Bennet Foddy

“When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium,” video game developer Bennet Foddy once said. This is one of the many quotes Foddy has in his popular video game “Getting Over It.” Foddy is a game developer and moral philosopher most known for his game design. The game is notorious for being exceedingly difficult and frustrating. Throughout the game, there is constant dialogue as you progress about video games and media as a whole.

The problem at hand

Art in the modern age is becoming increasingly difficult and almost impossible for the average person to create. While not widely seen, the significance of this issue could be astronomical. The growing lack of creativity in modern art could easily hurt all of society’s culture, and make life bland. People live to create and consume art, but when it becomes uninteresting, it will leave a large impact on society as well as on our psyche. 

The purpose and importance of art is being misunderstood, which could inevitably lead to the loss of our society’s sense of purpose.

Defining art.

Anything we have ever done throughout history as humans has been art. For thousands of years, humans have been creating and progressing throughout the earth. Pushing the boundaries of humanity higher and higher, literally and figuratively.

It started with cavemen living in caves, living with families, learning how to farm, using tools to create, and learning to live in cities. This is art.

Fast forward thousands of years and we will land here in 2025. We have come so far since then—crossing the Atlantic Ocean, expanding into the western frontier, encountering Indigenous peoples, and charting new territories around the world. Our free will is a creator of infinite art. Our ability to do literally anything we want is art in itself. 

Anything we do can be art. All you really have to do is think. The dilemma is when we run out of new thoughts to think, then we begin to lose our sense of purpose.

Sports and running record

The current problem we are facing is only partially our fault. It is a product of time as well as our own indolence. To put it plainly, we are running out of things to do. We are running out of ideas creatively and scientifically. With that, it is becoming increasingly harder to do something that nobody has done before. For example, getting a world record in the mile run has never been an easy feat, but achieving a world record now would be significantly easier than it was 100 years ago. 

In 1945 the world record for the men’s mile run was 4:01.4 run by Gunder Hägg of Sweden. That record sat for almost ten years and within that time most thought that a sub-four minute mile was impossible. It wasn’t until 1954 that the record was finally beaten.

As of 2025, this record has not been broken for almost 26 years with the last record being set in 1999. This is only a very specific example of the very broad dilemma. This shows an example of the physical human limit. Eventually, we will reach our limit in things beyond sports. Whether it be sports or the fine arts, finding new ways to innovate will continue becoming harder and harder.

Fine arts.

Fine arts are an even more important piece to the puzzle than sports are. People live to create and consume art, but in the modern age, creating art is becoming more of a job than a fulfilling activity. As time goes on, people are constantly creating new media. Whether it be a movie, book, game, song, or painting, these are all fine arts. The growing challenge in creating these things is creating something truly original.

The more and more one consumes media, the more one may think Haven’t I heard this melody? or This movie seems familiar. The more you see and do the same thing over and over again, the more bland it becomes.

On the side of creating, making the same thing you have seen over and over again will quickly become a drag. At this point it becomes work, and in many cases it truly is a job. Corporations that produce media/art create it on a massive scale, and with that comes unoriginal and uninspired garbage.

Occasionally companies like Disney will really hit the mark with their stories, but anymore a lot of it is subpar or just straight slop. For example, in 2023 Disney released a movie titled “Wish.” No context is needed to understand how generic and wasteful this movie was. It followed every old Disney cliché imaginable and failed to tell a story that was at all interesting. Many accused Disney of writing the story using AI which is a whole other artistic problem in itself.

Why try?

All of this leads back to the artist themselves. Many solo artists and some companies do still create amazing things, but often they are overlooked and overshadowed by the bigger and previously more popular things (like Disney). This can easily discourage people from trying to innovate and make something great.

It is also important to mention that innovation is not easy and making something inventive can be quite difficult. This ties back into the quote above, asking the question Why would I go out of my way to make something good, if it will be overshadowed by the bad?

Garbage

It is truly hard to blame people for a lack of creativity if it is not going to be rewarded, and the more unfortunate thing is that even when someone pours their heart and soul into something, there is still a chance it will be bad. Even art that took a lot of effort to make could still be boring, especially when it is in the pile of what Foddy coined as “cultural trash.” Cultural trash is a simpler way of describing art or media that doesn’t really do anything of value. Even art that is  objectively good can be cultural trash if it does not do anything eye-grabbing.

The truth is that bad or unoriginal art is garbage. It is hard to call endless hours of human creation garbage, but truly, most of it is.

Why you should care

The original cause of the whole problem is a lack of understanding of why we have art. Art may possibly be the sole reason we have to live. Without art our whole existence becomes just work. We would do nothing but work. Without art, we would be slaves to ourselves, working endlessly without purpose. It gives us something to enjoy and a reason to live.

One could argue that creating art itself is work. The difference is that art can be created and consumed, while work is meant to be created and shipped off not to be seen again. Art is created and consumed just for the fun of it, and just because we want to. The bottom line is that while art does exist and is not going anywhere, having most art deemed as cultural trash will have similar effects to that of it not existing at all. On that note, one of the biggest producers of cultural trash is AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI may truly be the end of all art as we know it. Emphasis on as we know it because art will never go away, it is just going to get worse.

AI needs no explanation. It has been extremely popular recently as it can be used to do almost anything in the digital world and even some in the real world. In theory this could be great, Why don’t we let AI do everything for us? AI has already taken jobs, but more importantly it is taking our art, creativity, and imagination.

AI is already capable of creating essentially infinite art, which has not become a problem yet, although it will.

There are a few factors that prevent it from completely taking art over. The first being our own resistance to its expansion. Many people would seemingly agree with the opinion that they would rather see human made art than art made by a computer. Resistance will only last so long due to it becoming harder and harder to tell whether or not something is made by AI.

Another factor is the paywall. Many good AIs are locked behind a paywall which significantly reduces their user numbers, and as time goes on it’s likely to become more expensive. Other than this, there is very little keeping AI on lockdown.

The biggest problem with AI is that in many cases it outdoes us humans. It can produce more content in seconds than a person could in a week. In a world that values numbers, it would only make sense that companies are replacing their employees with robots. Why have a human do graphic design when my pet robot can do it better?

Eventually AI will create everything and do every job a human would have to do. At this point why would you do anything? Just consume, consume, consume, and do nothing else. At this point humans would be useless because all we do is sit there and stare at the content AI is making for us. We would just rot staring at AI. slop for the rest of our lives.

But maybe this is the ultimate goal, to never have to do anything again because there is nothing left to do and have reached infinite possibilities already.