I need to routinely remind myself that every time I don’t post something positive in my feed it leaves a gap for something negative to slip in and take up the space I left for it.
Our feeds, all of them, are filled to the brim with algorithmically pushed trash.
Some of it is important. Some of if drives awareness of injustice and tragedy. Some of it sparks action and reaction. Some of it is vital to understanding the world, society and the universe.
But creatives have an important role to play too: positive balance.
It is not our jobs to join the rage.
It is our job to balance it all out, to remind people that there is beauty in the world worth fighting for, and it is our job to maintain the flame of art and story and music and hope in a wasteland of anger and AI slop.
It is so easy as an artist to reject the darkness of these platforms and avoid them, and I have struggled myself, even recently, trying to understand my role there.
The way I see it? Our role is not to repost angry memes, or rant about authoritarian politics, or even rage against the machine.
Rather, our role, the creative’s role, is to keep playing the music of humanity in all its forms and make sure when the dawn returns there is still a bit of our humanity left to remind us why we were fighting the darkness at all.
Terms FROm this POSt
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write here. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
- slop
- Maybe I’m just leaning into it, but it seems like this has become the de facto term to describe anything generated by an algorithm coupled with the soulless pursuit of creating for-profit content. Artificial intelligence is a complex technology with many positive uses, but making inhuman replacements for human expression is not one of those.
