Tressie McMillan Cottom

And they're crazy for AI images.

They are crazy about them.

They are making them, posting them, sharing them constantly.

And you can point out to them.

I will say, hey, auntie, you know, that is AI.

Oh, yeah, I know.

Ha, ha, ha.

They are not actually then looking for or responding to authenticity.

They're sort of responding to this the way I think about the art they sell in the mall.

Right.

Nobody is going up to look at that art so that they can have an emotional experience with it.

They're consuming it on a slightly different level.

I think the conflation of those levels, though, do create a social problem for us.

But I say all that to say I'm not sure that leaving us emotionally cold is going to be enough to break the habit of using these tools.

What I hear is that you're saying one that is honest.

I actually, I also just saw a really beautiful art piece that a local artist did recently where he superimposed using an AI prompt to try to recreate a memory that he had of a house from when he was a child.

And then he takes the AI image and he sort of paints through that.

And so you see both the AI impression of what they thought he was describing juxtaposed against his painting of his memory, right?

Again, super self-aware, right?

Very referential.