The Real Unreal

Hello and welcome to VOLVA. A chubby middle aged woman with auburn hair, standing and smiling in front of a herbal apothecary, with a bunch of herbs in her hands.

This is a pretty good visual description of aspects of me. And so this is what I used as a prompt for AI to generate an image. The image above is that image. That is not me. In fact, that isn't anyone because that woman is not a woman and 'she' does not exist anywhere in the reality of the physical world, neither do the herbs nor the shelves with jars behind. None of what is in that image captures the physical reality of what it is trying to portray.

If this is your first visit, you'd be forgiven for thinking the picture above is of me standing in front of my apothecary. It is incredibly 'lifelike', or so AI would like us to believe. It is an artificially generated image by a robot - a sophisticated robot, but a robot nonetheless - and it has received no brushstroke from an artist, no keen eye of a photographer, no smile from the warm heart of a human woman.

In this blog post, which is aligned with my Yule 2024 newsletter, I didn't want to offer the same as other offerings during this season. This is becoming a bit of a tradition for me now, following in the footsteps of a few of my previous Yule newsletters which highlighted topics such as grief and loss, distraction techniques, rampant consumerism and seasonal soul loss.

This year I wanted to share something just as real and evergreen, something that could be accessible all year, stripping things right back to the bare branches and to difficult truths. If you are new here, you will discover that this is just my way. I also wanted to highlight the huge difference between the glory of the real (that which has been created) and the ugliness of the unreal (that which is generated through theft of the real) - the lure of those things that strive to encourage us toward the artificiality of perfection in a beautifully flawed natural world.

I feel very strongly about AI generally and I am resolute in my feeling of both AI generated images and texts. I endeavour to never knowingly using AI images on this website, in my social media, literature or similar - this post and the associated newsletter, FB, Insta and YouTube are very much the exception to make a point. The only way to ensure this is to create and post my own images.

I will never use AI generated text. My words will always be from me, from my heart. If I were to use AI text, this blog post would take 10 minutes instead of 10 hours. I'll expand a little more on this later on.

I choose this approach for many reasons. I could quite easily use the first image on this blog to promote the branding of my business, to sell my goods and services. Who is to know if this is actually me if I am an online business? I could even generate things to sell that would not actually exist. I could generate aspirational images of products, services, myself and my life that are unachievable, continually hooking people in to repeatedly purchase services for something that cannot ever be reached because it does not exist. I could generate an entire business and persona that also does not exist, it only appears to. And this is what is happening out there on huge commercial sites, listings with AI generated images of products for sale that don't exist.

I came across a cookery page on FB recently and I scanned the images that they were presenting of teir recipes. All AI. No matter how incredible a cook you are, your cookery will never live up to the images on that page. THEY cannot live up to the images on that page. The person who posted the recipe with the image cannot produce it either because it does not exist. These are only small examples of deceptions using AI but I wanted to share with you my feeling about the spiritual impact of AI.

AI generates images by trawling a 'bank' of humanly created artworks, images and photographs - those works of artistry that are a divine partnership; the compulsion of the human spirit to commune with its God to create truth and beauty that touches our soul. A creation that communicates with us in the language of the heart.

AI pulls aspects of these to generate one composite image based on a phrase. AI dismembers art, ripping it into a million pieces, taking what it needs, then reassembles it. It generates a product instantly - on demand - for the consumer. AI is the antithesis of art.

Recently an image (I refused to call it a painting as the media are stating, because it is not) of Alan Turing, generated by an AI robot called Ai-Da sold at Sotheby's for $1 million. This image could not have been generated without the humanly created images, paintings and photographs for it to parasitise. I have worked with artists from all walks of life expressing themselves in different mediums, true human artists guided by a force beyond themselves, who are the instrument for this divine energy and who struggle to have the beautiful creations of their incredible gifts truly valued. And here we have some tw@ts squandering millions on a generated image that was robbed from other artists.

In shamanic traditions there is a practice of dismemberment and re-memberment. This involves a spiritual ripping apart - dismembering - of ourselves in the divine realms so that our guides, gods and goddesses can put us back together, healed and whole. It is a profound process that requires an experienced and compassionate practitioner who knows what they're doing. This often intense process allows us to re-member ourselves, that essence of who we are when we are light filled and at peace, no longer encumbered by the pains we have experienced in the world. We re-member who we are. We healed in the spiritual realms to be returned to ourselves.

So, what happens when there is a force - without its own divinity, compassion, morals, values, intelligence or empathy - that has been manifested with the sole purpose of dismembering millions of divine creations, then puts them all together in a mishmash with millions of others, a Frankenstein's monster of soul shards in an artificially generation 'thing' that is not-quite-living and not-quite-dead?

When we think about it, AI is perfect for our times. Faith has been replaced with spiritual cultism and commercialism. Much of what we see in spiritual circles is the selling of the 'get into heaven free ticket', the very same that the church used to guilt us into emptying our pockets at the collection plate but now it is under the banner of enlightenment. If we keep buying as much stuff as we can that makes us look like we are spiritual to our followers, family and friends - physical 'proof' that we definitely must then have faith - then we are enlightened. Appearance mistaken for substance.

