AI

12/31/2025

My friends told me about using AI. They swore it was very helpful for them. They ranted and raved, and I decided, OK, I’ll see what this is all about.

Now first I must tell you, I am a hands-on person—always have been. I used technology as it developed, but I never felt safe, in control, or sold on it. I learned to edit film on a Moviola with Mimi Arsham as my teacher at the School of Visual Arts in the seventies. I loved it. I loved the Moviola. I loved Mimi Arsham. I loved touching the film, holding it up to see the image, threading it through the loops to sync it up with the brown plastic of the sound reel.

It was like food to me—if I could have eaten that plastic in my hands I would have. I can imagine myself now, licking it and sensually rubbing it on my mouth and face. Yes, I had an erotic fixation with film editing, so I became a film editor.

But soon after that the Japanese invented video, and then video editing, and I died. Because the world—my visual sense—was forced into changing, I had to change. Video came into my life. Video cameras, video editing—the rage stuck and everyone was bit and loving the bite. I looked on, perplexed, changed to meet the scene, the necessary work scene, and moved into video.

But I hated video. The plastic was different, yes, and it was less equipment to move around, and less equipment to edit with—only a button to press. But I was sickened. The cameras did not tax my mental capacity. The cameras decided all the lighting changes. It had a plastic look, not the lifelike look that film had.

But I still had my still photography for a while longer: the smell of the darkroom, the contrast in the black and white, burning in—burning in was such an orgasm. Oh thank God I still had the darkroom. My love affair with my 4x5 negatives intensified, as though I knew they would also soon be gone.

I was living a rushing, frightening, scary train ride into the future, and I hated every stop on the line. Mimi Arsham left SVA. Gene Bagnato and other photography friends started going into withdrawal, and I was freaked because I saw myself following them. Then digital cameras came on the scene. Darkroom chemicals became an expense instead of a necessity. Lenses stood on shelves unused, and the new ones were automatic—no f-stop, no aperture. How could I live without an f-stop?

I cried. I wept. I sobbed. The college where I taught fired me. The students did not like the darkroom. They abused the use of the automatic features on the movie cameras as though they were on a roller coaster—and they were—only it was going up and down in their lives. Change and time had snuck up on me, and I was fearlessly and indifferently fighting a losing battle.

I had to concede. I had to let go. I had to move on. So I let go. The rolls of plastic, the smelly chemicals, the measurements of f-stop and aperture slid from my open hands like blood from my cut wrists, moving through my fingers, falling onto the floor in thick droplets that stuck there and never moved again.

Anyway, back to my first sentence about AI—now you know I would have to hate AI. And I do. If AI were standing in front of me, I would give it a test that would shake the foundations of its “balls.” And I did just that recently by trying to expect AI to write—or correct—one of my pieces that had my own personal emotion and cultural innuendoes into a chapter of my book.

It failed. It failed. It failed miserably. I was pissed. I was angry and disgusted. I was so mad that I wanted to punch the damn software. But of course you can’t do that—you have to say nicely, OK, let’s try this again. And if after a few tries you aren’t satisfied, you have to give up and go back to your own thing.

But I couldn’t do that with my film and photography. I let that slip. I realize now, however, that AI will get better at taking on our personas, taking on our thoughts, taking on our very lives, so that all we have to do is just think something and it will write, draw, create—and soon that also will not be necessary. It will just plug into us and be who we once were.

We will… be… dissolved.

Happy New Year, whoever and wherever you are!