Quality

March 31, 2026

Eventually you will be unable to give any of yourself to this world.

I don’t mean to say this as a way to plunge you into a cold existential void. If anything, I want this to be a splash of cool water on your face, a reminder.

Human life is hard. Friction is a feature and found in every single atom of actually living it. That flowing resistance allows us to bloom. To watch people hand off the role of being human to A.I. isn’t just sad and disappointing; it’s tragic, it’s offensive, it’s inhuman.

I think of all the people who use it to write an email. Or a poem. Or draw a picture. All the things that make us uniquely us. And some of this may arise from laziness, but I think of the real fear those people must have; the fear that if they put themselves out there, it won’t be any good. And so they don’t try. They don’t participate in the only life they have because a device can produce a string of words that won’t electrify but also won’t reveal and, if someone doesn’t like it, can just be blamed on the machine anyway.

What the fuck are we doing?

I am being increasingly drowned in A.I., from the companies who insist on integrating it into every single product to the people in my day-to-day life who sincerely think that by using it, they’re being clever or forward-thinking, when the technology is pushing us backwards by destroying human thought before it begins. It is not only offensive but oppressive. And like common sense or compassion, this understanding seems to be something you can’t teach.

As a few people like to obsessively point out, I talk too much. I know. I overshare. I get it. But for fuck’s sake: I only get to be here once, only get to connect to the other people with me on this planet once. There is no romance in withholding and no conversation in silence. I talk a lot because it’s who I am, and I know it’s who I am because I’ve actually spent my entire life figuring me out and not delegating that work to a smart toaster.

I keep thinking about the idea of quality. Quality being something that is excellent or good and can only be determined by an embodied being.

I’ve spent my whole life, from coloring on pieces of loose leaf paper as a kid to going back to school to get my degree in graphic design, dedicated to art and the embodiment of quality, of being human.

I have never used A.I. in my work. For better or for worse, I wrote all my own words, drew all my own pictures, edited and designed those messes with my own hands and eyes, and put them out into the world when I felt like they said what I wanted to say. To you. To another human.

So what is it that you want to say? Because time is running out; that well will not refill. There will come a day when you can’t share any more of who you were while you were here. What are you going give and leave? Everything, or just some of your parts? And what parts of your only life are you going to outsource to an unfeeling, inhuman machine?