Bringing Humanity into This Algorithmic World

Read this article in French:
Soyons humains avec l’IA

An Everyday Scene

You want to share a photo you took of a landscape from your home region.

You write a few lines to accompany the image, then ask an artificial intelligence for its opinion. It slightly rephrases your text. It then suggests improving the appearance of the photo.

You eventually publish the revised image and text.

Is this still an authentic trace of your human experience, even though AI played a part in creating it?

You were there. The AI was not. It helped you give form to this trace, but the experience it conveys is yours.

Let’s take another example. A person can tell their life story to a biographer who turns it into a book. They could also record their story, publish it as a podcast, or ask an AI to help organize and write their autobiography. In all these cases, the experience being told remains that of a person who actually lived it.

An authentic trace does not come from the tool that was used. It comes from the human experience we inscribe in it.

And what about the future?

Artificial intelligence will probably become an increasingly ordinary part of our toolkit. We will use it to write, translate, search, create images, organize our ideas, or communicate.

The question, then, will not only be whether AI played a part in what we publish, but also what we brought to it.

Our memories, knowledge, encounters, emotions, observations, and creations can become authentic traces of human experience. In the arts, an artist can use AI or any other digital tool while still inscribing their experience, perspective, and artistic approach into their work.

Once published, these traces enter the network. They can circulate, be discovered, shared, preserved, and become part of global culture.

We do more than simply use the digital world. Through what we choose to create, publish, and circulate within it, we also participate in shaping what it becomes.

Tools will continue to change. Let us continue to bring authentic traces of human experience into the network.

Artificial intelligence can help us give them form and help them circulate.

Let’s be human with AI.

📚 All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦 The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Humanist Digital Art: A Philosophy of the Human in the Technological Age

---

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor