Still Felt Something.
Field Notes of Nobody’s Ghost - 20261029-S10
Upon approaching the floating structure, the ghost was reminded that not everything seems as it is. Perspective changes, forms update, and he never had to worry about the landing after all.
Who signals a landing before anyone has asked to land? What does a city under glass already know about who is coming in, and does the hand on the deck care who she’s with, or only that she arrived? Something landed on me a couple months back the same way, unannounced, and it took me a while to understand what I had been waved into.
On a random day I was listening to Apple Music, minding my own business, when I heard a track from an artist I had never heard before. It was quite good and went straight into a playlist. The lyrics were outstanding, the execution was perfect but not suspiciously perfect, everything about it was legitimate. I finally had to look the artist up. Who was this? I quickly found a controversy swirling around an artist who is not an artist, or not human. AI, all of it, the entire package.
At first I had an interesting reaction: disappointment. Then I asked myself why. Being fooled wasn’t it. The work itself had nothing behind it. No name, no story, no background. With human-made content, that is what gives the work its depth, that it was produced by a complicated being, that every decision in it came out of struggle, joy, sadness, triumph. In my opinion, this is the elusive factor behind creative work that is hard to explain and easy to understand.
Wait a minute, but I still felt something. The music was excellent, I felt something, none of that was for nothing. So now I had two facts. The track resonated with me, and the origin was missing. The disappointment belonged to the latter, and it had nothing to say about the former.
I’m an illustrator, an artist, a writer, a creator. These are labels. They do not describe who I am. It’s easy to mistake, that’s the illusion of the ego, the comfort voice I hear out and then evaluate. Then what am I? You just are, without labels and without thought. You have thoughts, you are not your thoughts. “Artist” describes a concept, and a concept is a collection of thoughts meant to define something, none of which is real. Take away your vocational title. Did you disappear? No.
So a technology comes on the scene and disrupts the concept of “artist,” and the collective starts kicking and screaming. That part is expected. What is less expected is the severity of it, how deeply ingrained these ideas about identity are. I had the same reaction everyone has, the difference is what happened next. I asked why, found the gap, and noticed the feeling was still there underneath. Keeping both facts is the difficult but important job. Letting the second one erase the first is how a reaction hardens into a position.
None of this is new. I recently learned that several painters are documented or widely theorized to have used a camera obscura, a darkened box with a lens that throws the scene onto paper for tracing. Canaletto’s survives in Venice with his name stamped on the lid. Reynolds owned one built to pass for a book on a shelf. Vermeer left no record, and the case rests on the paintings.
In 1622 a Dutch diplomat named Constantijn Huygens saw a new lens version in London and wrote home that painting was dead by comparison, that this was life itself. Were they cheating? Why didn’t all of them say so? Read the list again. It sure as shit enabled a step up in their game, and painting didn’t die. Two centuries later the chemical camera took the view-painting job outright, and painting went where the camera couldn’t follow. The tool never kills the painter, but it does take away a job, and the work moves to what the tool can’t do.
Every one of my illustrations can be generated right now by AI tooling. Zero doubt. The tooling isn’t getting a little better every month, it’s getting better every day, and that compounds. So which job is being taken? The rendering. What can’t be generated is the record behind the panel, that it was drawn by the same instrument, the body I draw with, that had the experience it was drawn from. The mark in the corner is a claim about origin. That’s what the track didn’t have, and what I missed.
I keep an eye on the sentiment around AI on Substack and Reddit. It moves like a money market. The divide that has formed there is the same reaction I had, unread. One side relishes how miserable its pro-AI takes make everyone else. The other screams SLOP in all caps at anything a model touched and treats struggle as the measure of being human, and I’m not talking about the oil painter or the charcoal artist who chose the medium out of passion.
Both sides are afraid, and acting this way telegraphs it for all to see. Then there are the ones who pick a side to stoke it for notoriety or business. The idea is that everyone has to take a stand. The reality is simpler: nobody does. While the arguing and rage baiting go on, someone else is quietly building with the same tools.
I’m not insensitive to people losing their livelihoods, I’m quite literally “in this shit” with all of you. That failure falls on a society that puts living value on individual output, which deepens the illusion. I don’t agree with it and I can’t do much about it; my kids are fed from my pay. The world as built is not ready for this, and that is partly why the tribalism feels natural.
All of this is a reflection of what I’ve seen happen in the last four years. The saddest part is that talking like this will cost followers and subscribers. I know it will. I can’t change how strongly others feel about things. I used to be like that, and in some ways I probably still am, but I keep working on it. I keep transmuting my relationship with the ego from identity to partnership, and I keep walking the walk no matter how difficult it gets, because at the end of the day I’m not lying to anyone. Not to you, not to my kids, not to myself.