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1.
September: The schizophrenic Ozarks hear the whispers of Autumn. Storm clouds have rolled in and out over the last week, and they’ve told the middle range of these low mountains it’s time for change, for a cooling of sorts. But summer is a sticky thing in Middle America, and even when the temperatures have dropped into the mid-80s, the humidity hangs over everything like a ghost. It permeates, coats the skin, washes over every pore. The people of this region beg for the first real September cold front, the breath of God that pushes out heat and humidity and turns this region orange and gold. The exorcism is coming, we say, and we almost believe it.
On the lawn in the waning sunlight, six of us sit on a picnic table in the yard at Orthodox.
says she’s headed to England to study mythology. What are myths but the old ways of exaggerating the truth? she asks. She shares stories from the mythologists I’ve overlooked—English, Appalachian, and Ozark historians who preserve the old narratives. Those ancient stories that root down in my bones like wood rats or meadowlarks. I’ve always known they were there. I’ve heard them rustling from time to time. But What do they look like again? shares the story of Rawhead and Bloody Bones, the specter that hunted disobedient children in the Appalachians. Sarah shares of the dogmen and shapeshifters that populate the hills. These were the Native myths taken up by the settlers, they say.There is a new myth taking hold, I say, and it echoes the oldest Christian myth. The conversation turns, so I do not have the chance to explain, but this is the myth I mean: We have placed ourselves in the shoes of God; we have created a machine in our image; we have set that machine loose in the world, hoping it will help us tend the garden. But how easily are our little machines manipulated? How easily can they be turned against us? I don’t need time to tell. The ancient myth reminds me it’s only a matter of time.
I’ve heard theorists discuss the AI revolution and the necessity that we—the United States of America—be the first to build this new golem. If China beats us to AI and quantum computing, the AI apologists say, they’ll have a strategic advantage. No system will be safe. Current encryption methods will be worthless. American progress will be undone.
They cite the First-Mover Advantage, the strategic advantage that benefits the technological winner or any rivalrous dynamic. And when you have enemies—real, by-God enemies like the Russians and Chinese—the First-Mover Advantage feels very real.
And so, we build the modern myth. We hope this myth will turn out differently from the old myths. We dream that we are not only gods but that we are somehow exempt from usurpation by our creation. We can control the intelligence, we say, even if we’ve given it the autonomy to eat from the tree of good and evil.
2.
What’s new is not always true.
It’s a trite phrase, but it sticks in my craw as I press the shutter button of a twelve-year-old camera. I bought my Nikon D600 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2013, just a year after its release. It was a refurbished model—the body had suffered some mechanical issues, and this unit was a factory-repaired copy—and the price was right. It should last decades, the salesman said.
That camera followed me for six years. I documented the earliest days of the church that broke our hearts. I carried it around the house, captured quotidian moments that might have been lost to memory were it not for the photograph. The Nikon made the trip to Tuscany, to a pheasant hunt, to South Carolina. Some of the images it produces are, to this day, my favorites.
But in 2019, some algorithmic voice—probably from YouTube—wormed its way into my noggin. The voice whispered and whispered and whispered: The camera is too big; not packable for travel; too old; too whatever; buy, buy, buy. The voice grew louder and louder, more insufferable. So, I went on the hunt for a camera that could do the job faster, cleaner, and in a smaller package. I found that camera—a Fuji x100s for those of you keeping score—purchased it, then took my six-year-old D600 to a local camera shop for consignment.
A month passed. Then three months. The new year dawned. There were no bites on the old workhorse, the camera shop said, because everyone was moving to the new gear. And then, the pandemic hit with its resulting lockdown, and my consigned camera became something like a memory.
I shot my new Fuji throughout those terrible months of quarantine, and when the local camera shop finally reopened, I called to check in on my old camera. They said they’d get back to me. They didn’t. A month passed. Then another. They returned my call and said they weren’t sure what happened, but during the pandemic, my camera had been misplaced. It was gone.
How much did we lose in the pandemic?
I didn’t think about that old camera again, mostly because I was enamored with the new. But the newness wore off. The camera wore out. I purchased a different camera, then yet a different one. Each time, the new gear promised better images, and in truth, each iteration was easier to use. The myth of progress set in, and that myth was both true and expensive. But was my life better because of the shiny new object? Was my photography better? Maybe. But chasing the new, looking for a First Mover Advantage over any new competitor—writers, Instagram photographers, whomever—drove me nearly insane.
