Notes on being human alongside AI — written by someone who admires the machine and works next to it every day, not someone frightened of it. The question isn't whether machines can make things; they plainly can. It's where human value sits once they can, and whether, having industrialised attention the way we once industrialised food, enough of us will start wanting it made with more care again. I might be wrong about that. These are the arguments where I work it out.
If a machine can complete Schubert's unfinished symphony convincingly enough to move an audience, what's left for the human artist — and for us, the audience? Drawing on Brian Eno's idea that art happens inside the viewer, not the object, this catalogue essay frames the installation People We Love as an argument for valuing our role as imaginative co-creators, and for meeting AI not with anxiety but by upping our game as audiences.