Ellen Dissanayake
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Ellen Dissanayake. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Ellen Dissanayake's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The glitter would not come off the table.
My daughter had made a birthday card for her friend. She used every color in the tube. She pressed hard enough that the card buckled, and the excess scattered across the kitchen surface and onto the floor and into the grain of the wood where no amount of wiping could reach it. The card itself was barely legible. The message — "Happy Birthday Mia" — was buried under so much sparkle that you had to tilt it at an angle to read the words.
She spent forty-five minutes on it. A text message would have taken ten seconds.
I did not think about that card again until I encountered Ellen Dissanayake's work while building this series. And then I could not