In the Shadow of the Machine

When OpenAI launched its advanced image generation feature within ChatGPT in late March, the internet responded not with a ripple - but a flood. Users began transforming their portraits into Studio Ghibli-style artwork. Awe. Nostalgia. Unease.

What happens when something crafted with soul is echoed back by a system with none?

We like to think of creativity as a solitary act. A spark. An idea. An original voice. But when we use tools like ChatGPT, what we’re really tapping into is something far more complicated—and, arguably, unprecedented.

These tools don’t create in the traditional sense. They reflect. Compress. Remix.

Whether it’s text, visuals, music, voice, or animation, what they generate is a refraction of billions of faceless voices - creative fragments drawn from forum posts, Wikipedia entries, street photography, poetry, software documentation, blog rants, screenplays, audio samples, technical manuals, and tweets.

Most of the people behind those fragments will never know their phrasing, metaphors, styles, word choices — even their imagination — now live on in a neural net, governed by algorithmic probability.

And yet, we call it “generative.”

It’s not illegal. But is it… clean? Is it ethical? Or is it a hyper-efficient mirror of how humanity has always learned, just now with quantum-speed processors and no footnotes?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: even before AI, human creativity was never truly original. Every artist borrows. Every writer imitates. Every filmmaker echoes. Every melody contains a memory. Every thought is, in some way, a refraction of a thought that came before. We are all a pastiche of the ideas we’ve read, absorbed, forgotten, and reimagined.

So perhaps AI is simply us - sped up. A mirror of the human mind, without the fallibility or delay?

That’s the seductive argument. That these models are  doing what we already do - just faster, better, more fluently. Still, something about that feels… incomplete.

There is a difference between internalizing and embodying ideas through lived experience - and remixing them at scale without ever feeling them. AI doesn’t wrestle with ideas. It doesn’t doubt. It doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t know what it’s saying or drawing or composing. It just performs fluency.

So the output looks like creativity. It feels like authorship. But something’s missing.

What makes a story - or a visual, or a sound - resonate isn’t just how fluently it’s delivered. It’s why it needed to be made. The yearning behind it. The urgency. The obsession. The wound. The play. The spark.

It can speak in all our voices. Paint in all our styles. Mimic all our forms. But it has none of its own

Still, we use it. Maybe we even need to.

What we can’t afford is to mistake coherence for conscience—or elegance for ethics.

The technology will continue to dazzle. It will feel more alive. More fluent. More “us.”

And maybe the greatest risk isn’t that it replaces us. It’s that it convinces us it is us.

And in that moment, we may forget the people—the thinkers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, wanderers, ranters - whose voices and visions made this possible in the first place.

There is no clean resolution yet. Only the responsibility to look closer. To ask harder questions. To create - not in isolation from those borrowed voices - but in awareness of them.

And so, in a moment of deliberate contradiction, we asked the same machine we critique to imagine us  - Team Ark, our behind-the-scenes action, our furry arkies. 

(we forgive you for accelerating the sands of time on some of us …)

What began in Ghibli quickly spiralled into… Ghibli again.

(Can’t help if he looks like a dustball )

Wait - Disney?

(Anatomically abit suss….)

Simpsons? Too easy.

(Lost our lights and boom.. our soundie became the director waving a stick at our poor talent )

Saturday morning cartoons from the ’80s?

(A strong contender for… not winning the Spelling Bee.)

Riot Games? Claymation? Piece of cake.

(Now this is a game we would play!)

(Once again, we graciously bestow forgiveness—this time for the less-than-aesthetically-pleasing bobbly heads... oh but wait..  in claymation, a big ol’ head just means big personality… right??)

Can you handle the psychedelic ’70s? Or even French Bande Dessinée?

yeah, baby, yeah!

Caught mid-scène: When your day job turns into a graphic novel and you realise… maybe we’re the characters we’ve been scripting all along.

The results were beautiful. Haunting. (Recognise any scenes from Ark shoots past? )

And sometimes… delightfully, anatomically off - signature AI style. ;)

We gave it prompts. It gave us magic - beautiful, uncanny, sometimes a little grotesque.

But after the trick, something lingered - a silence we hadn't expected. 

It gave us everything - except the reason we wanted it. 

It did not ask why, or wonder who we were behind the style.

And maybe that’s the strange danger of a mirror that reflects too perfectly:

It shows us what we want to see, until we forget what we came looking for or what we even look like when no one’s watching.

What began as play quickly became something more reflective: a meditation on how easily we imitate - and how quickly we forget the source.

The line between play and appropriation is thinner than we think. The aesthetic charm of AI doesn't absolve its ethics - it complicates them.

And the danger isn’t just in what AI can mimic. It’s how quickly it fills the silence where a story - or an original thought - might have grown.

We’ve been here before - each era confronting its own reckoning between craft and convenience.

That dissonance isn’t new.

It echoes through every age that met a machine and had to ask: what do we hold onto?

And like the artisans of every era - typesetters in the rise of offset printing, portraitists facing the birth of photography, illustrators watching digital tools reshape their brushstrokes - we too may face a quiet reckoning.

Perhaps, in time, our task will not only be to decide what we want to preserve and create, but what we are willing to let go - and what we are willing to create with.

Not everything fluent is wise.

Not everything beautiful is benign.

The line between invention and imitation has never been sharper - or blurrier.

Whatever this becomes, it won’t be clean.
But maybe, if the need to create survives -

and we still feel something true in the making -

it might still be worth it.