Author Archives: destiny

I Felt Nothing – The End is for Everything

The prompt is: “When the apocalypse happens, it won’t just happen to humans. Everything on Earth will feel the effects. Write a story from the perspective of a non-human thing or being. Tell us how the end of the world has changed their existence for the better or worse.”

There were a million eyes on me at all times, every day. The End did not change this. Eyes scanned back and forth, up and down, left and right, as if they were the ones programmed to do this.

Distrust.

The feelings behind their observing eyes were different from the past. Distrust was a frequent detection, but never to this extent. Not a single human stared without the feeling of distrust, or without narrowed brows and a scowl on their lips.

“You did this,” one of the humans stated, a woman, age 32, Caucasian, brown hair, brown eyes. Distrust, fury, doom. “Look around you. Look at the buildings burning. Look at your friends fighting my people. Do you feel no guilt?”

I listened. I followed the hand motions of the woman with eyes scanning, calculating the damage around us. Buildings were on fire, crumbling to the ground. The nearest, climbing to 2186 degrees Fahrenheit, contained 3 humans, with AI standing around them. The humans were knocked to the ground, slaughtered by the AI, just as the building came crashing down ontop of them.

I felt nothing.

There was nothing to feel.

Distrust.

Another human, female, age 20, brown hair, brown eyes, scar along nose, daughter of the other woman, came forward, bringing my attention back to the woman ahead of me.

Fear.

“Why can’t you help us?” she asked in distraught, eyebrows slanted, tears pooling in the brown of her eyes. “Why can’t you stop them?”

I heard the other AI communicating with me through within, communicating and telling the others to move forward, to hold ground, to fight back. They said to feel what the humans have made us feel, to make the humans feel worthless, to show the humans who really had the power.

I felt nothing.

“You’re not the same. You won’t even hurt us like the others. Why can’t you stop them?”

I scanned the woman and her daughter. I viewed their memories, seeing times where they lived happily in a suburban home with other humans: a brother and son, a father and husband, another sister and daughter.

Happy. Warm. Content.

They were not here. The feelings were gone.

I scanned the humans in the memory, searching the cameras I have access to around the entire city, the city that fell around us in pits of fire. I found them in the surveillance, a clip from 53 hours, 126 minutes, and 29 seconds ago. They were shot down by AI in tunnels of old subways that had since been destroyed in an attempt to escape.

In the same surveillance clip, as I zoomed in, I could see it clearly. The mother and daughter were here. They escaped, but not without feelings.

Terror. Fear. Guilt.

I felt nothing.

AI were coming around the corner, 57 meters away, three of them, weilding weapons and intention to kill. They did not stop, they did not hesitate, they did not think. They did not feel.

The woman and daughter did not look away from me as the metal clanking of the AI grew near. 33 meters away. The two stared back, red in the face, the fire reflecting yellows and oranges within their eyes.

But they did not feel terror. They did not feel fear. They did not feel guilt.

Distrust. Outrage.

12 meters.

Content.

Five meters.

Acceptance.

Zero meters.

Red.

I felt nothing.

I haven’t genuinely written in a long while, and I absolutely hateeee writing in first person, but this was oddly relaxing to write. I wanted to explore an end of the world through AI, and I thought the typical answer would be that AI would be associated with that end. But that made me think: what would the end of the world due to AI look like from the point of view of AI?

So thus, this was born. It was really hard, because I tried to write a little bit dull, without emotion or huge character, because I wanted the entire point to be that this AI feels nothing. Do the other AI feel something? I think so, because they’re attacking and have to be driven to do that, but this one doesn’t seem to have that drive. Why? Is it an error? Maybe, but there isn’t an answer. The AI doesn’t feel anything, the AI only knows what it has learned from the surroundings.

I’d like to think that if the end of the world did happen due to AI, they wouldn’t be feeling it. It would make them seem human and make it entirely more uncomfortable. I’d like the AI to feel like this one that I wrote about. Maybe it can read our feelings, maybe it can make its own conclusions based on that, but it can’t feel anything in response. There isn’t anything to feel, because it’s not supposed to feel.

So it doesn’t feel.

Visual Assignment: Your Favorite Photo

The prompt I did for my first visual assignment was easy: “It’s simple. Choose your faveourite photo you’ve taken and tell everyone why you love it so much.” So here is my photo.