I feel we do not know the full spiritual ramifications of AI yet but what it has visually created is a grotesque yet captivating zombie that we just can't quite look away from. It may suck the life and soul out of us but we seem to want to keep feeding it.

While we think we are more civilised than societies before us, we haven't come far from the Victorian's love of the travelling Vaudeville sideshows. We still gather, with hungry curiosity, to gawk and marvel at what we consider to be the freakishness of the world. While it is socially unacceptable to point, laugh, jeer and berate others, it doesn't stop us doing it. The Victorians understood this about human nature in the world we live in. While we marvel at the freakish wonders of the AI monstrosity, in the world of AI generated images of unattainable perfection, this monster has actually made us the Elephant Man.

When we think an AI image is attainable, reality doesn't live up to the fantasy and it becomes disagreeable. We've all seen it. People post pictures of perfectly lovely life experiences and those they care about, and perceived imperfections are pointed out, magnified, ridiculed. Human emotions are then shamed. Difference is bullied. Non conformity is eyed with suspicion. Joy destroyed. We are gawping at each other as strange, malformed beings to be ridiculed and ripped apart. The monster has made us monstrous.

Illusion requires our permission; we must agree to be deceived that this is art or that it has some form of soul. Just as a magician's show is illusion, a spell that we give our consent to for entertainment, so is this. We allow ourselves to suspend rational thought and intuition - and often morals and principles too - in order for us to feed our hunger for an aesthetic of flawlessness.

Two of the things that early versions of AI image generators struggled to generate were human hands and feet. I find it interesting that our feet, those that ground us and anchoring us to the Earth, and our hands that we use to touch the world and each other - to hold, caress, comfort and create - were hard to generate artificially. Often the generated images of these were deformed interpretations. This was one of the visual giveaways that an image was AI generated, as you can see in the picture above. But as AI advances, sucking information from us all the time, this is becoming rarer and AI images are becoming harder to spot from real photographs - physically that is. If we ignore the visual aesthetic, there is something about them that doesn't ring true to our intuition. There is something in our gut telling us that what we are seeing is not quite 'right'. A little like when you come across a narcissistic sociopath. They can present as handsome, beautiful, intelligent or charming as much as they wish - and they may attempt to manipulate with mind games, seduce with flattery and conquer by emulating emotion - but there is no fooling the gut. We can be aware of intuition, and listen to it, but it only makes a difference if we actually follow it.

AI generated more than 30 images for me to choose from, in less than 5 minutes, for this post.

Forget about the incredible visions of your imagination and the fertile landscapes of your dreams. These are redundant now. Let the great Conjurer do all the work! You need only write a sentence and abracadabra there are 30 versions of a fake you to portray to the world at the touch of a button.

To give some perspective, in Autumn of this year it took me months to document the growing, harvesting, preparation and crafting of a tincture to create a 90 second video for social media.

AI kills art. Not only that, it kills the creative process; that immersive, meditative experience that takes us into a flow state.

AI is also the ultimate plagiarist. It is now 'writing' students' dissertations, blog posts, websites, letters, news articles. It is sifting job applications; sometimes there is no human involvement until an in person interview, and with many remote jobs there is actually no human involvement at all.

I have come across official documents and important financial proposals clearly generated by AI. It is at a point where AI is 'speaking' to AI, leaving humans out of the important interactions and decision making altogether. I once had a 'job interview' where I was asked questions by an AI program and I had a time limit of no more than 3 minutes to respond to each question, to record and upload my answers online for the AI program to screen whether I was a suitable candidate. Unsurprisingly, a woman with earth under her fingernails who finds spiders bungee jumping out of her hair at dinner didn't make the AI cut.

So what do we do? Well, we need to GET REAL.

I could argue that social media was instrumental in the development of AI. We have been encouraged to present an image of ourselves to the world that doesn't reflect our reality, disconnecting us from ourselves and seeing our own lives through a lens, not being present and experiencing it as it happens. I shared a little bit about this on one of my posts, the one I mentioned above, a video I had made on making Lemon Balm tincture. I found that the process of considering what social media users would prefer to see in the process actually disrupted the energetic flow of it for me - I became the viewer, disconnected from the creative process and, in turn, the outcome. I didn't like it and I felt it impacted the divinity, potency and power of the end product, which is so essential for a spiritual creation. The art (beauty) suffered for the aesthetic.

The above picture is me. Not AI. I am not, however, above vanity - I'm human after all. It was taken in early Spring, when I can get out gardening again, the lighting was excellent and I was having a very good day so I am genuinely happy here. I hope you can feel this from the photo. Ofcourse, I'm trying to present myself in a way that appeals to both me and you - this is how photographs have been taken since photography was invented - but it is real in as much as our image presented to another can be.

The reality is that, like most, my life is often chaotic, messy, disorganised, frustrating and sometimes rage inducing. I'm no stranger to swearing. I have never been one of those woman who people say 'Oh, you always get her the same way.' You won't but you will always get the real me. Get real with me.

Andrea

Note : I find AI images abhorrent including those included here. I would like to apologise for subjecting you to these AI images- thank you for sticking with the post.

All images - except the one above - were generated using AI.

IP and Copyright © Andrea Doran, VOLVA and Contributors | For personal use and information only - not to be reproduced in any form - see terms and conditions | First published 30th November 2024