When I received an invitation to join my Tito as his guest and part of his “team” at Vogue Threads Manila 2026, I jumped at the opportunity.
I’ve long been drawn to fashion as a form of wearable art, apparently even as young as three or four years old, when I am told that I used to make dresses out of tissues and toilet paper for my My Little Pony figurines. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself endlessly interested by fashion both as a form of self-expression and as an industry itself, even with all its flaws. Experiences such as learning to sew, joining my high school theater’s costuming department, and getting to learn from and work with social anthropologist and fashion designer Prof. Deb Christiansen at Indiana University have only made me more interested in the role that art and fashion play in our lives, especially in the ways that it holds a mirror to so many of the issues in our world today – greed, capitalism, sustainability, cultural capital, self/individual expression, and more.
Nevertheless, as I reflect on everything I saw and learned at this event, I find myself completely enamored, delighted, and high on life. There is something so energizing about being around creatives, and Vogue did an excellent job of cultivating thought-provoking exhibits and artists for their event this year, even though the talk I attended shed light on a bit of a more somber topic.
I attended the Vogue Talk “Intelligence, Agency, and the Future,” in which Tad Ermitano, my Tito, was one of the panelists alongside Jorell Legaspi and Marian Pastor Roces.
Building on Audrey Carpio’s article “The First AI: Ancestral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” this talk centered itself of discussing how AI is already affecting and will continue to affect art into the future.
Right out of the gate, Pastor Roces strove to establish her position regarding “AI, AI, and AI” as thus:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ancestral Intelligence (AI), and Artistic Intelligence (AI) cannot be compared to one another.
- Ancestral Intelligence is extremely complex and remains inaccessible to most people. For example, Filipino Ancestral Intelligence is only available to those who are fluent speakers of at least 1 Filipino Austronesian language as it was spoken in the 1950s. Thus, simply taking inspiration from an Indigenous Filipino pattern or motif, even as a Filipino yourself, does not mean you are accessing Ancestral Intelligence.
- Artistic Intelligence is embedded in technical and linguistic intelligence.
- Artificial Intelligence is not a tool. Usage of this type of AI and Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) is a surrendering of agency to machine intelligence.
- At this point in history, we must include Artificial Intelligence in discussions about the present and future of art, which it has already transformed and will only continue to change. Its scale is what truly differentiates it from other technological advancements that have drastically changed the world of art prior to this point.
In contrast, as a creative who has long challenged and pushed the boundaries of art, Ermitano states that he defines art as anything that makes meaning intensely – which, in his case, very much includes machines. In fact, he defends their place in art by saying that they can be perceived as extensions of human capability, as extensions of cultural ideas and prowess.
However, if you thought that the presence of machinery in his own art would mean that he would encourage the usage of AI in artmaking, you’d be sorely mistaken.
Ermitano calls AI/AGI a “bullshit machine,” in the sense that the products they create may look and sound like human-made art, but are completely devoid of the meaning-making that is a key part of the creative process for human artists. The machines (AI/AGI) themselves are entirely incapable of feeling, thinking, and consideration of ethics, having also been trained in an unethical manner, yet their rate of production is instantaneous. The danger, Ermitano says, is that work created by AI/AGI will soon drown out art made by humans and it will only become more difficult to distinguish human-made art from that made by machines.
Pastor Roces says we are 5-7 years from crisis related to AI, but my opinion differs – I believe we are already in a moment of crisis now.
She reminded the audience that where academics and philosophers formerly held power and sway in asking and answering moral dilemmas, the power to do so is now in the hands of artists, designers, and machines. For example, answering the Trolley problem is no longer merely a hypothetical – it is a question which designers of “self-driving” and AI-run cars must answer.
In other words, I perceive the AI/AGI crisis to be happening now because artists are not merely material creators, but arbiters of truth, constructers of cultural intelligence, and philosophers all at once. And AI/AGI is being used to take over that role.
Succinctly, Ermitano says that AI/AGI serves a capitalistic agenda in the sense that it makes product creation instantaneous. This means it is associated with corporate buzz words like “efficiency” and “productivity.” Yet, the true artist has never been concerned with an end product: the real artist finds meaning in the making. The time. The effort.
And while there is also a discussion to be had about how capitalist and corporate greed has always been obsessed with driving down production time and cost by exploiting others, there is also a conversation to be had about how and why faster and frictionless should have never been the goal.
