AI can certainly help us address the climate crisis—optimizing carbon capture, forecasting renewable energy, and streamlining disaster response. But what about our art? While AI can drive the science to heal the planet, it threatens to extinguish the very thing that makes us human: the drive to create, explore, and wonder. AI art threatens to erase the uniquely human experiences and expressions that define us, even as we work to save the planet we call home.

As we scar the Earth with our impact, AI is simultaneously making it harder for human artists to survive. The click of a mouse can erase livelihoods. And being an artist has always been difficult –– both economically and craftwise. Still, the creation part is an intuitive and transformative sort of struggle. When it comes to process, for me, there is no plan, no sketches to follow. Each work starts with a germ of inspiration — the texture of rusted metal, the gleam of sunlight fracturing through shattered glass, or, every California fall, the tempest of wildfire smoke blurring the horizon.

The rest is a puzzle. There is wonder in the discovery of each piece, and the process of finding and layering and rearranging is deeply fulfilling, in fact, at times, revelatory. 

Outside of a few big names, most of us struggle to sell through traditional art world channels. Galleries are gate-keepers with ever-changing admissions requirements the vast majority of artists cannot meet. Many of them fall prey to the comparison game, concluding that their work just isn’t good enough. Some of us cope with the rejection by abandoning the profession. The rest of us stay because making art is the only life we know, or the only way to stay sane. Nonetheless, I, like many artists, am my own biggest obstacle, and I am grateful to those who push me out of my own way.

I don’t think anyone can explain this tension any better than the Welsh rap genius Ren does in his viral clip, “Hi Ren,” a musical manifestation of both his mental illness and its cure: what he calls an “eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods.”

Chrysalys is my own eternal dance. My own treatment plan. My scream into the void. Except now, it’s not a void. It’s a community. And it’s not a scream. It’s just an invitation.

Come on in. It’s hot out there.