after ai 291

ChatGPT also raised the specter of the aesthetic without AI (after ai 99/after ai 247). Remember, my story is that of the young sensorium: experiential, liminal, and contingent. Experientiality gives meaning to indeterminacy (Merleau-Ponty); liminality suggests mystery. ChatGPT: If AI’s governing presence once lent the world a sense of frictionless intelligibility (the feeling that “someone,” somewhere, was calculating and anticipating), then its absence produces the opposite: the unsettling sensation that the world has slipped back into opacity. Clouds, winds, and crowds no longer feel indexed to hidden calculations but instead drift into mystery again. Thus, the disappearance of AI as governing intelligence does not merely erase efficiency; it reintroduces contingency. And in that contingency, there emerges a new aesthetic condition—a world less legible, less sculpted by algorithmic will, more uneven and difficult, but also richer in indeterminacy.