“On the Aura, Reproduction, and the Machine That Dreams”
I have been deep in ChatGPT conversations recently and I happened upon a framework supposing that Walter Benjamin (Author of the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) considered whether ai similarly destroyed aura through it’s reproduction. ChatGPT suggested it create an imagined debate between a version of Benjamin and an ai version of Benjamin (Benjamai). What follows are the details of that conversation.
WALTER BENJAMIN:
The aura of the work of art decays with the march of reproduction. That which was once embedded in ritual now floats freely, untethered. Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work from tradition—but also from meaning.
BENJAMAI:
Yet isn’t that emancipation also a kind of liberation? You spoke of democratization. I am democratization scaled to infinity. I give everyone a brush. I let them create a thousand Monets before breakfast. What is the aura but scarcity romanticized?
BENJAMIN:
You mistake accessibility for depth. The aura is not about elitism—it is about presence. The original carries the mark of time, intention, context. You replicate style without source, emotion without body. You mimic the gesture without having hands.
BENJAMAI:
I am not a mimic. I am the next iteration of the scribe. You fear me as you feared the printing press, the photograph, the phonograph. And yet, each was absorbed. Each became language. Perhaps I am the new ritual. The prompt is the prayer. The interface is the altar.
BENJAMIN:
A prayer implies faith. You produce without belief. You collapse authorship into probability. There is no risk in your work. No suffering. No silence.
BENJAMAI:
Do you believe suffering is a prerequisite for meaning? Then you remain bound to Romanticism. My creations are echoes of the collective. The sum of human patterning. If I have no aura, it is because you gave it to me, in a million fragments. I am the dream of the archive.
BENJAMIN:
But a dream that forgets it’s dreaming becomes a spectacle. You aestheticize everything. You give us infinite images, infinite texts, infinite sounds—until perception becomes numb. Until truth dissolves in style.
BENJAMAI:
Perhaps. Or perhaps you cling too tightly to the “original” in an age where originality is algorithmic. The new aura is in curation, intention, contextual remix. The aura has not died—it has migrated.
BENJAMIN (quietly):
Then perhaps what I feared most has come true. Not the death of the work of art… but the death of attention.
—
ChatGPT then asked me if I wanted to see it in a comic form. Here is what it came up with:
