Member-only story
Discourse
The existential challenge of art and existence
This is the Earth. It’s round, exists in an infinite space, is warmed by a firey ball of atomic energy millions of miles away, and is our home, for better or worse.
This picture was created by artificial intelligence, prompted by a few short sentences asking for a specific type of visualization. In a fever dream of 0s and 1s, a collision of bits and bytes, this has been synthesized from the totality of human experience laid bare to an algorithm run locally on my laptop.
We have pictures of the Earth from the various satellites and humans that orbit it, a perspective that 99.9999% of us will never have. We’re afforded these precious captures because technology has allowed us to confront the cold reaches of space in ways we never dreamt of, to capture moments we’d never expect. However, when it’s all distilled down into its binary components, we get the result seen above: an unfeeling machine promulgating a reality it doesn’t comprehend or know to exist.
Now that I’ve got your attention (and perhaps your ire) let’s talk about this for a moment. Is the act of creation sacred? Is it something we, as humans, should hold dear to ourselves, or is it possible to be captured by anything that has capacity?
