Columns

To date, this column has taken a broadly anti-AI and AI art stance. I intuitively know that the primary reason I feel this way is due to a personal aesthetic aversion to AI art.

I remember purchasing my tickets to see Keshi at Frost Amphitheater several months ago, my frustration and eagerness compounded by sweaty palms and a reliably unreliable internet connection.

Consumption for consumption’s sake is something I think we all engage in to a degree, but maybe some of us are more prone to it than others.

If a social blunder occurs in person, I know I can laugh it off and try to convince myself later that it never happened. Unfortunately, that luxury does not extend to texting.

An otherwise bleak semester turned decidedly sunnier last week with the return of “Succession” for its final season.

For days when the thought of watching a Criterion Collection film or, God forbid, cracking the spine of a book conjures a wave of nausea, I turn to reality TV.

Belonging to the small but vocal minority of people who spend too much time on Twitter, I typically first encounter media and art in their abridged, non-contextualized states before I ever consume them the way that we are “supposed to.”

In the aesthetic wasteland, personal artistic tastes are merely superficial. Where they once functioned as a means of sculpting one’s identity, they now serve a higher power: selling stuff.

What gets churned out by AI is inherently antithetical to art, so why do we labor to maintain that it might still have creative utility?

“Punch-Drunk Love” was my PTA gateway drug. I watched it in the thick of lockdown my junior year of highschool, before I knew anything about film or really much about people.