This post is going out early as a thank-you to paid subscribers. The full piece opens up to free subscribers next Tuesday. I’m grateful you’re here, and grateful for your commitment to rethinking what education can be. Your support is what keeps this work going.
I’ve held off on writing this post for some time. The subject takes us outside education, and my position on it is unconventional enough that I kept finding reasons to postpone. Neither is much of an excuse though. And the detour may turn out to be more relevant for education than I had originally thought.
Creative exceptionalism is the belief that of everything human beings do, creative and knowledge work are more valuable. They are presumed to be closer to the very essence of what makes us human. Under this view, it is unfortunate but acceptable when automation pushes a tradesperson onto an automated factory floor. But when the same automation arrives for a copywriter or an illustrator, it becomes an assault on the human spirit.
A fair number of people I read and respect hold some version of this belief, and at least some of them are likely going to be annoyed with this post. Maybe even offended by it. But I could never really make sense of this worldview. I have always felt it is somewhat elitist.
Most of us buy mass-manufactured clothing without a flicker of guilt, but few of us have ever wondered what happened to the tailors that used to handcraft garments. At the same time, we now turn around and insist that pictures and sentences have to come from human hands, or we are losing something central to the human experience.
What really separates the illustrator from the tailor? What gives one of them a claim on humanness that the other is apparently not allowed to make?
So in this post, I want to analyze that question with the help of two past examples of automation-driven labor displacement. Both examples used to be discussed in a way that strongly resembles today’s argument about creative uses of AI, and both have since largely faded from our collective memory.
A maiden with a pen, a harlot in print
Before movable type reached Europe, copying a text was skilled and sacred work. In monastic scriptoria and secular scribal guilds, manuscript copying was understood as devotio, labor in which the hand of the scribe served as a physical conduit for divine and classical wisdom. Hand-copying and the careful curation of manuscripts were both treated as safeguards against textual corruption and against the moral decay assumed to follow from it.
Then the press arrived, and the scribal elite fought it.
Filippo de Strata, a Dominican friar from Venice, formally protested to Doge Nicolò Marcello, who governed Venice from August 1473 to December 1474, calling for the removal of all printing presses from the Republic.
In Martin Lowry’s translation, de Strata’s most quoted line sets the two crafts against each other: “She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print.” The writing profession, he wrote, had been degraded in the brothel of the printing presses. Mechanical reproduction stripped writing of its dignity and let uneducated commoners reach texts with no learned intermediary standing between them and the page.
Typographical quality was secondary. What de Strata objected to was who could now read what, and without whose supervision.
In 1492, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote De laude scriptorum, “In Praise of Scribes,” arguing that hand-copying carried a spiritual utility no press could match. The physical act of writing, he claimed, pressed sacred words deeper into the mind of the copyist, while printed books were cheap and spiritually empty. He urged his monks to keep copying. Then he had the book printed, in 1494.
I find that hypocrisy almost too perfect. His case for the irreplaceable human hand was set in type on the machine it warned against, by a man who used that machine freely for his own work. If you have read much of the current commentary on AI and writing, that pattern will likely sound familiar.
The loom was somebody’s identity too
Three centuries later, the same argument reappeared. This time it came from people with no ecclesiastical standing at all.
