I was scared of AI until I read Keith Haring’s journals

Source: I was scared of AI until I read Keith Haring’s journals, James Corbett, 20:55, uploaded 2026-04-27.

In 1978, when Keith Haring was 20, he wrote that the silicon computer chip had become a new life form and wondered whether people would end up serving it. He asked whether a computer could receive an aesthetic pattern and make decisions from it. If people became expendable, he wrote, their emotions, enjoyment, creativity, aesthetic sense, and personality could become expendable too.

James Corbett finds the passage in Keith Haring Journals, which covers Haring’s ideas and life from 1977 to 1989. The quotation gives Corbett’s video its starting point. The fear around AI feels new because the current systems are new, yet the worry that technology may displace human judgement has a longer history. Corbett leaves open the possibility that this moment is a genuine break with the past. His claim is narrower: earlier artists can still provide a useful way to think through the fear.

Corbett uses Haring’s philosophy as a lens for AI, creative identity, and the work that remains worth doing when machines can produce convincing outputs. He says that he uses AI every day and expects it to improve work and business. The video focuses on Haring’s philosophy and a few works rather than trying to cover his whole life or influence.

Art for people

Haring’s early philosophy grows from Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, which he reads in art school. Henri treats art as a capacity available to every person. A person becomes inventive and self-expressive by doing anything well, whatever their job. Haring takes this as a social claim. Art belongs in public life and should remain free and accessible to people beyond the group that can afford galleries.

His practice follows the claim. Corbett says Haring makes more than 5,000 chalk drawings in the New York City subway, hands out posters at protests, and once produces more than 14,000 posters for one event. He works with children on public installations, makes more than 50 public murals, creates statues, and gives away pins on the street. He turns gallery openings into parties where people dance and celebrate as well as look at the work. He caps the price of some pieces and opens the Pop Shop so people can buy his images as inexpensive merchandise.

The point is larger than access to an art object. Haring expands the group of people who can take part in art and the places where art can happen. Corbett connects this with the present problem of AI because a creative practice loses something when it becomes a way to deliver an approved result to an already defined audience. Haring’s work begins with participation in the world.

The line as a record of a moment

Haring’s work is spontaneous and each piece is unique. Henri’s advice gives Corbett the phrase that makes this precise: a drawing should be an expression of the artist’s sense of something, rather than a map that imitates its subject. The line should come from an inspired act of seeing and moving.

Haring does not plan his drawings, erase mistakes, or remove every imperfection. He writes that he paints differently every day, every hour, and every instant, so each painting records a particular stretch of time and a pattern of thought. Corbett compares this with the fact that a person cannot step into the same river twice. The work changes because the artist changes and because the surrounding world changes.

Spontaneity therefore carries a claim about time. Haring’s line records the contact between his own movement and the moment in which he acts. The work is a reflection of his individuality and of the world that his individuality receives. A premeditated copy can reproduce an image while losing the gesture that gave it force.

Individuality and the social role of art

Haring’s journals treat individuality as the condition of a worthy contribution. An artist can belong to a movement only by following its settled truths, he writes, whilst an artist who explores ideas independently adds something to the whole. He links this to the future of human society, which depends on people remaining different, changing, and contributing as individuals.

The line expresses that difference. Haring says that copied things are usually redrawn, and the power of the line disappears in the process. Corbett reads this as a reason the artist’s work cannot be reduced to its visible subject. The line matters because it carries the person who made it.

Haring also gives the artist a public duty. In a 1984 journal entry, he calls an artist a spokesperson for a society at a particular point in history. The artist acts as a medium between the world that exists and the world that could exist. Their language comes from how they perceive their culture, and honest work lets that culture speak through them whilst keeping the artist’s ego in check. Haring calls the artist an antagonist within conservative or politically oppressive societies.

In a later entry, he writes that the early line determines the public nature of his work. Subway drawings, public murals, and graphic work enter popular culture because they understand and reflect it. Artists help people understand themselves and their times through pictures, parables, and actions. Haring describes his responsibility as finding the artist’s place in harmony with the self and the world, then making those discoveries known through the things he creates.

This makes the work a passage between experiences. Haring calls himself a middleman who brings ideas together. A work remains incomplete until another person experiences it, and that person can give it a different meaning. The medium matters less than the encounter between the work and another mind.