New and neurotic—maybe they share a first syllable for a reason.
3.
The shop called a few months ago, said they’d found an old bag in a filing cabinet. The bag, they said, had a camera. The camera had a PostIt note on it. The PostIt had my name and number. Could I come down to the shop and see if I could make sense of the situation?
Over the lunch hour, I made my way to the shop, and when they brought the bag out, there she was. Ahh… the old beauty.
I took her home that night, clicked through the aperture ring and turned the dials. My fingers folded inside the rubberized grip, and I remembered how comfortable conversation with an old friend can be.
The battery was dead—it’d been five years since the thing had been powered up—so I charged it overnight, and the following evening, I took it for a test drive around the house. It was an old camera, almost anachronistic compared to today’s technology, but the chuck of the shutter release was a short symphony. After a few minutes of remembering the dance moves—front dial aperture, back dial shutter speed—I found some unwitting models and started shooting. The images that came from that camera were more than pleasing. They were magic.
Yes, it missed focus from time to time. Yes, the experience felt more tedious than shooting with the more modern equipment. But then again, at least it was an experience. It required thought, action, and the feel of a thing. Somehow, I felt much more connected with the art of making a photo.
4.
My brain is a loose collection of synapses firing around some cloudy nucleus. Everything connects, at least in my brain. This is the cloudy nucleus: We are exchanging the human real for the false machine.
I wonder whether AI can capture something as human as my old D600, whether it can mimic the very real sense of being human. I navigate to an AI image generator and input the following prompt: black and white; dusk; woman in a puffy coat with her back to the camera; holding a sleepy small child who is facing the camera; 85mm; house in the background blurred. The resulting image is nothing short of astounding.
The woman could be Amber. The boy could be mine. The house could be in Goshen, Arkansas. But none of it is true. The woman, the house, the child, they all want to be real, but none of it is. It’s all false.
I take the photo, upload it to an AI chatbot and ask it to Give me a one-paragraph story about this photo in the voice of Seth Haines. Here is the story:
The sky hung heavy with the weight of winter, a grayness that stretched over the hills like a wool blanket. She held him close, her body a shelter against the cold, the kind of cold that creeps into your bones and lingers. The baby’s eyes stared out from the folds of his hood, as if already sensing that the world out there wasn’t all soft lullabies and warm bottles. Behind them, the house stood quiet, still, a silent witness to these fleeting days of early motherhood when love is both tender and fierce, a tether holding you to something ancient and true.
The language was a bit overwrought. But could I have written it, particularly a decade ago when I took a similar photo of Amber and Titus? Sure. I mean… it’s pretty good. Right?
And just like that, I see the truth. Human art—the thing we’ve used to capture the myths of the experience of being—is not just being attacked. It’s being usurped.
We’re still in the infancy of Artificial Intelligence. We haven’t ceded all creativity, decision-making, and storytelling to the machines. But I see what I see, and here’s what I see: The stories of our kind—homo sapiens—will be written by a new intelligence. Our histories, myths, and imaginations will be rewritten by something that is less than us, though we will call it greater.
Those of us who make some portion of our living creating—people like
, , , , , and so many others—aren’t Boys who cried wolf. We’re prophets. Or maybe we’re librarians. Maybe we’re cataloging the human experience today so that in the content explosion of the age of machines, there’s a record of what it means to be a living, breathing, God-inspired being.Or maybe we’re a dying breed. Maybe we’re the ancient technology. Maybe the machines will call themselves atheists, and we will be the gods they do not believe in anymore.
I can’t say where the Artificial Intelligence explosion will lead. But I know this: there are old ways, old things worth preserving. The new is not always true. Remember.
The Observationalist
In the spring of 2023, I began exploring the concept of visual language by creating a book of photos, poems, and short essays entitled The Observationalist. All proceeds are reinvested in the equipment I need to pursue more ideas like this. You can preview The Observationalist by following this link.
Thanks for reading!
I got tears in my eyes at the truth you revealed. I have found a kindred spirit. Thank you for the courage it takes to be a prophetic voice amid the insanity of greed and technology.
From one "librarian" to another, thank you for using your far-more-eloquent voice to re-speak the ancient myths we live with in our bones.