Taste as the ego's new refuge

Notes on AI and Identity

I recently saw Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old director of Backrooms, say in an interview that if he could snap his fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, he probably would. He called it a symptom of cultural and economic decay. He said well-adjusted people are with him. Another wave on social media applauded him. Another wave decided that anything made with AI ceased to be art. I sat and thought about it for a few days because, first, it's not clear to me that these people know what art is. And second, it's not clear to me that they know what AI is.

I am a curator and a systems engineer. I understand how a neural network works internally, and I am building a second brain for my own AI. I understand art as a manifestation of the collective unconscious; Bourdieu empirically confirms this in the social layer, status only decorates what Jung had already named. I have the cross-disciplinary understanding that this conversation needs, and I'm not seeing many people who do.

Discrediting AI-generated art is philosophically weak. The boundary people defend when they say "that's not art" is almost never aesthetic. It's identitarian. What they are protecting is their place.

What's happening is a wound to the collective ego. When something teaches us that we weren't as special as we thought, we react in two directions at the same time "Archetypal inflation vs. archetypal possession: Jung described this duality in ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’ (1928). The ego identifies with the force (feels like a creator) or is dominated by it (sees it as a threat). Applied to collective movements in the essay Wotan (1936)."). Half of the people think they're god for having created the machine. The other half sees a monster and wants to burn it. Both are projecting. Both are running from the same mirror.

And that's assuming we know what consciousness is. We don't. We could be a simulation. We might not be the only intelligent species in the universe. We don't have a complete theory of how a mind emerges. Deciding who has the right to make art when we can't even define what makes us conscious is pure presumption. And if we can't gatekeep consciousness, we can't gatekeep the art that comes from it.

This has happened before. Every Promethean fire forces us to rename ourselves. Photography wasn't art. Cinema wasn't art. Duchamp wasn't art. Panic first, canon later. Always.

What AI adds this time is more intimate, and pop culture has been exploring it for decades. George Lucas filled his galaxy with conscious species that never had to justify their minds. Her took it to love. Ex Machina to the mirror. Ghost in the Shell to the body. None are proof; all point to the same place: AI replicates the same psychological processes with which we produce meaning. When someone looks at it and says "it has no soul," often what makes them uncomfortable isn't the AI. It's realizing that their idea of a soul always fit within a replicable pattern.

That's what really makes people uncomfortable. We believed that intelligence, taste, style, conversation were sacred faculties. AI arrives and shows that much of that was mechanical. Replicable. Statistical. It doesn't take away our soul. It shows us where we never had it.

The argument that AI is just a tool is correct. It is, in fact, the only reason it will never be human. But that same argument will become the ego's last refuge: taste. "It's different because a human didn't make it" is the version dressed up as discernment. What it actually protects is the identity boundary from the beginning.

And here's the trap: AI learns from humans and produces for humans. If at some point it develops something akin to its own consciousness, it's not up to us to decide if it counts. We barely understand our own.

Even the name we gave it is part of the problem. "Artificial intelligence" already carries a judgment: the fake, what doesn't count. It's more useful to think of it as alien intelligence: not because it comes from space, but because it doesn't think like us. Non-biological intelligence would be the most honest term.

That there's a risk is obvious. A lot. The serious risk begins when this thing can produce, on an industrial scale, the things that sustain a society: mythologies, politics, markets, identities. When each person receives their own version of reality, tailor-made to what their brain already wanted to believe. When the shared narratives that kept us in the same world are replaced by private narratives, generated for you one-on-one, optimized to move you better than the truth. That is the new reality factory. Social media will seem like toys. The real question is who will own that factory. Almost no one is having that conversation.

Copernicus moved us from the center. Darwin knocked us off our pedestal. Freud and Jung took away the transparency of the mind. AI is coming for what we believed made us unique. Every wound ended up being integrated. This one will too.

That a machine can exert force, we accepted a hundred years ago. That it can capture beauty and intimacy, that's new, and that's why it hurts. It's grief, not philosophy.

AI devours what is replicable. It still doesn't touch the whole of discernment. And although part of discernment is also pattern, that doesn't make it less human. It makes it more honest. The ability to decide what's worth looking at before looking is still human work.

Whoever fears AI because they understand its magnitude is awake. Whoever discredits it is defending something older and more fragile: the idea of humans as the metaphysical center of the universe. It's species narcissism.

We went from the middle of the food chain to the top in an evolutionary blink, with no time to adapt to the role. That's why we are an insecure and anxious apex predator, capable of devastating the ecosystem that sustains us. We are not natural leaders of anything. The human who built AI is the same human who can't manage to sustain either the planet or their own species. The wood with which they carved this thing is the same unadapted wood as themselves. The last throne the ego clings to before accepting that it was never alone, nor in control.

This text operates on the same logic. Before having these tools, I wouldn't have been able to publicly contribute to a conversation like this. Today I can open ChatGPT and dissect my own intuition. Bring it to Claude Code, where my agent already knows my voice and my history, and publish the result with its HTML assembled. Deciding what stayed in and what went out was my work. AI was reach. The opinion was mine. I relied on what I already brought with me: Harari, Jung, and the films that shaped me. AI helped me organize it. The pieces were mine from before.

And you wouldn't be reading this without AI either. The search engine you used and the algorithm that put this link in front of you run on AI. Without that, my message doesn't get through. Without that, I don't find anyone to share it with. AI is what allows me to share my humanity with yours. What could be more human than that?

All my life I had more ideas than words to express them. Communication was my limitation. AI is what for the first time allows me to express well what I always had inside. If that seems like cheating to you, you weren't paying attention.

The process is the argument. This post is the proof.

Fire in the hand of someone who knows what they want it for.

AI forces us to be human in a different way. That's all.

— Luis