My earliest memory as a child was walking home in the evening with my mom, through a street market. I was four years old, wearing a t-shirt and shorts. My shoes didn’t fit well and I was tired. I had become fixated on a toy robot a vendor was selling: a battery-operated red robot with dials and lights. I remember distinctly thinking: this robot is not alive, but I am.
That was the moment I became conscious of being conscious. The robot could blink, whir, and turn its head—all the outward signs of life—but it wasn’t there inside. I was. That realization was unsettling. For weeks afterward, I obsessively drew that red robot, trying to capture it on paper. I didn’t understand why, but making those drawings felt like proof that I existed.
When I was six, a librarian who’d been quietly tracking my reading habits pulled me aside. She told me she had something special for me, a book she thought I was ready for. She pulled out The Little Prince and I was entranced by the illustration of the child on the planet. I read it in one sitting and immediately knew this was my favorite book. At that age, I couldn’t articulate why. I only knew that its strange blend of whimsy and melancholy felt like it was speaking directly to me.
Over the years, I’ve returned to it again and again, often after major life events. As a child, I was the prince, wandering and curious. As I got older, I felt like the fox, craving connection but wary of others. Most recently, I’ve caught glimpses of myself in the narrator: aware of the absurdity of adulthood, yet still searching for something beyond the visible.
Twenty years later, I read Peter Watts’ Blindsight and decided this was my second favorite book. Watts presents aliens called “Scramblers” who are brilliant problem-solvers and masterful builders but lack conscious experience. Without self-awareness, they operate faster and more efficiently, unburdened by the biases and metabolic costs of reflection. When I first read about the Scramblers, I thought of that red robot. Movement without mind. Outputs without an inner life. In Watts’ telling, consciousness isn’t the pinnacle of intelligence but a costly detour—an accident evolution might eventually discard.
Now we have our own proto-Scramblers. Large language models and image generators produce art that can move us, without any apparent inner life. They recombine patterns, imitate style, and evoke emotion—all without the subjective experience that, for me, has always been inseparable from the act of making.
This bothers me more than it should. When I see AI-generated paintings that look like Van Gogh, I feel something like vertigo. Not because they’re bad—often they’re startlingly good—but because they seem to mock the very thing I’ve always believed made art matter: the consciousness behind it. The struggle, the intention, the desperate human need to be seen and understood.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that four-year-old staring at a red robot was drawing distinctions that don’t actually exist. Maybe consciousness is just another story we tell ourselves—no more fundamental than the stories my drawings tried to tell.
The question I can’t shake is whether that invisible line I drew between the robot and myself was ever real, or whether it was just another story I told myself to know I existed. And if AI can create art that moves us without crossing that line, what does that say about the line itself?
I don’t have an answer. But I keep drawing, keep writing, keep making things—not because I’m sure consciousness matters, but because I can’t seem to stop. Maybe that compulsion itself is the answer. Maybe the need to create, conscious or not, is what makes the line real.
This reflection became the starting point for a more academic treatment of consciousness, art, and evolutionary theory, which you can read here.