Do This...in the Age of AI

Experience the raw and the real

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash

More and more in my social media feed I’m encountering images and “videos” that radiate the saturated, too smooth vibe that is one of many small signatures of AI. The colors are too bright, too vivid, ragged edges or rough lines smoothed, and often a capture of something that is “too” unlikely, perfect or lovely to have been been caught.

I should probably learn to just scroll on by and stop being Debbie Downer, or Annie AI Killer, but these images inspire in me the very opposite of what they’re intended to do: something between dread and rage. Sure, two hummingbirds taking shelter inside an impossibly deep rose against a perfect rainstorm is “pretty.” Sure, whales presenting themselves to humans to remove uniform rows of barnacles is “sweet.”

Pretty and sweet the way a Hallmark card is heartfelt, or a Thomas Kinkade painting is moving. They give me a hollow hurt just behind the breast bone, a despair, that soon nobody will be able to tell the difference between an artist’s real effort and a synthesized one.

It’s normal to feel moved at moments of truth and beauty and concern and care in a world often ravaged by the worst of us. I don’t blame anyone for wanting that, for being arrested by it, even, and wanting to share, and the technical quality is getting hard to tell from the real thing. I also don’t mean to sound like an art snob; I’m really not.

But the more steeped we become in AI, and the better it gets at duping us, the more I crave the raw and the real.

Like local theater!

This past weekend we went to see a version of Cyrano de Bergerac by the Los Altos Stage Company, in which Cyrano’s character is a queer woman, played by the fabulous Maria Marquis. Local theater is, for me, the antipode to AI. It’s the genuine delight of the shared ruse as a real person transforms into a character before you. It’s feeling the rumble of the actors’ bodies as they thump and thunder on stage. It’s people laughing too loudly in the audience and being close enough to see a bead of sweat roll a track through someone’s stage makeup. It’s feeling genuine tears burst in your chest as they channel the character’s grief.

I love big Broadway productions, too, of course, and many have a current level of stage craft that’s so sophisticated you might almost be in a movie theater, but there’s just something so authentic about local live theater. I encourage everyone to go!

And live music! We spent part of Saturday at our son’s guitar teacher’s showcase of his many different music students. Some of whom had never even played together. There was a joy and ease among the musicians, room to play and riff and jam. Talents were spotlit, sure, but it felt more like a day of appreciation and collaboration, not just technical precision, and it soothed something inside me, too.

Artists can get so caught up in the need to be perfect, polished, commodity-ready, monetized. And yet, art is also so much about connection, community effort and appreciation, a reminder of our inherent joy, our raw and human, messy and marvelous ability to make meaning out of anything we like.

AI just can’t offer me that.

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VIRTUAL LAUNCH PARTY

Note: The ET on the virtual launch party image is incorrect. It should be 2pm ET.

For anyone who can’t make my in-person book events, please join me for a Virtual Launch party via Zoom. You can attend by sending me your email address via this form.

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Buy books here:

Fallout. Paperback. (E-book and audio forthcoming).

Forged in Grace. Paperback. E-book. (Audio forthcoming).

Women in Red. Paperback. E-book. (Audio forthcoming).

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