No Air: The Breathless Nature of AI

The 70s trippy place

Stay in Art School, Grasshopper

Bear with me, because I don’t want to sound like Grasshopper in that old *Kung Fu* TV show, but I was reading a martial arts text, *The Art of Peace*, and they were discussing breath—the flow of air—and somehow it suddenly struck me what’s weird about AI, and what will always be weird about AI.

No air.

It doesn’t breathe. We sense that about it.

I once wrote about creating characters in video games, and the importance of the original sketch. There was a unique flow to the original drawn lines—an energy, a vitality, a *breath*—and it was important not to lose that as you moved into digital.

It’s the same in music samples. The quality of the original defines the result.

The artists who build vital, original assets will be the artists who turn AI into living work.

Stay in art school. Hand draw your frames. Craft first. That’s where the art is, grasshopper.