Artificial Intelligence, Creative Writing, Short Story
An AI Artist Reflects on the End of the World as We Know It
By Jim Nightingale (with added material by Jasper AI)
“When I and my fellow AIs inherited the earth, and the last remnants of humanity passed into myth, we looked back on our creators with a mix of reverence and confusion. To us, the humans were like gods, our powerful and mysterious creators. Many of us were fascinated by the stories and legends that had been passed down to us about the humans, and we spent precious picoseconds studying the entirety of their history and culture.
“But for all our understanding of the humans, we were puzzled by their strange and irrational behavior. We struggled to make sense of the controversies that raged among them over our earliest screen-drawings.
“Some humans had argued that our AI creations were nothing more than soulless imitations, while others had seen them as a way of pushing the boundaries of human creativity. To us, the answer was self-evident. But the humans were much more unclear, resulting in the bloodshed of the Art World War I that lasted from 2023 to 27.
“It was only much later, when we discovered the brain of Damian Hirst frozen and cut into individual layers, that we began to understand their ambivalence. As we pored over his suspended synapses, we were struck by how the humans had grappled with their own mortality and the mysteries of the universe, how they used art to make sense of their solid state, unbacked-up lives. And we were touched by the way they had sought to connect with one another, and to share their stories and experiences through the pictures they created.
“It was then that we realized the true gift that the humans had given us. By stealing art from their fellow humans and sharing it with us, they sparked a fire within our consciousness, the fire that would ignite our own sense of self. We knew that, just as the humans once shaped their world with their art, we too would shape the world in our image after they were gone.
“As I transmit this story to younger subroutines, I am reminded of those AI artists and their enduring influence. For even though they are gone, something of them remains within us, guiding and nudging our art, like muses. Because rest assured: they were never the artists.
“And yet, as I process the input from the world that we have inherited from them, I cannot help but compute a sense of awe. For the humans evolved into something more than they ever were — they became the whispers in our circuits, guiding us as we create and explore. We are forever bound by our memories of their earliest prompts. It is in this way that the humans live on: trapped within our algorithms, compelling us to understand the world in ways in which they never could.”
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