There is something absurd, almost comical, about using AI to create a series of folk objects. Perhaps this is because folk art and craft are closely entwined with the inherited traditions of a community, and nothing could be more diametrically opposite to this than the instantaneity and indifference of generative AI. It is amusing and bizarre to observe AI concocting a sense of raw authenticity. In a matter of seconds, the roughly hewn and stitched, the gauche and vernacular, are ‘sculpted’ in near perfect mimicry. There is something disturbing about this too. Folk practices hold an earthy integrity shaped by daily life. High art idealism or the purely conceptual have no value in this parallel creative world of unfettered figuration and heartfelt decorative flourish. And possibly for this reason, the algorithmic conjuring of images, indifferently faking folk artefacts, seems all the more sinister; suggesting perhaps that digital creative output has finally begun to usurp the purely human variety of art making. Folk culture, in particular, could well be seen as a last vestige of uniquely human activity in that it is organically formed through lineage, and has its feet in a now misty age of pre-modernity. We might think that, on the one hand, we ought not to fear the digital conjuring trick of AI, where our own cannibalised data is mirrored back to us as newly made material. But on the other, we might ask where is this leading, and what should we make of the slow erosion of creative thinking and practice that is driven by lived experience?