David OReilly

David OReilly (born 1985) is an Irish animator and artist whose short film Please Say Something won the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlinale and whose experimental games Mountain (2014) and Everything (2017) blurred the line between simulation and philosophy. He also designed the fictional video game sequences in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) — an ironic credit for a future critic of machine creativity.

The Infinite Art Scenario

In August 2022, weeks into the Midjourney boom, OReilly published “The Infinite Art Scenario,” a widely shared essay imagining AI’s endgame: a system that generates “its own compelling artists,” invents “hundreds of new genres every second,” and tailors endless media to every person’s taste — leaving no role for human artists at all. He called the scenario one that “would be dark not just for creativity but for our species, yet we seem to accelerate towards it with glee.”

The essay rejects the framing of generative AI as a mere tool — when its outputs are harmful, he noted, the company is blamed, not the prompter, unlike any pencil — and gives three reasons the Infinite Art Scenario may fail: corporate censorship breeding bland content, the human habit of valuing only what was hard to make (“We seek the edges of human potential, and find meaning in what people spent time on, everything else is noise”), and the possibility that AI becomes an object of disgust — he reached provocatively for Nazism and Stasi Germany as past systems of inhuman efficiency once believed benign. He has continued the critique in posts and interviews since.

Coming from an artist who built his career on procedural systems and software aesthetics — and who imagined AI companionship on screen in Her — OReilly’s opposition carries particular weight in the animation and games communities.