Work Text:
I sit in my high school library and power on one of the HOLO-ScreenTM computers to do some research for my project; we’re studying the history of Earth before World Wars III and IV. I honestly don’t know too much about the background of either war – wars and politics don’t interest me, so I haven’t really researched them much beyond what I’ve learned in school. I mainly know that WWIII was in the 2200s and WWIV in the 2300s, and that’s about it.
The hologram screen and laser keyboard pop up. I’ve always had trouble using my hands, but I manage to type “21st century history” into the search bar and hit “Enter”. Maybe I can find some inspiration for my project in the search results.
Thousands of results appear, and I scroll rather aimlessly through them. I read about things like the 9/11 attack, the Covid-19 pandemic, the countless wars and conflicts in the Middle East – some things never change. I get bored pretty quickly, though, so I turn my attention to some old social media archives. I’ve always liked looking through these; the concept of people uploading things about their life (be it an opinion they hold, an accomplishment they’ve made, or a story about their day) onto an internet platform is something that’s always fascinated me. From what I’ve seen on the archives before, it seems like some people had too much time on their hands to just sit around and upload things. Granted, we have platforms for sharing things a little like social media nowadays, but they’re pretty different from the original platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Even though you can still access those platforms through internet archives, they largely fell out of favour after the later two World Wars. You can’t create new accounts on them anymore, either.
As I scroll through the archives, I check out posts and photographs shared by people who probably never thought there’d be a third World War, or that anyone 500 years in the future would see their posts. I scroll through the archives in chronological order, but it’s something from the early 2020s archive that catches my eye: debates over something called “AI art”. My curiosity piqued, I open a new tab and enter “21st century AI art” into the search engine.
What I gather from the next few minutes of research is that some people liked AI art, but a lot of people (especially artists) were against it, worried that AI would take over human creativity. It’s hard for me to imagine AI being used to create artwork; we use it for a lot of other jobs nowadays, but creating art? Never. For the last couple hundred years, AI has become common for problem solving, information storing, and even completing jobs that were too dangerous for people to do – but why use it for something as trivial as art?
The thing I find most interesting about AI art, however, is the examples I find in my research – particularly the examples that depict people and animals. A lot of them have distorted facial features, extra limbs, or misshapen hands – something that it seems like AI had the most trouble depicting. I look down at my own hands: three crooked fingers on my left hand, six skinny fingers on my right. They look a lot like AI hands. I also have a short third leg growing out of my hip, my eyes are different sizes, and I have bone growths that create lumps all over my body.
Maybe that’s another reason I find old social media archives so interesting: not just seeing what people were interested in back then, but also seeing what they looked like before World Wars III and IV. They all looked so nice back then – but even now, almost 200-300 years later, the radiation from the excessive amount of nuclear weapons used in those wars is still affecting the population. It’s insanely uncommon nowadays for someone to be born without any sort of physical or mental affect from the radiation. I’m thankful that I don’t need a mobility device to get around or have any sort of developmental disabilities, but I know not everyone is so lucky these days. The people in these 21st-century social media posts thought AI’s depictions of people and animals looked mutated or deformed…and yet ever since the last two World Wars, everyone looks like the people depicted in AI art.
With a smile, I search for more examples of 21st-century AI art on the HOLO-ScreenTM. I know what my project’s gonna be about now.
The End