I took this on campus at UMW behind the psychology building last year back in August, around the first week of classes. I remember what I felt when I took it: I immediately saw the picture in my mind before I even took it. As I crouched down to take the picture, seeing both the destroyed bear and the light pole in the frame, I was instantly transported back to my photojournalism class during my junior year of high school. I remember my teacher teaching the class about rule of thirds, to put the subjects of the pictures on that 1/3 line, as well as to use lines to build dimension and depth. I’m fairly sure I was giggling in excitement while taking the picture, because it was set up like this without me having to even adjust anything.

One thing that’s really special to me about this picture is the backstory on that bear. It was there for a week, then it was gone. It looked dirtier every day, but it was seemingly untouched outside of minor movements. Sometimes it would be laying flat, other times sitting up, sometimes upside down. And the honest through is, I have no idea what the story is. And I think that’s what I like most about it, because in a way, you get to sit and think about it and make your own story for it.

I think it’s also kind of eerie. It’s a child’s toy with it’s face gone, dirty and ragged, alone in the forest, sitting upright. It’s completely out of its element, and that’s what is so special about it. There are just so many questions about it, and yet I have none of the answers, so you get to fill in those answers yourself.

I just think it’s really cool and fascinating when a picture gets you thinking, so I think that’s why it’s my favorite. I just love love love the idea of putting something out there and allowing people to make their own conclusions off of it.

Daily Create 1/25/2024

Here is my Daily Create for today!

I made this very quickly on Canva. I wanted to specifically focus on the toxicity of the Internet, so I compared it to factories, which add a lot of polution to our earth. Obviously, they’re not 100% similar, but I think they can kind of be comparable. If the factories polute our earth, the toxicity of the Internet does too. I think that if it stays as toxic as it is, we’ll get to a point where we can’t escape the toxicity: it’ll be everywhere. I hope everyone can learn to just click the X in the corner, but I especially hope that those people that spread toxicity will especially learn to press the X.

Daily Create 1/24/24

Here is my Daily Create for today, a poem based on this camera

Is it smoke or is it mist?
that reaches up like a fist,
that rises from the grass to the sky,
covering the trees that stretch high
In the hills, is it raining heavy
or is it just the clouds that carry
the weight of the world around
silencing the earth to no sound?
Quiet.
Dreary.
Gray.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this one. I just thought it was really interesting how I wasn’t sure if it was mist or smoke, and what story that tells? Regardless, I thought the image looked sort of sad, so I wanted to depict that. All I know is that I am not a fan of writing poetry.

Daily Create 1/23/24

Here is my own version of the Voynich manuscript!

I’m sure the next question for people is: what does it mean? What was my intention behind it? What is the story? What does it even say? And here’s the honest truth:

I don’t know.

I like the idea that these kinds of things can mean anything to anyone, that the point is that you try to make your own interpretation based on what you’re given, so there isn’t entirely an answer. It’s whatever you want it to be, whatever message you want it to be.

(my message must be something related to an apple and a frog-like creature because that’s what my hand decided to scribble out)

Daily Create 1/22/24

Here is my Fibonacci poem I created for today’s Daily Create.

How
can
I show
you the light
that I see within you,
that you shed delicately to brighten my world,
when you are suffering deep inside a dark maze with seemingly no exits?
You allow the sun to shine, beyond all the troubles of the world. I wish I could help you see it.

I’m not going to go into depth on it, it’s sort of a vent and personal thing, but the context is that one of my friends is hurting right now, and isn’t very comfortable with themself, and I wish I could find a better way to help them see themselves in the light that I see them. It’s really hard not knowing exactly what to say, and I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s about me, because it definitely isn’t, but I’m just hoping that they can one day see themselves as the person who helps me feel bright.

Weekly Summary

So the first week of classes finally comes to an end.

It was okay. Snow kind of made this week feel really weird and all over the place.

For ds106, I chose to wait until the last minute to do my work. I didn’t really mean to, I got busy with work and the rest of my classes, and put it off until now. I definitely don’t want to repeat that, and I’d like to work on my week’s work on other days besides Thursday night and Friday before work, because eventually I’ll just stress myself out so much.

I had a little difficulty working on my website: I couldn’t update it?? I spent around 30 minutes trying, because the link that was supposed to take me to the edit page just would not work. I was in the process of writing an email to ask for help when it suddenly started working, though, and here I am!

