My Empathy Is a Sticker Detector

I look at technically perfect AI art and feel nothing. Zero. A flawless generated landscape moves me about as much as a screensaver. For a while I told myself that that was my humanity talking, some deep circuit that can smell the absence of a soul on the other side. It's a nice story, and I believed it for some time, right up until I learned it's wrong and there are brain scans to prove it. What I'm reacting to isn't the art. It's a sticker, a little label that says a human made this, and it's the cheapest thing in the world to fake. This started on the podcast. The host, Joe, asked me the same question you've likely heard hundreds of times at this point: whether AI is going to replace people like me. Instead of, "well, it depends", this time I said that AI raises the floor and the ceiling at the same ti