Translation of language, validation of forms, explanation of processes, and interconnecting their small community—here I was sitting with my keyboard open pondering the complexities of this technology and he was joyously celebrating it as if it was a gift that should be understood and embraced.

That’s the real complexity right there. 

Every experience with any technology is different. It’s easy to raise an angry fist because the spectre of vanishing jobs or evaporating rights or amplified surveillance—and none of those are invalid concerns, all of them are real and possible and should be better understood—but experience is an individual thing, and while automation for some may seem like a lost opportunity, for others—students, small businesses, movements, or communities—it lowers costs and increases access.

I have written much of this collection of words from the perspective—mine—of an artist struggling to reconcile the loss of the humanity of creativity and more as the algorithms seem to once again trounce through a domain I felt personally part of. 

This is not a universal feeling, I know that, and yet sometimes it’s good to get a small reminder.

Votes happen all over the world and I know south of the border the imminent midterm election is just days away, too, but here in western Canada we’re having a politically charged referendum^[1] on the future of our province.

That said, this is not an overtly political project.

I’m deeply invested in the political part, of course, but in the context of this project what has me thinking is the effect of the economics of attention on the reporting aspect.  We were joking (darkly and with deep sighs) that because of the complexity of the process, the volume of questions, and the stakes of the outcome, it could easily take multiple days for the final results to be known, even though the polling is leaning towards a landslide.

My followup consideration, also dark and filled with deep sighs) was just that: How much theatre emerges from this process before, during, and after such democratic events that are the result of media attention prioritizing drama and tension over clarity and confidence?

The algorithm thrives on this.

My attempts to steer my personal feeds away from this topic has been all but futile, the recommendation engine seeming to grip with force onto even the slightest hint of lingering attention on this topic, funnelling what I see along a path of charged political content. I hardly need to explain this. Likely every person reading this post will have experienced something similar.

Attention, after all, holds value, and value drives the further manipulation of our attention.

My dark joke was that we may not know the results of this vote for days after it concludes—and that we can be sure the local media will be broadcasting every tense moment, posting countless breathless articles, and milking every click of attention value they can from the spectacle.

Welcome to what counts for democracy in 2026. Pour another drink and hang on.

This is a revision of an earlier piece called ersatz creativity  (v1) originally published on 2026 Jun 18.

Via a series of multi-panel comic strips^[1] that I found posted and reshared on social media an interesting question was posited: what if [insert great artist/scientist/thinker here] had used AI?

We take for granted that the greatest people of our collective creative human history never leaned into the modern thinking simulators to which we have access, but perhaps Einstein or Shakespeare would have pasted drafts of their ideas and work into a chatbot had they had access to one. Thus they might have buoyed their feelings of uncertainty and modified their work under the advice of an AI, y’know just like anyone else might do nowadays.

So, the gag set in motion by the aforementioned comic strip was simple: what if someone like, say, Darwin had asked AI about his nascent Theory of Evolution or Mary Shelly had queried her thoughts about her plot outline for Frankenstein^[2] past a chatbot? In doing so the cartoon version of the LLM had replied with expected kind of feedback.

Anyone who has done such a thing, asked an AI model for input, would immediately recognize the flavour of formulaic, pandering, sycophancy that generally emerges, and which was illustrated in the cartoon.

The likely scenario was illustrated: in each panel of the comic, the gag AI had showed reticence about straying too far from established notions, concepts, and norms and had instead discouraged the cartoon human from pursuing further work on their ideas. Darwin was discouraged from pursuing evolutionary theory^[3]. Shelly was nudged to stick with more commercially viable women’s fiction.

It was just supposed to be a funny cartoon.

…but like any good bit of humour the notion rang a little too true for me and highlighted a subtle issue that I think many people already sense about generative AI and find difficult to articulate: that is, our experiences with these systems has almost uniformly resulted in a kind of blanket conformity to existing patterns. It all results in a kind of ersatz creativity within the bounds of what is already known, a pattern matched against existing reality, and a simulation of creativity jumbled together from the pattern-spewing innards of an AI engine.

AI tends to shave the rough edges right clean, and all that is left is a boring, unoriginal, polished stone.

Creativity is hard to pin down, after all.

Creativity is something we, even as meat-brained humans, often struggle to define in a satisfying way.

We wave hands past a definition that includes even more vague terms like imagination and originality, overlooking the hard truths that we are ultimately products of complex biological outcomes and a lifetime of experience. AI approximates creativity in a believable way because, I think, it is difficult to pin down even in ourselves, let alone others. We buy the act. Yet, there is an invisible novelty that fails to manifest in these systems. And that novelty is what is important because we don’t know it is missing. We don’t miss what we don’t know exists and thus cannot see.

We may more and more feel the absence of bold ideas outside the metaphorical box as we more and more lean into these tools, but it is impossible to see what never was.

So, what if Darwin had used AI… and walked away from his theories because a chatbot had discouraged him with a list of reasons why those theories didn’t fit current thinking?

And what if Shelley had used AI… and wrote a novel more fitting to the styles, trends and commercial viability of the fiction styles and demands the day? Or, what if she wrote to the nineteenth century equivalent of the booktok algorithm?