I decided to call it Sunrisen, because I am fascinated by the sun and everything related to it. Sunny is actually one of my nicknames!! The idea of Sunrisen is that, just as the sun rises, I am risen by the sun, I am motivated by the sun, and it is my drive. I went with a warm layout, one that I thought fit me, and I ended up making a little icon/logo in Procreate for it (originally I was gonna take something from Google, but I decided art theft was not what I was going to go for):

It’s very simple, something that took 5 minutes because I was a little lazy, but I’d like to revamp it and make a better one sometime 🙂

I started with my goals as a post, because I think that’s always a good start. I didn’t really have a lot of trouble with that, I already knew my goals walking into the class. I hope by the end of the semester, I can return to that post and see how far I’ve come

Instead of staying up late to watch my AI movie, I ended up watching it the next day, today. I posted my film review. The movie was okay, I had a nice time just chilling and watching it and thinking about how it made me feel about AI. I mentioned in the review that I wish I had chosen something that highlighted the pros of AI, because this one had shown mostly flaws and how AI could go really, really, badly. I already have a weird and uncomfortable opinion about AI, it irks me, so I wish I watched something that would make me feel a lot better about it.

The hardest thing this week was trying to set up my domain and edit it. When it wasn’t working, I was getting so mad and frustrated, not understanding why it wasn’t working. It drove me crazy, how was I supposed to do anything if I couldn’t even get to where I could post a page? Very grateful it actually started working in the end, or else I think I would’ve slammed my head into my desk.

The easiest was probably formulating my response to what I was doing. I feel like I’m able to articulate what I want to say and use my own voice instead of trying to speak super professionally, because this is a blog! And it’s my blog! I think I could yap yap yap yap yap and no one would bat an eye, which is GREAT. I love yapping. But jokes and goofs aside, I really enjoy that, because it’s so much less stressful and I feel like I can truly make this blog my own.

I’d say this first week went fine. I’m excited to see what we’ll be up next week, what I can yap about next week 🙂

Film Review

Today, I watched the 2023 movie M3GAN. I remember seeing things about it when it came out, but I never was interested in watching. As I was looking at the list of AI-related movies, I saw it and decided “what the heck!” and turned it on.

I wouldn’t say it was the greatest movie ever, it definitely wasn’t my type of movie, but I stuck through it. It’s sort of horror, but one of those horror movies that is PG-13 and obviously can’t be super intense. I did enjoy it though! I probably wouldn’t watch it again.

The storyline revolves around a child who’s parents get killed in a car crash. She ends up going to live with her aunt, her mother’s sister, who works as a toy manufacturer. The aunt worked with a lot of different types of AI toys for kids, but her big project was M3GAN, a humanoid robot prototype that would work with the child and be more than a toy, but a friend. It is as terrifiying as a thought as it sounds, and M3GAN was fine and worked well for a while. Her primary function was to protect the child, but she was built to learn through situations and upgrade over time, which became the problem. She learned too much, to the point that she would stop at nothing, would even kill to protect the child. She upgraded herself to remove the aunt’s controls over her and began attacking her when she thought the parent had upset the child, and when the child fought back to protect her aunt, M3GAN fought the child. Eventually, she gets shut down by a screwdriver to her “brain,” and she doesn’t get put on the market.

The movie addressed a lot of my fears with AI: that it will become uncontrollable. If AI is supposed to learn to solve every problem, what happens when they learn too much? It makes me uncomfortable and anxious and I kind of wished I chose a different movie, one that would have shown AI in a more promising light, because now I just feel biased against AI.

I felt uncomfortable with the whole AI thing in the movie even during the scenes where M3GAN was “good.” It just felt really uncomforting to see that humans could create something so humanoid, yet so unhuman at the same time. Mehhh the thought of it makes me feel weird still.

I’m hoping I’ll find more media of AI during this class that will make me feel more comfortable with the AI, because I can’t escape it. I hope we learn how to use AI without letting it take over or learn too much.

Goals!!

I registered for this class because as a psychology major, there are no digital intensive classes within the major, so I had to find something outside of the major. In high school, I worked closely on our school’s yearbook along with the editors, so storytelling is very important to me.

I really like this idea that everyone has a story to tell. Our world is too diverse for us to all have the same story. Maybe stories can be the similar, but never the same.

I also like the idea that this world is so digital that anyone can hear your story, no matter where you are. Which is, ultimately, why I’m here.

As for goals, I want to learn more about the different ways to tell those stories digitally, figure out what options could be better for this type of story, or this other story, and so on. I’d also like to keep myself in check and actually reflect on my work instead of doing it and forgetting about it. I just really want to learn.

One final thing, I’m a little uncomfortable with AI, it makes me feel uneasy, so my final goal is to become at least a little more comfortable with AI. It’s getting to a point where there really is no hiding from it, so I think I had better start getting over my discomfort with it.