Especially as someone raised in the States, I can say without a doubt – Americans have more leisure time than ever. According to Ramey and Francis (2006), leisure time has, on average, been raised by roughly 550 hours over the past century from 1900 to 2005.
Yet, even with all of this extra time on our hands, there is not a marked increase in quality of life that one would expect. Instead, in Time for Life (1997), John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey report that Americans are increasingly saying that they always feel rushed and are, ironically, lacking in time each day. Mental health professionals assert that this capitalist-driven pace of life has also been cited as a contributing factor for increasingly high rates of chronic stress and burnout, anxiety, and depression among Americans.
Coming from a social work background, I find it ironic that part of the job of many mental health professionals is to teach people how to slow down and be present in their own lives.
In a sense, I suppose that while this conversation was geared towards artists and discussed their role in attending to the world and observing the present moment, it’s an invitation I’d want to extend to everyone alive right now.
What would it look like to truly be present in your own life – even if only for 5 minutes each day?
AI/AGI is dangerous, certainly, perhaps for artists more than most. But even for the average person, AI and AGI are also part of a broader conversation about the role of technology and machines in our lives.
As I was reveling in the beauty of handwoven Filipino textiles on display, my Tito reminded me how traditionally, the making of such intricate designs has been done without any written patterns. In that moment, I confronted the horrifying truth – we are outsourcing so much of what our minds are capable of to technology.
I remember reading Ready Player One (Cline, 2011) for the first time in high school and being so deeply disturbed by the idea that people would live their entire lives in a virtual reality. Nevertheless, the idea seemed so impossible and far away. Yet, just a short decade after its publication, we’re seeing this exact scenario play out in real time. Mental health professionals are having to develop rehabilitation camps for people with technology addictions (phones, video games, etc) due to the sheer number of people struggling with them.
And honestly, though the idea of having an addiction like that is perhaps a bit extreme, I’d still argue that most of us live more life digitally than we’d care to admit.
Everyday endeavors involving creative decisions, even as simple as choosing an outfit or cooking a meal, are becoming less and less the work of our doing.
Instead of being used for inspiration, social media is now used for straight up copying another person’s artistic viewpoint. You like it? You can buy it, right here, right now, with just the touch of a button. By tomorrow, or maybe even today, what you liked will be on your doorstep.
And beyond that, moments of boredom and curiosity, often some of the greatest catalysts for creativity, have become practically non-existent.
While waiting at a bus stop or in line at the grocery store, it’s rare you’ll catch someone not on their phone.
When I have a question, my first instinct is to run a Google search – not come up with my own ideas and theories.
We have even outsourced the remembrance of our own daily schedules to machines.
And now? Students are outsourcing their very learning and education to AI.
What does it say of us that we are so willing to surrender our minds to machines?
In The Talent Code (Coyle, 2009), Coyle presents the mind as a muscle. People who achieve excellence at anything – learning a language, playing an instrument, heck, even solving a Rubik’s Cube – do so by strengthening neural pathways through consistent practice (along with personal drive/motivation and high level coaching).
Unlike other muscles, such as our biceps, abs, glutes, or quads, we can’t visibly see the atrophy that occurs as we outsource more and more of our cognitive processes – critical thinking, decision making, and memory – to machines.
But scientists are already finding that the Flynn effect – the sustained rise in IQ scores across generations – is starting to see a reversal with Gen Alpha, the first generation to have had access to touchscreen technology from infancy.
Is it merely a coincidence?
It’s hard to say. While there are, of course, several other factors that could be at play (including the fact that the calculation of IQ itself is a flawed Western invention), I think it is certainly plausible that this could be an early (and eerie) warning sign that we are already failing to use our minds to their full potential and capability as handheld devices and wearable technology continue to take over our lives.
surrender
in the land of suburbia,
convenience is queen
and comfort is king
wrapped up in a shiny gold bow
it's sold for a price
that at first seems nice
because nobody still seems to know
they're stealing our minds
and putting our hearts
under a close microscope
to see all that lies
beneath our fears and cries
cut so deep it soon hits the bone
they'll hollow us out
just as easy as they
tell us they're giving us
the key
to a new better life
easier, faster, and bright
with everything all within
reach
so we hand over the reigns
to machines and our banes
to those we don't even know
they say they'll take the pains
but even as it wanes
my fears, they continue to
grow
we're allergic to waiting
bores and curiosity?
outdated
and still we hand over more
attention and art
the feeling of being
smart
are things we now care not to
know
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