Being a student, a design student at that, during the rise of AI generated media is interesting to say the least. There is something uniquely disorienting about learning design during the exact moment people started asking whether humans need to make things at all.

Honestly, writing about AI has never interested me. It arrived with apocalyptic headlines and ended up helping people cheat on discussion boards and generate LinkedIn headshots. I was born in 2005 and in my short lifetime I’ve seen the invention of the touchscreen, laptops becoming as thin as a piece of paper, my grandma asking Google Home to play church hymns, my fridge having YouTube, and even nicotine devices developing the UI of a spaceship that you can functionally check the weather on. No new technology seems sensational anymore. However, somewhere between school, work, and the internet, AI has become an insidious permanent condition.

I mean, you MUST talk about it.

I’ve been asked about what I think of AI in every job interview I’ve ever had, by every professor, every discussion board. Every Linkedin post now has 30 emojis I know didn’t exist in the writer’s peripheral before ChatGPT (sorry Mom I’m looking at you). And I’m still trying to form an opinion on it.

Really, I’m a stressed out college student who knows AI is inevitable and that it makes my life easier, but I also feel a bit spiritually obliged to be against it. I can’t deny that it’s helped me learn a lot and produce things quicker than I ever could alone. I can truly say I love Cursor and don’t know where I’d be without Photoshop’s “generative fill.” My websites are cooler, I don’t have to spend hours using the clone tool, and my resumes sound a LOT better. But I’m not here to talk about productivity. I’m here to talk about a personal loss I’ve felt greatly with the rise of generated media.

R.I.P. — HANDCRAFTED internet slop.

Back in the day (like two years ago), when you’d see some egregious meme, badly edited fan-cam, or unbelievable clickbait animation, you knew somebody had to physically make that thing. Someone opened Photoshop voluntarily, they spent four hours keyframing their character, they had to have pirated Adobe Suite and suffered for their production.

Today, the beloved troll face Carlos Ramirez took the time to draw in MS Paint is replaced by Tung Tung Tung Sahur and those bizzare Dharmann-esque animated shorts are replaced by AI Fruit Love Island Tik Toks.

Actually, the creator of the AI Fruit Love Island videos (AI Cinema on Tik Tok) recently “crashed out” on their platform, complaining about how difficult it was to keep up with generating the videos because they had to “keep redoing things because the AI generation messes up constantly. Each episode takes hours and some of yall definitely won’t understand that until you try it.”

An incredible statement for many obvious reasons that the internet has already condemned the creator for, but really, for the first time, someone is experiencing all the inconvenience of artistry without actually acquiring the art.

If you wanted to post clickbait stories with crazy titles like “bringing my homeless ex-husband home” you had to surrender yourself to the laborious process of animation. You’d have to have drawn these characters, rigged them, animated them, picked the font for the dialogue, exported the file for a couple hours, and probably make 50 revisions because your editor hated it. Now you can just type into Sora (or maybe not Sora because that’s gone right?): “yo generate me an animated short story about bringing my homeless ex-husband home who cheated on me and stole all my money in the artstyle of studio ghibli and make the plotline real crazy” and you’ll end up with a viral video.

I remember being in middle school and seeing BTS fans make insanely convincing edits of Jungkook in their selfies– so much so that the rest of the fanbase would get angry and call them out for desecrating Jungkook’s holy image. But if the Photoshop was believable, that meant someone had actual technical skill. There was effort behind the delusion. Now you can just tell Gemini to generate a MacBook photo of you and Jungkook together in ten seconds, and it’s easily 10x higher fidelity than the 2019 edit someone spent five hours making on PicsArt. We’re losing something.

Even the humble transparent PNGs have become strangely excessive. The little graphics we used to pull off Google Images for school presentations are now replaced by hyper-rendered baroque AI visuals with cinematic lighting that is completely disproportionate to the task at hand.

The more I learn and the further I get into design, the more impossible it becomes to ignore intention. Visual decisions have become more apparent to me. At the same time, once you understand how difficult creative labor actually is, you begin to develop a tenderness toward the most crude attempts at it. These days, I instinctively reverse engineer designs I see in the wild. Someone chose these mismatching fonts. Someone resized this image six times. Someone experienced the deeply human creative process of staring at a design until they didn’t know whether it looked good or not. Even the most obnoxious designs online once reflected someone’s taste, humor, laziness, or obsession.

Perhaps one of the more philosophically concerning effects of AI media is how it excises authorship.

Take those AI-generated images of Trump depicting himself as Jesus. If this were 2016, some underpaid political designer would’ve had to painstakingly compose that image. There would’ve been intention behind every unfortunate decision. They would’ve had to consciously decide to blend that american flag into the background, to layer mask his faint golden halo and add that renaissance painting texture by hand. Or PS brush.

Now the image materializes almost anonymously. Prompted into existence and detached from labor. No artist, no craft, no grubby digital fingerprints. Only spectacle and plausible deniability.

“…the object which labor produces — labor’s product — confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.”

-Karl Marx, Estranged Labour, 1844

Marx might not have accounted for the conception of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, but perhaps TTTSahur and Trump Christ (?) marks this separation of labor pushed to its logical extreme: content with virtually no visible relationship between creator and creation.

We used to mock bad edits because they looked amateur, but now the unmasked jpeg feels almost touching. I could probably write an entirely separate article about the rise of intentionally imperfect branding and “human” design aesthetics in response to AI, but I think the deeper issue is that people are deprived of traces of humanity online and in design.

We’re not actually craving uglier design. We just want to see evidence of life — of taste, humor, effort — signs that another human cared and was looking at this before us.

Really I write this piece as an obituary of sorts — to archive this lost art form, this specific kind of internet humanity, and give flowers to that somebody, somewhere, that cared enough to spend those miserable hours making their slop.

AI, I don’t hate you. I’m trying to embrace you. But I want my memes back.

And yes, I used emdashes before ChatGPT existed. You can tell because I’m probably not using them right.