Audrey A McGee

From October 4th, 2025

I think I haven’t been legitimately scared about the dystopian state of technology until this past year. I have spent multiple nights crying so hard that I burst many mini blood vessels around my eyes and woke up with a headache the next day.

I hope this is the only time you find me talking about AI, because my calling is not to engage with it, but to engage with life, and perhaps remind people what exists beyond the screen.

I think the creation and exponential increase of arts-based AI has brought an ultimate question to our world, particularly to the creatives (which, in a sense, is all of us):

Would we rather create, or be entertained?

It has been a trending factor that our “social” media of today actually disconnects people and focuses on addicting users to the constant, easy stream of information, entertainment, and advertisements. Personally, I have had to delete my Instagram account and report to a trusted friend every time I go on YouTube or Facebook, just to ensure that I don’t stay on there for hours on end. I cannot be more thankful for that accountability in my life, because I know myself. It is easier to be entertained than to do anything else, especially to create.

Creating is hard.

I recall posts saying something along the lines of, “I wanted robots to do my dishes for me so I had time to make art, not make art so I still waste my time doing the dishes.”

I wish the world worked like that, but unfortunately, I think we let the entertainment drive us. We drive the money. The money drives the innovations. Of course the innovations go into entertainment.

Why are we letting AI write? Draw? Design? Act? When so many creative people have wanted to do these things but haven’t had the time or money?

It’s easier to train and watch something else to do it than to do it ourselves.

We are making art convenient, because we have chosen entertainment over creativity.

I wonder if there’s any going back.

Don’t go crying your eyes out over robots late at night. Go write something. Paint a picture. Take a picture. Sing a song. Go outside. Do the dishes. Yes, even the dishes! Do the hard things because, to be frank, they’re not that hard; they’re parts of what we called life before we all had black holes stuck into our pockets.

AI isn’t the focus here. AI systems were made by creative people, as were the millions of other pieces of entertainment accessible to us right now. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with being creative on new platforms, but there is something faltering and failing in how we spend our lives, and from an artist’s perspective, that failing revolves around the convenience of entertainment.

What’s a way that you’re engaging with life today?