The AI Obsession
Yesterday, I watched Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die and it was… unsettling.
Not horror-movie unsettling. Not jump-scare unsettling. More the kind of unsettling that sits quietly in the passenger seat of your brain afterward, occasionally clearing its throat while you’re trying to think about something else.
If you haven’t seen it, let me summarize the premise in a way that somehow manages not to spoil anything.
Summary: A man travels back from the future to recruit a team of misfits in order to prevent the creation of a sentient AI that will eventually wipe out humanity as we know it.
And yet, somehow, that summary tells you almost nothing about the movie.
Seriously. Go watch it. Then come back and tell me I’m wrong.
The film itself isn’t really what disturbed me, though. What got under my skin was the way AI, and humanity’s relationship with it, is discussed throughout the story. It felt less like science fiction and more like someone had wandered into a boardroom meeting, a technology conference, and a social media marketing seminar, then blended them together into a screenplay.
At this point, I assume there are still a handful of people somewhere on Earth who haven’t heard the term AI. Maybe they’re living happily in a cabin in the woods. Maybe they’re on a fishing boat somewhere. Maybe they’ve simply achieved enlightenment and stopped reading headlines.
But if you’re reading this blog, you’ve almost certainly heard of AI.
You couldn’t avoid it if you tried.
AI is everywhere.
Every product has AI.
Every company has AI.
Every app has AI.
Every toaster is apparently one firmware update away from becoming self-aware and demanding voting rights.
We’ve reached a strange moment in history where companies are attaching the letters “A” and “I” to absolutely everything, whether artificial intelligence is involved or not. There seems to be a growing belief that if a product doesn’t have AI, then it must somehow be outdated, incomplete, or inferior.
As though humanity collectively woke up one morning and decided that software wasn’t enough anymore. It needed to sound like it had read three philosophy books and was planning a hostile takeover.
Let me give you a few examples.
A few weeks ago, I noticed several websites listing my camera, the Sony a7III, as having AI features.
Now, for those unfamiliar with camera history, the Sony a7III was released in early 2018. Back then, AI wasn’t being sprinkled onto marketing materials like parmesan cheese at an Italian restaurant. It was just a remarkably good camera.
Yet somehow, sites like B&H, Amazon, and others had begun describing certain features as AI-powered.
They aren’t.
The camera didn’t magically become smarter while sitting on my shelf.
No secret update transformed it into a silicon philosopher.
The features were the same features it has always had. They had simply been renamed.
Why?
Because AI sells.
That’s it.
That’s the whole explanation.
People want AI, whether they understand it or not. Whether it provides value or not. Whether it actually exists or not.
It’s the modern equivalent of putting “all-natural” on a bottle of water.
I see the same thing in my day job.
As some of you know, I work in software sales.
Not long ago, I was speaking with a prospective customer about a software platform.
At one point he asked me, “Does it have AI?”
The answer was no.
So I asked him a simple question:
“What would you want the AI to do?”
He paused.
Then admitted he wasn’t sure.
He just wanted it to have AI.
So I asked again.
“What problem are you trying to solve? What would you want AI to accomplish for you?”
Again, no answer.
Not because he was uninformed or unintelligent. Quite the opposite. He was a smart guy.
But somewhere along the way, AI had become the goal rather than the tool.
It’s a bit like walking into a hardware store and demanding a hammer without knowing whether you’re building a deck, hanging a picture, or attempting to fight a bear.
The hammer isn’t the objective.
The outcome is.
This morning brought another example.
I logged into WordPress and noticed a shiny new button proudly labeled “AI Link Genius.”
Naturally, I clicked it.
I had to know.
Was this some revolutionary new technology?
Would it analyze my content and create intelligent pathways through my writing?
Would it achieve digital enlightenment?
No.
It checked links.
That’s it.
It was the exact same feature that periodically scans my site looking for broken links and optimization opportunities.
A feature WordPress and related plugins have had for years.
The interface was the same.
The functionality was the same.
Everything was the same.
Someone had simply stapled the letters “AI” onto the front of it and sent it back into the world wearing a fake mustache.
Apparently that’s innovation now.
To be fair, some of this madness appears to be fading.
The AI descriptions attached to the Sony a7III seem to have disappeared from many major retailers, and some original product descriptions have returned.
That’s encouraging.
But the broader trend remains.
Every week another product emerges from the marketing laboratory wearing an AI sticker like a participation trophy.
It’s exhausting.
Some days it makes me feel like the guy standing on a street corner wearing a tinfoil hat and muttering about the end times.
The difference is that the tinfoil hat guy is usually worried about aliens.
I’m worried about marketing departments.
Thankfully, I have photography.
Photography remains one of the few things that consistently pulls me back to reality.
A camera doesn’t care about quarterly earnings reports.
Film doesn’t care about investor presentations.
Light doesn’t care about buzzwords.
The photons have no interest whatsoever in your product roadmap.
Recently, I’ve found myself spending less time scrolling through social media and more time looking at sculpture, classical art, and Renaissance paintings.
Many of them feature nudity, of course, but what fascinates me isn’t the nudity itself.
It’s the drapery.
The fabric.
The way cloth seems to float, twist, conceal, reveal, and guide the eye through an image.
The way marble somehow looks softer than skin.
The way painters managed to create movement from stillness.
I wanted to see if I could capture some of that feeling through photography.
Not recreate it exactly.
Just borrow a little of the language.
Translate it into a modern photograph.
Thankfully, Natalie was available and willing to help me indulge this particular artistic rabbit hole.
Armed with nothing more sophisticated than my decidedly non-AI Sony a7III, an Olympus mju-II, a Canon AE-1, and a collection of fabric that probably looked suspicious to anyone passing by, we set out to create something.
No prompts.
No generators.
No algorithms.
No machine learning.
Just two humans making art.
One of us standing behind the camera.
One of us standing in front of it.
I’ve only edited a small fraction of the images so far, and more can be found over on Patreon, but I’m genuinely proud of what we created.
They’re beautiful.
Not because technology made them beautiful.
Not because software decided what beauty should look like.
They’re beautiful because two people collaborated, experimented, failed a few times, laughed a few times, adjusted the fabric, adjusted the light, and kept creating until something clicked.
Maybe that makes me old-fashioned.
Maybe someday I’ll be the guy yelling at clouds while wearing a tinfoil hat and clutching a film camera.
But at least I’ll be making art.
And for now, that’s enough.
Because despite all the marketing campaigns, all the buzzwords, all the promises that AI will inevitably transform every aspect of human existence, I still believe there is tremendous value in creating something with your own hands.
A photograph.
A painting.
A sculpture.
A story.
A conversation.
Things made by people remain meaningful precisely because people made them.
And until someone invents an AI capable of wandering through a field at sunset, getting distracted by the way light hits a piece of fabric, and then spending three hours chasing an idea that may or may not work simply because it feels interesting…
I think we’ll be okay.
