Image Source: Arrival (2016)
In December, my roommate was replaced by GenAI. She worked as a graphic artist on a video game for the past eleven months, and then one morning the entire arts department was fired. She said she saw it coming back in September. It started when the project managers began using AI-generated visuals during their PowerPoint presentations; it ended when she, eight years into the industry, was left jobless a week before Christmas.
We talk a lot about the characteristics of GenAI—the milky texture of Midjourney photos, the insipid decorum of ChatGPT texts, the cacophonous familiarity of BeethovenAI songs. But our conversations stop at aesthetics, at six fingers and gratuitous vocabulary. When I see the mercenary excitement for DeepSeek, or the way society exalts scientific discovery and economic competition as invaluable exercises of the human intellect while writing off environmental sacrilege as a necessary concession (as if nature is ours to concede!), I realize that the celebration of industrial revolution cannot be limited to existential discussions of whether machines will be “smart enough” to substitute humans. Our obsession with establishing intellectual hierarchy with the world around us distracts from the deficiencies of our own species. Wouldn’t life be so much cooler if we were massive elephant-skinned squid instead, communicating pure meaning through levitating ouroboros of ink rather than through the highly misrepresentative, highly frustrating contrivance known as verbal language?!
Rather, originality means criticism and criticism is the foundation of change. Too often we conflate technological advancement with social progress, yet GenAI recourses to the status quo for its content. Paradoxically, it sabotages progression. There is something so backwards and foreign about figuring my roommate’s recent unemployment as collateral damage, about being told to simply “adapt” to the scientific wave or be washed ashore. We are better than this. We are beyond manufacturing a survival-of-the-fittest scenario. This month at the Trinity Times, we criticize.
Junella Zhang
Co-Editor in Chief, 2024-25
“We are here.”
We always say, even in silence.
It is our fundamental condition. We don’t know what it’s like to not exist or not communicate. We don’t know what it’s like to be truly alone.
Just to be sure, we pray that someone answers: “Yes, you are.”
Whether through voice or text, last decade’s song, brushing up against warm fur, crunching up of blue-salted snow under our boots as we walk side by side…
And so we converse on, self-preserving through call and response, with papers and walls, with silver filigrees of mycelium beneath cedar trees and 10-40 hertz under the sea, on the streets, among the stars, within bottled lightning. We reach out of ourselves, sinking ink and roots and teeth into the world, into others, each other. In the face of others, we see ourselves. We manifest ourselves, wars, love bites. In whatever we make, we communicate and invite others into our very being. With such an existence, which is an interdependence, comes responsibility. So please be cautious. Read and tread everything kindly, as we are everywhere, in every word.
The Medium is the Message.
The Medium and the Message are us, those who speak and listen together.
Communication is our fundamental condition—let us make the best of it. Let us go on, line by line, shoring our existences against each other.
Shirley Yue Chen
Co-Editor in Chief, 2024-25
