A perennial critique of generative AI is that it is creation bereft of creativity. Lacking what could be called a human soul, but perhaps effulgent with the soul of a new and cold machine. A contrary view sometimes espoused is that it is precisely the abstraction of the creative process from the human element which stands to radically democratise art, by making artistic skill and imagination a transferable technology. In this view, generative AI is a bionic technology which does not replace the human being, but rather completes it.

This view is typically not well-received by artists who view the investment of 'blood, sweat, and tears' into their craft as something which cannot—or at least should not—be elided by the use of generative models. Campaigns by pro-AI art activists to have deficiencies in the brain areas associated with producing good art considered as a disorder ('inæsthetica malignans' or 'Dauber's Syndrome') in the DSM-6 have been the subject of widespread outrage and derision. This cool reception—particularly from bad and very bad artists who insist that Dauber's Syndrome represents an undue pathologisation of normal human variation—has confounded activist demands for the recognition of generative AI models as essential medical infrastructure.

In 2025, AI model hub ShruggingFace attempted to bridge the gulf which had opened up in the community as a token of goodwill, and in a vain hope of preventing any more of their employees from being 𝖋𝖚𝖈𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖉 (emphasis theirs). ShruggingFace replaced their free, unlimited generative AI offerings with a Graduated Proof-of-Humanity (GPoH)-based protocol. ShruggingFace baulked at the prospect of asking users to donate blood (possibly creating the 'Bowl Judgement Blood Computer' described in the Revelation of Téreza de Mozílla) or sweat (gross, and also potentially creating some sort of sweat computer, ibid.)

This left only tears as a suitable currency, however fortuitously the Honeywell TSH-012 Solid State Tear Sensor (Human) is a well-established technology. Users can exchange their tears for inference time on the ShruggingFace servers, and each created image or other artistic work is digitally watermarked with precisely how many tears were poured into the endeavour, providing the artist with a source of unimpeachable pride. ShruggingFace terms of service forbid the deployment of recursive lachrymaxxing models (so-called 'deep weep' or 'weep dream' models) which can be used to create supranormal hyperstimuli and extract infinite credit from the system, up to the limits of human endurance. This has not stopped the 𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖘, although ShruggingFace has argued that it has at least slowed the rate of increase.