THE MIND GAME DECLARATION
> > > > >
What happens to us if the internet dies?
> > > > > What happens to us if the internet dies?
Anyone who knows me in real life knows I am anti-AI. Most specifically the application of AI technology to generate (not create) art. In my view, art is supposed to take you somewhere and the journeys that I see offered by these programs are mid indeed. I think what surprises people however is most of my reasons for being against AI are more philosophical than material or economic.
Obviously I do agree that AI is nothing but a blight on the material conditions of the average man, harming both the environment and the economy in ways we will not be able to predict, however what concerns me the most some days is AI’s effects on the mind, heart, and soul.
Allow me to get personal.
Since a very young age I was able to draw. I consider it a God-given talent, but I also believe everyone is born with skills and traits that they naturally intuit towards. You have yours. I have mine. And like any one who is talented in something, I’ve heard time and time again “Oh, I could never do what you do. It takes so much skill!” and forgive me if this is egotistical, but that always felt a bit insensitive.
The talent was intuitive, yes, but the skill was earned. It took a lot of work and practice and learning to get to where I am at and admittedly I know I could be much much better. 10,000 hours. Blood, sweat, tears, late nights, early mornings, lonely days, etc. etc. Not only that, but I’ve seen others get better. I’ve watched people who could not even draw a stick figure train and practice and become competent designers, 3D artists, painters, and photographers.
I’ve always felt one of humanity’s greatest gifts is the ability to be creative. To think outside the box. Maybe I am biased because there are a lot of educators in my family, but the power of the mind was always emphasized to me from a young age. So to me when I hear a lot of the discussions around generative AI and it’s abilities, I almost find it insulting.
Maybe it’s ego talking but the question that keeps bouncing around in my head is why would I believe a machine could out-create me?
To me that sounds like low self-esteem. Poor self-image. An excuse to not be better.
I of course believe a machine could out-produce me, but that’s not the question here. Off the napkin math an AI generative model could create tens of thousands of generated images in the time it took me to finish one painting. But that’s not the race I’m running.
When everything is said and done and the rivers and lakes run dry when image number 43,272 is made, what chiefly concerns me is: were people moved? Were souls touched? Were barriers broken?
Did the output make you wanna change your life? Did the work inspire you and make you want to do the work you’ve been running from? Did it make you question yourself or your upbringing? Did it make you change your perspective on something? Did it keep you up at night tossing and turning wondering about the possibilities of life? Or did you just view and swipe and scroll and keep it pushing?
And I don’t even ask that final question dismissively. It comes from a genuine place of concern.
At 28 years old (at the time of writing), I am an “elder Gen-Z” and therefore one of the last of a dying breed of human being in America that can remember a time in my childhood that was pre-smartphone and pre-social media, but at the same time came of age and into adulthood at a time where the seeds for our modern digital condition were being laid.
Maybe it is that damn phone or maybe it isn’t but I have noticed that as we have shifted into this always-online, always-connected, always-engaged phase of human existence we are all confusedly making our way through now, the human part of things seems to be pushed to the wayside more and more.
Everything has to be optimized and efficient. No room for nuance or grey areas or the natural ebbs and flows of life. Even the subjectivity is objective now. We’ve done this weird roundabout cultural shift where we’ve made everything about the individual, but all we gave the individual was a bunch of boxes to put themselves into. A bunch of boxes to check off before they can be considered a whole being. We’ve become defined by the boxes we choose, not the people we are.
And it just raises more questions for me: Who taught you about yourself? And why, when they gave you that lesson was the conclusion they left you with that you must be commodified and sold to millions of digital strangers for spare parts?
I believe the techno-feudalist billionaires that we have signed our identities away to got us confused.
In the span of two decades we went from thinking that people who spent every day on the computer were weird and antisocial to damn near everyone having a miniature computer in their pockets that they spend all day on. And in the midst of all this, we’ve also failed to recognize that we went from primarily using the internet to interact with people and to share information to primarily using the internet for consumption of entertainment and talking with bots. As of April 2025 the majority of internet traffic is automated and that majority is only increasing. It’s possible that soon you could stake your bets on no one being on the other side of the screen anymore.
And what happens to the world we live in after that? What happens to the humans in a world that takes humanity, processes it, strips it of all its soul and the things that make one human then sells it right back to them? What do they think about? What do they dream about? What inspires them? What moves them?
Artifice breeding artifice. The funk just gets faker. Miss me with that.
I’ve been more moved by any of my experiences in real life with real people in real time than I’ve ever been by any generated-not-created image. I’ve learned more about the world and myself through my lived experiences and the experiences of others than I ever have from anything else. When I need inspiration to paint, or write, or make the music that I don’t talk about enough, I think about my life. My real life. The people around me. The conflicts I’ve had. The beauty I’ve seen. The ugliness I’ve stared at. The word I’ve heard. The pain I’ve felt. The joy I embraced.
Pixels bounce off the screen into the ether every day. Laptops crash. Phones die. Hard drives get corrupted. Wi-Fi signals go down. If it’s one hypothetical I think about more than any other it would be: what would happen if all this just goes *SNAP* tomorrow? All the servers go down. All the social media sites blacked out. The IoT services cease to be. How many of y’all are going to pull up ChatGPT and ask what’s going on?
Cause that would be crazy right?
You’re going to call your mother, or your brother, or your friend, or your neighbor, or turn on the news.
At the end of the day, we are humans living in a world built by us for some. And it’s clear to me that a large chunk of that some do not value humanity. They do not value human experience. They do not value life. They are walking, talking, breathing bots hoping to make real life more and more like a simulated one.
So if anything, know that when you see something from me, there’s no AI involvement. Matter of fact, I’d take the accusation as disrespect to my work, my craft, my process, my moral code, and my humanity. We are in the midst of a potential technological shift that could have unforetold ramifications on culture, religion, art, language, history, the mind, the heart, the soul and much more if there even is anything left. We must maintain our spirits in unspirited times. Cause once you’re dead and gone and your head grows cold, who would you rather have left to tell your ghost stories? Your loved ones? Or the homunculus of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman?
I know my answer.
