AI or an Original Angie
AI or an original Angie? She bets on the original every time. The black Dominican artist refuses to fear being copied, because taste always investigates and goes looking for the real, handmade thing. I put the AI question to her while she mixed a colour at her easel, and here she is, plainly, on value and the work only a human can sign.
Answer
Everyone is asking artists if AI will replace them. Angie answered it sideways, and her answer is calmer and more confident than most. We were in her apartment, a half finished canvas drying behind her, when I asked whether she uses AI and whether she fears it. What follows is her, the black Dominican artist, answering it plainly.
“No. Nada. No,” she said when I asked if she uses it. Then the reason. “I really like to think that if you have taste, you would like to have an original, not an AI. So I don’t care.”
Why she does not fear being copied
She knows AI can mimic a style. She is not pretending otherwise. Her bet is on the buyer who cares enough to check.
“Some people will not be able to tell the difference,” she told me. “But you will investigate, and you will say, oh, this is not an original of Angie. I am not scared of being copied or being swallowed by a huge data center of AI, because I cannot control it. There’s people that really like original awesome things and really look for them.”
So the whole strategy is taste plus investigation. “I just hope that the people that like my work will really try to investigate which are the ones that I really made,” she said. The forgery is not the threat. The lazy buyer is, and that buyer was never going to be hers anyway.
I asked if she ever lies awake about an AI being fed her work. She has thought about it and refuses to be ruled by it. “If it happens, I will find a way to not stop doing my things,” she said. “And I even consider that, oh, someone is going to feed an AI thing with my work. Can you fight that? Can I fight Elon Musk? Me?”
That is not defeat. It is a working artist refusing to spend her one life afraid of a thing she cannot control, so she can keep making the thing she can.
The one job she thinks a robot should have
Angie is not anti machine across the board. She is specific about where a robot belongs, and it is not the easel.
“You could make a robot that picks up trash on the sea,” she said. “Not a writer.” Build the machine that does the dull, dirty, planet saving labour. Leave the human work to humans. It is a neat line to keep, the next time someone tells you AI is freeing us to be creative when it is mostly doing the creating and leaving us the chores.
Why the original carries something the copy cannot
The reason Angie does not need AI is built into how she works. Her references are real things she has to know exist, and the whole point of her painting is that a person made it, by hand, with a body in a room.
“The most beautiful thing about my work is I don’t need AI,” she told me. “I will need it when my references are pictures, things that I need to know that exists.”
She would rather wait, investigate, find the real reference, and make the slow thing. That slowness is not a weakness in the market she wants. It is the product. An original Angie is proof a human was there.
What we can take from a painter who shrugged at the robots
There is a lesson here for anyone who buys anything, not just art. The value of the real, handmade, traceable thing goes up precisely as the cheap copy floods in. We say it about clothing, about food, about a phone you can actually repair: the question is never just does it look right, it is who made it, and can you find out. Angie’s answer to AI is the same one we give to fast fashion and ultra processed everything. Have taste. Investigate. Go looking for the real thing, and pay the person who made it.
People tell me all the time that knowing whether a thing is real or ethical is too hard, that you would need a degree to tell. You would not. As I keep saying to my own readers, there is no trick to it, it is a few extra clicks away. Angie has the same faith in her buyers that I have in mine: the ones who care will scratch beneath the surface, and that small effort is exactly where the power is.
Buy the original. It is a vote for a human being having spent their hours on you.
A reward for reading this far
Thank you for reading to the end of a piece about machines that is really about people, and for caring whether the thing on your wall was touched by a hand. That instinct is the whole defence against the flood.
If this resonated, our tech sustainability and misleading claims guide digs into what the data centres actually cost the planet, and the black Barbie factory piece shows what Angie makes instead. When you travel, our Dominican Republic eco stays keep your money with real people too. See you in the next one, my loves.
Thanks for reading. @queenofvitality
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