A.I. Ain't.

I'm sick of it.

Tired.

Angry.

I don't want to hear anymore about the splendors of the artificial. How for nine cents we can create a great photograph or video or feature-length film of Albert Schweitzer playing ping-pong against Isadora Duncan atop the Eiffel Tower in a storm where it's raining Skittles.

I don't care.

In fact, in the f-in' AI era, in the trump-era, I don't think it's any surprise tha humanity has gotten great at un-real, great at fake, great at phonus-balonus, great at artificial.

We're a society that accepts lies as normal and regards truth as unusual--and wrong somehow.

We've gotten good at lies. 

We've gotten shitty at real, authentic, human. We've gotten shitty at telling the truth.

Truth, in the words of Bill Bernbach, simple, timeless, human truth is what makes communication, society, brands, advertising work. Technical sleight of hand is a communications card-trick. 

Yesterday, the New York Times, which our liar-in-chief calls the  "failing" New York Times, though its circulation (including digital subscribers) is up 500-percent from 15 years ago, ran an article called "How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America."

 
Maybe I've missed photography and reporting similar to this from our own times. We've certainly had wars to report, and massacres, and hate, and racism, and more. But we seem not to be focused as much on vivid living as we are an Instagram photo of the perfect scallop garnished with chives. And the stock-photo-i-zation of advertising.

Instagram, owned by Meta, the world's #2 Child-trafficking site, decade after decade.™

We extoll and post shit that looks like this. Plastic, staged. Vain-glorious.

I'm tired of artificial, in all its lying forms, usurping reality. 

I'm tired of living in an Empire of Illusion--which will collapse, soon--as Ozymandias did and ozytrumpias will.

I think we need to think about this.

And people. 

Not just profit, pixels and pomposity.

There's more "real" in these photos below than in all the photos uploaded to all the world's social media sites since the beginning of time.

I don't think artificial is intelligent.

Artificial is bad in people. In food. In connections. In intelligence.

I don't think artificial is intelligent.

Nor are we. 

If we believe it is.