative endeavors altogether, producing work that essentially only exists as corporate output. Yes, they can (and do) make that available to individuals, but there’s still no autonomy. People outsource both their creative and mechanical work to corporations.
And yes, I’m focusing on corporations here. There’s a potential future where this type of generative AI is commonplace on individual devices, without subscriptions. And there are already open-source models that aren’t produced or owned by corporations at all. Those environments still suffer from similar problems, though. Yes, there would be less corporate involvement and more individual choice, but we’re still talking about putting creative control into a mechanical process. To me, that’s distinctly anti-human, and it’s a path we shouldn’t be going down.
Thinking in terms of mechanical and creative processes does show a path to where generative AI can be genuinely useful. Photoshop has been a prominent example of this path for years (though I’m not pretending Adobe is immune to the threat of AI slop). Photoshop takes the creative work of creating and modifying images, and adds a bunch tools to automate repetitive or challenging tasks. Many of these, like smudging, are meant to mimic literal mechanical tasks that would’ve been done on paper or canvas for centuries. Others are specifically digital.
AI is already playing a role here, with things like generative fill: take a piece of an image and use AI to replace it with something else. Accidentally got a power line in your shot? There are already tools to repair this, but AI can automate them. A mechanical workflow for mechanical work. But that same feature, without any modifications, can also be used for any number of creative uses, which are also being heavily marketed. Add a mountain range, extend an image to include generated surroundings, even generate images from nothing but a vague idea.
For a personal example, I’ve been playing around with generative AI in my software work. I could ask it to write my code for me, but that’s a creative task that’s been suited for me, the human. So I ask for mechanical tasks instead: write some basic tests, generate a documentation outline, etc.
AI is great at mechanical work: summarizing text, automating workflows, transcribing handwriting or audio, etc. Not perfect, but pretty great, honestly. I can admit that. And there’s a real future in it for these types of tasks. But it falls down pretty hard on creative work, and not only am I okay with that, I honestly think it should. Creativity is for humans. We won’t be able to stop people from using it for creative work, but I see only harm in corporations pushing it for that purpose.