Many live in quiet fear that AI will someday be, if not the death of art itself, then at least of the human artist’s livelihood. Between Hollywood screenwriters taking to the streets to protect their jobs from large language models and robot artists like Ai-Da fetching millions at auction, the future of art can seem rather grim. Fortunately, the annals of art history paint a different, brighter picture. Viewed from a distance, the pressure AI exerts on human artists appears as part of an