Electrons, light, and the human imagination

In June 1989, Haring visits the Sistine Chapel in Rome and spends much of the same day working with contemporary computer graphics tools. The contrast interests him. Computer painting changes the relation between a physical drawing gesture and the resulting image. A digital image can move, stretch, multiply, shrink, recolour, rotate, flip, edit, and disappear within a fraction of a second. Haring describes it as electronic information that remains programmable and malleable, an image made from electrons and light.

He sees this as a continuation of an older process. A painter first moves a brush across a surface, then a person uses a mouse to make marks on a screen, and later a person types words that generate an image. Each medium adds a layer between the original physical act and its result. Haring’s answer is that artists have to change with media and technology whilst preserving their connection to ritual and popular culture. He says the human imagination cannot be programmed and treats it as a hope for survival.

Corbett does not claim to know how Haring would judge AI-generated work. He uses Haring’s “line” as a present-day test. A work can pass through technology and still come from an artist’s imagination, philosophy, experience, taste, and view of the world. A person who asks a model to reproduce an idea without adding a lived perspective produces what Corbett calls unnecessary art. He suggests that the current name for this kind of output may be slop.

The distinction rests on authorship of the idea rather than on the tool. Corbett sees the medium as secondary when a person has something of their own to express. The tool becomes a problem when it replaces the experience and judgement that would have made the work individual.

Dubuffet and the older function of art

Haring’s other formative text is a 1951 lecture by Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet opens by describing the collapse of the ways of thinking that European humanism had built since the Renaissance. Corbett hears the same fear of lost human agency that appears in current discussions of automation.

Dubuffet gives art a function beyond arranging pleasing shapes and colours. Art addresses the mind, acts as a language, and gives people a way to know and express themselves. Haring repeats the idea in his journals: people need to separate themselves from their surroundings and connect themselves to the world, and art helps define their existence as human beings.

Haring connects this view with cultures that he calls primitive, then questions the word. He thinks the distance between those cultures and a technologically advanced society hides a common human need. Art responds to changing conditions and directs attention towards the parts of the world that people need to understand. Corbett’s conclusion stays close to this claim. The fear and uncertainty brought by new technology have appeared throughout human history, and art gives people a way to face them.

Corbett’s own line

Corbett ends by applying Haring’s ideas to the making of this video. He wants people to think like artists, which for him means remaining in the world, having experiences, noticing how those experiences affect them, and forming an individual taste. It also means watching where they outsource decisions.

He writes the script and reads the books himself. AI helps with research by finding Dubuffet’s talk and compiling a list of Haring’s public murals and image links. He may let AI write the title. If he had given a model some quotations and a broad guideline, he says, it could probably have produced a decent script in much less time. That version would have taught him how to mass-produce a video. It would not have taught him about the books, the research, or the way the work changed his understanding.

The process matters because it changes the maker. Corbett says that a fully automated script would leave his taste and style untouched, and his line would disappear. He expects tasks that can be automated to become automated. Human judgement still has to direct the output and assess its quality. People develop that judgement through making things, and a person who has never built the skill will struggle to make anything that carries their own view.

The video closes with a list of experiences an AI has never had: sitting in a cinema, falling in love, having its heart broken, becoming a parent, spending a night with friends, going to a party, or seeing a sunset. Corbett treats those experiences as material forces in creative work. They shape what a person notices, what they care about, and what they can contribute. Haring’s journals give him a way to keep using AI whilst protecting the part of making that changes the maker.

Limits

The figures about Haring’s public work and the biographical details in this note remain claims presented by Corbett. The video does not give page numbers for the journal quotations or establish every number independently. Corbett also says that he printed the journal pages and is reading from those printouts rather than directly from the books. His account of Haring’s response to AI is an interpretation. Haring wrote about computers and computer graphics, yet he did not encounter current generative systems.

Further reading / references

• Keith Haring, Keith Haring Journals.
• Brad Gooch, Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring.
• John Gruen, Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography.
• Robert Henri, The Art Spirit.
• Jean Dubuffet’s 1951 lecture, which Corbett uses as a second source for Haring’s philosophy.
• The video description also lists Keith Haring: Street Art Boy, Drawing the Line: A Portrait of Keith Haring, After Hours: Keith Haring in Australia 1984, Keith Haring in Milan painting live on Italian TV show 29-may-1984, Keith Haring interviewed by Clare Ann Matz, Pisa, Italy 1988, and Keith Haring’s New Year’s Eve Party with his paintings and favorite music.