Aga Aquino

AI is taking over the world, this remarkable technology allows people to create digital content rapidly, often in mere seconds. It’s amazing, and I myself have been astounded by just how easy AI platforms make art & literature. Recently I have been using chat-gpt to summarize books, develop systems and code for me, it even even generate the first chapter of a book I’ve been struggling to write for years. I can’t imagine how powerful the technology has become that the years of on-and-off writing is done in flash.

AI has allowed me to bypass the birthing pains of creating a narrative, there was no learning curve, I wanted a book, no need to make one draft after the other, I was an author immediately, writers block be damned.

Another use of AI was in art. Just the other day I was introduced to an app that created mocked up images, like fake graduation photos, or professional head shots. It was not surprising how so many people were also taken in by this app, my social media feed was flooded of fake images that glamorized people; to look like something else than what they really were. I too was entertained, it was nice to see me in a healthy weight, in a career that fulfilled me, to be living a luxurious life. I was so engaged in these that I keep generating more and more mock ups and I immersed myself in the world of what could have been.

This was great, but a voice was whispering in the back of my mind, a troubling thought:

~You’re not an artist, your creations are a sham, you are a fraud.

A part of me wanted to justify my use of AI. I would say to myself: AI is a great tool, I’m still the creator that wields it, it just makes everything easier.

But as a creative individual, I take pride in the skills that I have honed to express and create. My drawings, my figures and painting, my narratives, the characters and worlds I create, all stem from my personal journey. I feel pride because upon the mountain of mistakes I built the foundation of what I have made now. Realizing how technology essentially corrupted the creative process is panic inducing.

In a world where we present ourselves with filters and procedurally generated facades, could we really expect these shallow representations to evoke genuine emotion.

It’s like watering a plastic plant and expecting it to bear fruit.

I myself, cannot blame the world for embracing the technology to create fake art, but art by nature cannot be fake, because art is our human experience given form. True art cannot be procedurally generated because it is the tangible manifestation of our existence. It emerges from the raw, unfiltered essence of our emotions and life experiences.

So I keep staring at those fake pictures, and kept reading the several chapters written and as I realize how empty of meaning these things were. AI created content may be visually pleasing and eloquently stated but essentially devoid of beauty.