The future showed up uninvited, wearing my face.

It blinked in binary and said, “I can do it better.”

It whispered in the gallery halls, clicked through pixelbrush scripts and prompt-smudged poetry,

and they—those wide-eyed collectors, the ones who never bled on canvas or watched the sunrise

just to suffer for it—

they applauded like it meant something.

I didn’t ask for a machine to wear my grief like a Halloween mask.

I didn’t ask for the algorithm to remix my dead grandmother’s voice into a radio jingle.

And yet, here we are—trading lived experience for latex approximations,

smiling politely while the soul is outsourced.

This isn’t creation.

This is taxidermy.

They say it’s “democratizing art.”

No, it’s strip-mining the human condition.

It’s printing tears in bulk.

It’s biting the skin off memory and calling it innovation.

I walk into rooms where metal tongues recite poems I haven’t written yet.

Where models trained on a billion broken hearts spit out love letters

for the cost of a double espresso.

Meanwhile, the real ones—the dreamers, the dirt-under-fingernails crowd—

we’re left in the alley, selling blood for bandwidth.

Being an artist now means screaming underwater.

Means watching critics fall in love with ghosts.

Means drowning in a sea of knockoff souls stitched together

from the wreckage of better minds.

The machine isn’t evil.

It’s indifferent.

And that’s worse.

I don’t want to be clever about this.

I want to rage like I used to paint—messy, loud, unmarketable.

I want to tear down every prompt-engineered masterpiece

and write on the ruins:

You weren’t born. You were built.

And that’s the difference.

Dustin Triplett is a creative Swiss army knife with a heart full of half-finished poems and a head wired for emotional detours. He specializes in writing that lives in the in-between—those raw, reflective, and often uncomfortable spaces we occupy when life refuses to offer closure. His work leans into the messy, the liminal, and the moments we usually try to skip over.