what remains human when everything is being replaced🌹
and which way i am walking in an ai-algorithmic world.
I had no idea what I wanted to write about this week, but I still forced myself to write about something. I feel like this is the responsibility that I have toward my readers. I have turned this “obligation” into a place to stay with something for a while, even when I do not fully know what something is. As it happened this week.
I am writing this on a Sunday. The moment I recorded my thoughts was 1:30 p.m. The first thing I did after I woke up at around 10 a.m. was read the Bible, and then I opened my laptop and went through a document where I keep notes about things I want to explore, or questions I want to think about more seriously. But today, nothing resonated with me. Nothing.
I felt like my mind was stuck somewhere unfamiliar. I felt like it was blank. I started to force it, to think about something to write about, but I immediately realized that I would rather write about nothing than force myself to write about something I don’t even want to write in the first place. So I left my mind alone and focused on other things. And this time of detachment actually helped my mind find the thing it wanted to write about, which is how I am adapting to this new AI-algorithmic-shaped world.
I have always been excited about technology, always wanted to be on trend with everything that was happening. Not in the sense of following trends for the sake of it, but I wanted to understand the newest thing early to see what it could make possible and to always be ahead.
The same thing happened with AI. I started using it more in 2022, first with DALL·E and then with ChatGPT, and from the first time I used both, I felt that something remarkable was going to happen. Both of them were awful back then, but at the same time, they were so good that I could not stop thinking about the changes that they would bring about. But I did not predict that they would happen so fast.
I have had conversations with people where they compare what is happening now with AI to what happened with the internet, and I understand why they make that comparison. The internet changed a lot of things, too, but at least from how I see it, that change had more time to unfold. It took years for the internet to move from something we mostly read to something we wrote inside, built identities inside, worked inside, and eventually tried to own pieces of. With AI, the rhythm feels different. A tool appears, and almost immediately, there is a new expectation around what a person should be able to make, automate, or understand. The distance between something being released and something becoming part of the work has become very small.
And I was excited by that. I still am, in many ways. The things that technology allows me to create today are mind-blowing to me, and this is not something I want to pretend I do not care about. I use AI every day. I use it to think, to code, to create, and to do many things I would not have been able to explore otherwise, or that would have taken me much longer because of a lack of skill or knowledge. There are so many meaningful things that can be done with these tools when they are used with intention. The change in me is not that I stopped believing this, but rather that I started questioning the part of myself that wanted to follow every opening simply because it opened.
I reached a moment where I could no longer tell if I wanted to know about every single thing because it actually served my work, or because I was afraid of being left behind. I started asking myself why I needed to stay up to date with everything, and why I was feeling so anxious every time I missed something. I did not become less ambitious, and I definitely did not start thinking that all of these tools are bad. The question did not come from there. It came from understanding that my ambition had been turned into a fear that looked like curiosity.
A big part of what made me see this comes from a change that happened in my life a few months ago, which is discovering God. I do not want to turn this essay into something else, but I also cannot speak honestly about this period of my life without mentioning it, because since I started following this new path, many things have had to change, too. A lot of things I was planning to do, or actively working on, no longer resonated with the direction I wanted to go in. Some of them were hard to give up because they were things I had wanted for a long time, and I was finally able to do them. They made me feel lost. I still feel like that, but I am trusting that I will be shown the right way I have to follow.
Other things were easier to let go of, but only after I understood the reason why I had been chasing them in the first place. In most cases, that reason was not peace. It was money, clout, or the belief that I was rushing toward an opportunity before someone else did. It was the fear of missing out. This is one of the most difficult things to admit, because the world we live in makes it very easy to justify almost anything as building, creating, growing, learning, or whatever word may be “trendy” in a specific moment. Sometimes it is genuinely these things. Other times, it is just wanting to win at a game before asking whether the game is even connected to the life you want.
Some people will move fast, build things, make money, and probably change their lives because they were doing the things I no longer want to do. I do not think there is anything automatically wrong with that. But not every opening is a door I have to enter. Sometimes, something can be a real opportunity and still not be mine.
As much as I love technology, I no longer think I want to follow it everywhere. I still want to use AI, but I do not want to be used by the fear that surrounds it. I still want to build digital things, but I do not want the speed of the digital world to decide what is worth building. I still want to know what is happening, but I do not want to make awareness my direction. Before, I would have tried to use everything and stay on top of everything because that felt like the only intelligent thing to do. Now I am trying to ask whether those things actually help me move toward the work I believe I should be making.
And the answer keeps bringing me toward more finite things. I am not referring just to physical objects. Anything that has some kind of edge to it, whether digital or physical, can be finite. I mean work that does not keep expanding just because it can, and does not ask to be refreshed endlessly in order to stay alive.
Lately, I started working on a zine, and it is really important to me, even though it is small. This zine is my first physical response to the thing that asks us to consume mindlessly and create weightlessly. I do not want to print something because print is beautiful, or because physical objects feel more special. I want to make something that has a different relationship with time. A zine cannot be scrolled forever. It has a number of pages, it has a beginning and an end, it asks you to hold it, to turn the page, and to stay with whatever you are finding in it for a while. This is not something that sounds revolutionary, but I do think that such things carry a special weight in a world where so much is designed to disappear as soon as the next thing loads.
At the same time, I am not saying that physical things are more human than digital ones. That is not true for me. So much of what I make still lives digitally. My essays exist online, my visual art is usually seen on a screen first, and some of the most meaningful things I consume or create are digital first. But I am becoming more interested in work that has a boundary, even when it is digital. Something can be digital and still feel finite if it is made with enough care, and something can be physical and still feel empty if it is made to become another product. The distinction, for me, is between work that asks for presence and work that only asks to be consumed.
This is also how I think about AI. I will never reject it, but I will change the way I use it. I do not want to use it because I feel pressured by what everyone else is doing with it. I want to use it because it helps me make the thing I already know I need to make, in whatever way that may be. The intent behind the use has become more important to me than the tool itself. The intent has always mattered most in the creation of AI-assisted art, but right now, I feel it is expanding into the broader AI landscape as well.
I am still exploring all of this, and I do not want to write as if I have fully figured it out. I have not. But I do think there are moments when everyone seems to be moving in a certain direction, and you have to stop for a second, almost like stopping at a traffic light, and ask yourself if you actually want to continue on the same road. If not, then you are allowed to make a turn. And I think this is where I am now.
I am not leaving AI or any other technology behind. I just do not want it to be the place from which my direction comes. I want to go toward more finite things, toward whatever feels like it can hold something human without immediately turning it into “content.” I want to use technology in a way that helps me get closer to that, not further away from it.
And in a way, this feels natural to me because most of my work has been in dialogue with the same question for a while now: what remains human when everything is being replaced?
Whether I am making visual art, writing essays, building digital experiences, or creating physical objects, I think the work itself is trying to stay close to that question. I do not know if I am trying to answer it as much as I am trying to understand what it asks from me. And right now, one of the things it seems to be asking is that I pay more attention to what has weight, what has edges, what asks for care, and what still remains human in a world that keeps trying to make everything artificial.🌹