The mirage of the algorithm | When the machine hijacks the gaze and art becomes a fast food menu (Part I)
AI is not your enemy; your submission is. We have let an algorithm dictate our aesthetics, hijack our gaze, and turn photography into a fast food menu. It is time to break the mirage. (Part I).
© Doctor Z | Miquel Angel Riquelme Nuñez - Image © Osvaldo Labbé - © Doctor Z | Miquel Angel Riquelme Nuñez
7/9/20263 min read
I am not going to prove to you that I know about this. I am going to show you that I have looked at it closely, camera in hand, for thirty years of craft. And what I have witnessed over the last two is a silent mutation: it is not the tool that has changed, but who is in charge.
What it is, before what it appears to be
An idea before a technical debate, and I want to nail it down from the very first line: artificial intelligence is not the enemy. I am not here to demonize the tool. It is the most honest mirror we have ever manufactured. And like any honest mirror, it makes us uncomfortable.
The enemy goes by another name, and it must be said bluntly: it is subordination. It is surrendering your creative judgment and your discourse to a distribution algorithm that knows nothing about art driven by human discernment, or to a censorship that dictates which discourse is allowed to exist and which is not. AI as a tool, use it fearlessly. AI as a master, that is where I draw the line.
We are living through a brutal transformation and, to be fair, a brilliant one in many respects. Today, someone without calluses on their fingers, without the thousands of failed shots that forge judgment, can generate a piece bordering on the masterful in mere seconds. The beginner's frustration simply dissolves. Coming from someone who has spent a quarter of a century learning and teaching how to see, I will not deny it: this is a true triumph of technique.
But be careful not to confuse access with judgment. Right there lies the mirage.
The object enters the scene
Generative AI did not fall from the sky, nor was it born from the spontaneous genius of four visionaries in a garage. It is the result of a silent and massive plunder. For a model today to understand what chiaroscuro is, the texture of skin under afternoon light, or why a composition stops you dead in your tracks, it first had to swallow whole—without asking permission, without signing a contract, without paying a single cent—the entire archive of generations of creators who wore out their eyes educating their own. As Senator Bernie Sanders bluntly pointed out in his offensive against the "tech oligarchs," the correct word for this is not "innovation": it is theft.
Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney have been raised by devouring millions of photographs and artworks with zero recognition or compensation. They have privatized a collective effort—that of all of us who have spent decades training our eye—and now they resell it back to us wrapped in a monthly subscription.
The Distribution Cage
But the looting in creation is only the first layer; the true hijacking happens later, during exhibition. Platforms like Instagram have transformed art into a visual fast-food menu. This is where it is urgent to raise awareness and leave evidence of how we are being manipulated. Through opaque algorithms, these platforms steer our way of seeing, dictating which aesthetics work, what topics are rewarded with visibility, and what discourses sink into oblivion. They train us to create what the algorithm wants to consume, homogenizing the collective gaze.
This is deeply concerning. Throughout history, artists have always been the vanguard, the step forward in the transformation of societies. We are the guarantors ensuring that freedom of expression and creation is not amputated. When the world becomes rigid or dangerous, art shatters the structure.
Think of Dadaism, which emerged as a visceral, illogical cry against the slaughter and bourgeois reason that dragged us into the First World War. Or remember the Bauhaus, a beacon of innovation and humanism that championed the avant-garde and creative freedom in 1930s Germany, precisely when Adolf Hitler's crushing shadow sought to impose a single way of viewing the world.
Yesterday, the threat was political totalitarianism; today, the risk is the aesthetic totalitarianism of a commercial algorithm. If we surrender our gaze to the machine to let it decide what and how we must show the world, we lose our reason for being.