10/14/26
Yesterday I was feeling lazy. I woke up, got on my computer, stared at nothing for a bit, then laid back down again. Eventually I got my ass up and onto the living room couch. It’s an improvement I suppose… Then I browsed for a movie to rewatch since something new felt like too much. Ten minutes into the Hobbit I realized it was the second movie and quickly abandoned ship. My backup choice was The Matrix, a movie I’ve probably seen a handful of times. All of that to say, I really wasn’t thinking much of it. Well color me surprised when the movie trilogy about AI being evil has pretty relevant commentary to today… No but seriously, I’m sure I’m not the first free thinker to put two and two together with the most obvious and direct connection ever, I’m also sure there’s plenty of people much more knowledgeable than me who have broken this movie down. Either way, I’m going to indulge in my thoughts anyways. This is gonna get autobiographical and a bit depressing, but I promise I will eventually get back to The Matrix…
Looking back at the past decade, I’ve really gone the whole nine yards with AI, both broadly speaking and specifically with gen-AI and LLMs. It began with a fascination of video games, learning programming so I could make them, doing tangential AI stuff like terrain generation, and watching software engineers on YouTube make cool projects using Machine Learning and Neural Networks within their little simulations (CaryKH as an example). At some point I was intently following Two Minute Papers to catch every new development about Machine Learning. For my entire childhood I’ve been a hobbyist artist too, in college I stopped bringing a notebook to lectures because I would end up distracting myself. I had a fascination with how these seemingly opposite things intersect one another. In hindsight, it’s no wonder I held such excitement toward the idea of image generation…
Eventually I even ended up with a job at Bungie supporting the designers behind Destiny 2’s enemy combatants. Ultimately though, I got laid off around 2-3 years in. Not because of job redundancy from AI or anything like that, but because of sales projections and failing to reach them. I don’t regret my time at Bungie, the people I worked with were awesome and the job was also necessary for me to get the healthcare I needed and the money to pay off student loans, but to be honest, I also had a sense of relief once I got laid off. Between college and then, I was getting sick of living, going through the worst depression I’ve experienced. As offensive as the idea is, I even remember expressing to my therapist that I wish some kind of life or death conflict would invade my life just to give it a sense of meaning again. Life was a haze and working on a live-service product wasn’t fulfilling anything inside of me. I spent more time asleep than awake. I realized everything was breaking. The function consumerism used to play in my life stopped working. I didn’t want money anymore so work became meaningless. Even though I need it to survive, I didn’t even care about that either. It only took me a single day of being unemployed before I started planning out and working on my own game. Not because I needed to sell a product and earn money, but because there was something I wanted to make.
In the honeymoon phase with my indie game I felt creatively inspired and was enjoying myself for the first time in forever. Between that and the realization that many of the values I grew up with didn’t mean anything to me anymore- I seriously felt unplugged. However, it wasn’t sunshine and rainbows outside of Plato’s cave. I quickly felt lost, my old values were shattered and I had no new ones to replace them with. Everything suddenly became meaningless again, my game became meaningless… that “5-month long” project got halted at the 3-month mark. Then, a 3 month hiatus and a couple weeks of work, a 6 month hiatus and one week of work, a 1 year hiat- oh, it’s been two years now… This extreme burnout was heightened by the presence of generative AI. It started to become clear how this technology fit into place within this culture I grew to hate- the epitome of modern America and what it seems to stand for. Not only do we own nothing, the things we did have authorship over were stolen and bastardized into easily digestible slop for all of our indulgent, dopamine-fried brains. Before, I might’ve described it cynically as “Plato’s cave but its actually just infinite caves” but now I realize I can just point to The Matrix and let it do all the heavy lifting with that imagery.
“I’m trying to free your mind, Neo, but I can only show you the door, you’re the one that has to walk through it. You have to let it all go, Neo, fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.” – Morpheus
Morpheus pretty clearly outlines the path for Neo here, and right after this, Neo “fails” the jump. Though we should all know by now that failure is the first step toward success. It is much worse to give up and be unwilling to challenge your fears, your doubts, and your disbeliefs. The fear that AI will keep improving, the doubt that we can keep up, and no longer believing there is meaning in the pursuit.
I’ve found my answers to these. I don’t fear AI improving, I operate within the assumption that it will stay, that the corporations will print money with it and it will succeed. Then I ask myself why that ever mattered to begin with. The shift goes from looking at craft as a means to make ends meet to returning to the meaning itself. My goal was never to make money, it was to create, to learn and to become better, money wasn’t on my mind at the start of my journey and it wont be at the end. Even then, I don’t doubt that I can keep up either. Good ideas were never a lottery. The difference between my good and bad ideas is that one is thought out and the other isn’t. If I outsource critical thinking on any level it would only weaken my ability to develop ideas and create meaning. In that world, I wouldn’t be the creative director with the AI at my fingertips, I’d be a meat-proxy to the AI- somebody plugged in and waiting for the agent to take over. To think otherwise is to believe that the value in creation stops with the idea, and that couldn’t be further from my truth. Art is worth the effort; it is worth fighting for. That’s the belief that keeps me going.
I know this shit isn’t easy, I am still struggling too, my game remains in hiatus. It’s as Morpheus said, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” And hey, yesterday I was tired, but today I somehow ended up writing a blog.
Free your mind, and fuck AI.
If you read all that, thanks a bunch. It was probably cheesy as hell, and I barely even talked about the Matrix… There’s so much other shit I had in mind before writing too. But I guess in the end, I just wanted to reflect on how this all pertains to my own life and didn’t want to get really off track. I know that also means my answers might not be relevant to your own. Who knows though, I certainly don’t.
Side note, I don’t think I’ve properly written something in ages, so maybe the punctuation, spelling and the structure of this is absolute dog water. I kind of just mind splattered shit, though it took me a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would… that’s the creative process I suppose.
Welp, see ya around,
– Bajingus
