On Aura in the Age of AI

Every generation believes it is living through an unprecedented technological revolution. Every generation it is living through an unprecedented technological revolution. Ours happens to be AI. As the conversation grows more and more, I find myself returning to a text written almost a century ago: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

I first read it as a Communication student. At the time, it felt like one of those books that every student is expected to know. We discussed photography, cinema, mass culture and the democratization of art. Like many texts encountered at university, it remained somewhere in the background of my thinking, waiting for a different moment in life to become relevant. Re-reading it now feels completely different.

Benjamin could not have imagined ChatGPT, Midjourney or the countless generative systems that produce images, music and text within seconds. Yet one of his central ideas has unexpectedly found its way back into contemporary culture, not through academic journals but through TikTok, Instagram and everyday conversations. The word is aura.

Benjamin described aura as the unique presence of an artwork, something rooted not only in originality but also in its history, context and irreproducibility. Mechanical reproduction altered our relationship with art because it detached the work from the circumstances that made it singular. A photograph of a painting allows infinitely more people to experience it, but it is not the same experience as standing before the original. For decades, this idea remained largely confined to discussions of art history and media theory. Today, "aura" has become part of internet vocabulary.

People say a photograph has aura. A café has aura. An outfit has aura. Someone walks into a room and has aura. Equally, they complain that something has "no aura" at all. The meaning has shifted, yet something essential has survived. People seem remarkably capable of sensing when something feels genuinely inhabited by a person and when it feels assembled from interchangeable parts. This is where I think Benjamin becomes unexpectedly useful.

The most interesting consequence of generative AI is not that it produces convincing text or images. We already know that it can. What fascinates me is something else entirely. The more accessible these tools become, the more homogeneous large parts of the internet begin to sound. Spend enough time on LinkedIn and certain rhythms become impossible to ignore. The same sentence structures. The same emotional cadence. The same conclusions carefully designed to maximise engagement. Even before AI, platforms rewarded imitation. Now they make imitation almost frictionless.

Ironically, the technology itself is not the problem. I use artificial intelligence almost every day. It has become part of my research process, my brainstorming, sometimes even my editing. The question is not whether we should use these tools. That debate feels increasingly uninteresting. The question is what we choose to outsource. When we delegate grammar, we gain time. When we delegate research, we gain efficiency. But when we delegate observation, taste, judgement, contradiction and voice, something more difficult to define begins to disappear.

Perhaps this is why so much content feels strangely anonymous despite being attached to highly visible personal brands. Everyone is publishing. Fewer people feel unmistakably present. The paradox is almost Benjaminian. Never before has it been easier to produce. Never before has originality become so dependent on what cannot be automated.

At the same time, I find myself re-reading another thinker from my years studying communication: Guy Debord. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argued that modern life increasingly replaces lived experience with representations of experience. Together with McLuhan's notion that the medium reshapes the message, these ideas seem less like historical curiosities and more like descriptions of the digital environment we inhabit every day.

Perhaps this is why the contemporary obsession with aura feels so revealing. I don't think younger generations are unknowingly quoting Walter Benjamin. I think they are naming a feeling. A growing intuition that, despite infinite content, infinite productivity and infinite visibility, something singular is becoming increasingly rare. Maybe the challenge of creating in the age of artificial intelligence is not protecting ourselves from the technology. Maybe it is protecting the part of ourselves that technology cannot manufacture. Not because it is more authentic in some romantic sense, but because it remains irreducibly, recognisably ours.