The Last Human Artist

by Tyler Jagt

 Let me date this very clearly: it is

              the year after Los Angeles burns

                 to the ground, the Great

              Barrier Reef loses seventy percent

          of its coral, a record hurricane shatters two

       Caribbean islands and unprecedented

                        drought strangles the Amazon

                        rainforest past a tipping

point. My peers no longer distinguish

                real experiences from online ones.

               When algorithmic intelligence replaces

             our jobs as leading artists on

         animated movies, the film company

     releases a statement in

language so careful it will not be a lie

     that the carbon cost of their machine

            learning program could not possibly

be the sole contributor to the recent extinction

     of a species of sea turtle —

       to call their actions ecocide

      is unjust when the whole world is

    trending toward artificial intelligence.

The movie is completed in four days through

              several engineered prompts

— they do nothing and call it

something —          and later in privacy I

     ask the program to paint me a picture

        of the ocean, where it drags out

    an image like something caught

in a net, spitting up a whale with too much

         symmetry and pattern. I stare

at the screen for a long time.

                       The fish in the ocean

         swim and tunnel and drown and

      rot and decompose, I sit

   at the desk and thrum and

       absorb and grow

           hot then grow cold