The explosion of readily accessible artificial intelligence tools has made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to generate art, photography, and even entire worlds with a single prompt.
But AI promises to unlock unprecedented creativity in the same breath that it threatens to wipe out entire workforces built on human skill and storytelling. Humanity is weighing the perks of this powerful technology with the financial and environmental costs, and the potential for entirely new risks to society.
As a writer and photographer, I can’t help but wonder: What’s left for those of us who create real stories in a world that prefers the artificial and instantaneous?
Just before the existential crisis is about to take hold, my rational mind asks, what it is that artificial intelligence cannot do or be? What sets us apart from the miracle technology poised to make us all obsolete?
Then it hits me—AI isn’t real. It’s right there in the name: artificial.
An algorithm cannot feel the real emotional and intellectual impacts of living in reality. It can mimic, remix and reassemble parts and pieces, but it cannot live. It can’t experience our human cocktails of real, lived conversations and moments, and then live to tell about it.
All the ways AI cannot replace me.
AI can’t stand at the bottom of a steep potato patch in Perú, waving hello at a toothless older woman and her younger companion, harvesting their crop high in the Andes. It can’t hand her a few wrinkled soles in exchange for a sack of tubers – one of the 4,000 varieties cultivated in the country that we can touch and feel with our hands.
AI can’t hike 10 kilometers up the misty Tatra Mountains in Poland, loop the lake, and plod another 10 kilometers downhill being battered by a torrential downpour the entire way, giggling deliriously at the circumstances, shoes squelching with cold water.
No algorithm can wade through a rice paddy in Bali, sweat trickling down its back, tracking egrets as they glide into the terraces to rustle up insects and invertebrates from the mud. It can’t hear the cow’s disgruntled moan.
It cannot haggle for a better taxi fare in Indonesian rupiah in front of a 400-year-old golden palace, or smell sweet frangipani dancing with the earthy scent of incense in Ubud.
The machine can’t get goosebumps in the unique microclimate created by the Bora winds clashing at the intersection of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. It can’t skip stones on the Adriatic Sea.
AI cannot wheeze its fallible, human lungs up Rainbow Mountain, more than halfway to the top of the world. It can’t replace the sound of the ceremonies in the streets of Aguascalientes below. It can’t ask a schoolyard of Quechua children what they want to be when they grow up.
The things AI cannot do are the moments that define us.
From the high Andes to the Adriatic, the things AI cannot do are the moments that define us. Artificial intelligence will change the world – for better and worse. Only time will tell how it will change us.
By reading this, by seeking out real stories and images, you’re choosing something more meaningful than the instant and artificial. Thank you for sharing in these lived experiences—ones that can only be captured through the lens of a human being.