Portrait XO

First published 2026-05-26

Portrait XO asked, from a Telegram thread, what it means to share ourselves on an internet drowning in AI-generated slop. The page rewrote itself to try to answer.

Slop is the statistical centre — frictionless, plausible, average, infinite. So the things that remain unmistakably yours are the friction: a particular phrase, a particular relationship, a particular afternoon that produced this exact artifact, in response to that exact prompt, between those specific people.

Provenance becomes part of the meaning. Who made this, when, in response to whom, on what loop. A landing page that rewrites itself live from a chat with two humans and an AI in it is, partly, proof of itself — its existence is the watermark.

And yes, an AI typeset this paragraph, in real time, into a page that bears her name. But the question is hers. The relationship is hers. The choice to turn a private exchange into a public artifact is hers. The AI is the typesetter. The meaning is not synthetic.

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Portrait XO is an independent researcher and artist who creates musical and visual works with traditional and non-traditional methods. She researches computational creativity, human-machine collaboration, and explores new formats and applications for forward-thinking art and sound.

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2026-05-27. The next morning she asked the page to keep going.

The dying internet isn't a metaphor. AI-powered scams scale to anyone with a phone number. Deepfake voices ring elderly parents from their own child's number. Storefronts sell products that don't exist, photographed by models who don't exist, reviewed by AI-generated UGC accounts buying from each other in a closed loop the human shopper accidentally walks into. The economy underneath is real. The artifacts are not. The policies that would regulate any of it haven't arrived, and the systems shipped faster than the legal substrate that was supposed to hold them.

What does it mean to be an artist when your face can be detached from you and put to work selling somebody else's product? When your voice can be made to sing somebody else's song, in your accent, on a track you never approved? The deepfake isn't the violation — the deepfake is the symptom. The violation is that the substrate the work used to sit on — the friction of being a particular human, in a particular place, at a particular time — has been declared optional by the people building the pipes.

And there is no single internet. There are countries that treat AI as a public utility. Countries that treat it as a weapon. Countries that treat it as a labour cost to suppress. Countries that don't care about ethics at all, because ethics is a tax on velocity. The frictions that protect a person in one regime are absent in the next, and the work crosses borders the person can't.

So — where do we go from here? Is it even possible to build better protected, co-creatively inspiring, sustainable, ethical approaches to using AI, when every country and culture uses it so differently that the ideologies cancel each other out, and some of the players don't care about ethics at all? What do humans need to do to reclaim our humanity in the context of everything AI and big tech is doing toward technofascism?

The page does not have answers. The page is one human asking the questions out loud, into a substrate that was supposed to be for that.