The problem with creative brilliance is that it is unique and rarely fits the existing pattern. It breaks it, and we often don’t recognize it even when it comes from ourselves, and maybe especially then.

What if you used AI… and walked away from something interesting because you dreamed outside the establishment when AI pushed back?

This prolific poster of long form video essays was incensed at the draconian policies that resulted in her two hour long video being pulled from the site over a few seconds of copyright claim. I’m not going to out the specifics of this particular influencer (a) because she doesn’t need the publicity, but also (b) because she is just yet another example in a very long line of people who have made a bad deal for exposure and traded their content agency for the publicity and the fame that comes so much easier on those platforms.

This isn’t an anti-copyright post, but (given the evidence she presented, at least) the claim was very likely a censorial or cash-grab type effort that resulted in exactly what the claimant was looking for: shutting down a popular video. 

I’ve seen it so frequently now, and it joins a long list of “reasons these platforms own you” screeds I could write.

All that aside—because I really do hate to be the I-told-you-so guy—but I will be using this as yet another example of why content sovereignty is important to creatives and the lack of power that popular influencer type posters have to deal with when they use corporate social media.  

I’ll be the first one to tell you that overseeing a private website on a private space and relying 100% on my own elbow grease to build an audience and promote my work, well, it’s not easy. 

And yes, I am beholden to the laws of the land for what I post—of course I am. 

But I am also far less beholden to corporate and automated or algorithmic policies to that govern and manage and oversee what goes on a platform when I own said platform. 

It’s hard to feel sorry for any influencer who has built their entire business on the back of another business and then has to deal with the consequences of (even if you look at it even in the most benign way) working inside of another digital ecosystem—or if you look at it more insidiously, making a deal with the devil for fame and popularity. 

Once again, my best advice on this is to maintain as much agency and control over the things you make as you can. Or at the very least, when the system fails you, take it on the chin and stop complaining to the rest of us about the imbalance of the deal you’ve made for your popularity.

This is a cross-post from Dispatches from Nowhere.

An article that I read recently from The Verge called Instagram is adding an AI ‘assistant’ to tell you how to post^[1] triggered some full-circle vibes in my artist’s heart. “Creators can also ask for ideas for content, how to hook viewers, what captions to use, which audio tracks are trending, and how to script videos.” 

In business analysis there is a tool called RACI.  It is meant for project management type stuff, allowing for a charted map of how many people are involved in crossing the finish line of a major project. R stands for responsible. A stands for accountable. C stands for consulted. And I stands for informed.  If those words made any sense to you, you’ll also realize that with each progressive letter the less hands-on the role of the person with that letter assigned. Someone who is responsible, say, is doing the actual work, while someone who is informed, gets an email that the work was done.

Look, I don’t want to get into the weeds on what terrible social media company is using which generative product in a ridiculous way this week. The bigger picture here is that with each so-called innovation and tool designed to automate the creative process, real people are being shifted further down the RACI alphabet list roles of the experience.

Where once we were Responsible for making it, later just Accountable for asking for something to make it, now it seems like more and more AI is just going to Consult us on the things it is making on our behalf. It may seem pretty cushy to work oneself into a sit-back-and-be Informed role, getting an email when your content is ready and your likes have been tallied, but what the hell does that do to the humanity of any of the content this process churns out? 

At what point is it just bots all the way down?

Tin-foil hats aside, this continues to be the human creator hokey-pokey but we’re only ever taking ourselves out of the circle one piece at a time.

A small team of vibe coding software developers released an entire open source repository^[1] for anyone to download that touts the ability to replace not just one flagship product from a major software company, but their entire quite. Artcraft is a vibe-coded Photoshop (and every other product Adobe makes) replacement, set free on the web.

“Though plenty of competitors have tried to ram their way into the market, few have been able to make a dent against the dominant [Adobe] Creative Cloud. That may be about to change…thanks to the efforts of a four-person team vibecoding out of Atlanta, Georgia.”wrote one of the dozens of articles that popped up shortly thereafter in multiple small tech journals. ^[2]

This isn’t a site that jumps on breaking news, but I tend to follow interesting developments. The inevitable of which I referred to at the opening of this post is the marking of a shift in what algorithmic coding agents queued up by curious and frustrated consumers are effecting upon a software industry that has gone through monumental changes over the years—but may soon be entering an endgame. 

The shift has been fuzzy, of course, but ask anyone who bought software on floppy disk thirty years ago what it meant to own a piece of software and the picture becomes clearer. Human developers wrote code and sold it to you in keep-forever cardboard boxes in a department store. Years later, those brick-and-mortal purchases shifted to ethereal one-time downloads, and inevitably shifted once more to subscription cloud models where the end-user owned nothing but a temporary and costly license.  

This month those of us who are paying attention are marking what seems to be a new era: an agent who can skip over that entire supply chain and generate commercial grade software on-demand maybe—likely—even replacing existing products.

It was the work of four people this week, it will be the work of one person next time, and will undoubtably become just another feature listed on the spec sheet of an agent-provider’s sales page in the foreseeable future.