AI as Shapeshifter

The Three Faces of AI

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

—Warren Buffett

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Above: Do we manipulate pixels or do pixels manipulate us?

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To most, AI is just a lever. A way to do more of the same, but better, faster, cheaper.

But to the artists, artisans and creatives—the ones who stare at blank canvases until they bleed something real—AI is a shapeshifter that wears three faces.

First, it is a Siren. It beckons with a song that is as beautiful as it is easy. It’s a safety net glowing on the screen. Why not? you think. Just one word. A little nudge to get unstuck. It feels like freedom. But, like most drugs, the first hit is free. And then the habit gets expensive.

Then, it becomes a Shadow. It hangs just off your work, dark and quiet. At first, it just mimics you. But the more you use it, the blurrier the edges get. You don’t know where you end and the shadow begins. It is you—it has your tone, your cadence, your vocabulary—but it is not really you. It is a confusing, depleting drift. You begin to lose yourself in your own output.

Finally, it reveals itself as a Spider. You realize the safety net was actually a web all along. One word became one sentence. One sentence became one paragraph. One paragraph became one page. And gradually, then all at once, you are so deep in the mechanical red that you can no longer balance your creative budget. You can’t prompt your way out because you can no longer tell the difference between a prompt and a preposition.

It is a uniquely modern, suffocating dread. But perhaps our language was warning us all along.

You can’t spell anxiety without AI.

And the way things are going—caught in the web of ones and zeroes, listening to the hum of the machine instead of our own heartbeat—soon we won’t be able to spell creativity without AI either.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom