A new artistic epoch or the collapse of meaning?

Some revolutions begin with a manifesto. Ours began with a shark in sneakers, a gorilla made of bananas, and a bomber jacket-clad crocodile. 

No, not a metaphor. Not a symbol. Just a digitally generated image of a shark wearing crisp blue Nikes, jogging through a neon jungle with a caption that read: “Monday is a concept, Kevin.”

Not a painting, not a sculpture, but a digitally rendered, golden-hued banana gorilla — smiling, no less — circulating wildly on social media. 

One minute, you are scrolling past wedding photos and baby updates; the next, you are face to face with a crocodile in a bomber jacket sipping tea at a Parisian cafe.

Welcome to the new Renaissance, apparently. Only this time, the artists have silicon brains, limitless imaginations, and no regard for the difference between Salvador Dali and a children’s cereal ad.

The rise of AI-generated images has become the latest absurdity in our ongoing tango with ethical reason. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new artistic epoch — or the collapse of meaning as we know it?

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” 

One wonders what Wittgenstein would say about a lion generated by MidJourney, wearing glasses and riding a unicycle through Times Square while quoting Plato. 

Is this communication, parody, prophecy — or simply pixels gone wild? 

Let us not pretend we have not seen this before. The memeification of art has been underway for some time, from deepfakes to NFT apes. But this new wave, this deluge of digitally conjured, hyper-real absurdity, invites more than idle chuckles. 

It raises deeply confusing and slightly horrifying ethical questions. Who owns an image that no human created? Who is responsible for its message — or its misunderstanding?

And just like that, the age of AI image-generation brain rot was born. 

This term, now lovingly and ironically adopted by digital natives and reluctantly Googled by digital immigrants — describes the mental state induced by consuming endless streams of surreal, absurd, contextless AI-generated content. 

You know the kind: a goose in a business suit negotiating peace between planets; a Victorian child made of waffles; a platypus holding a sign that says: “Capitalism is soup and I am a fork.”

And yet we keep scrolling. We are enchanted.

Philosopher Theodor Adorno once said: “Art is the social antithesis of society.” In Techville, AI generated imagery is the social antithesis of logic. It is the philosophical equivalent of an espresso martini at 4 a.m. — confusing, unwise, but oddly invigorating.

Let us take a moment to consider the rise of AI-generated nonsense. These are not merely strange pictures. They are surreal flashes of algorithmic creativity, trained on the deepest layers of the internet’s subconscious. 

And they come with short, cryptic phrases like: “Let the ducks speak.” “Reality is just poorly rendered soup.” “He who controls the cheese, controls the skies.”

Somewhere, Franz Kafka is either applauding or suing.

A generation raised on surreal, algorithmic absurdity risks losing its appetite for clarity, coherence, or even causality. 

Rafael Hernandez de Santiago

We are not just talking about art. We are talking about a cultural shift — where traditional storytelling collapses under the weight of its own earnestness and is replaced by AI-generated absurdity that says nothing and yet, somehow, feels like it says everything.

But what does this mean ethically? Who is responsible when an image of a bishop made entirely of spaghetti holding a flamingo whispering “Free me, Deborah” goes viral and is mistaken for a political statement?

And more urgently: if the shark in sneakers gets invited to the Venice Biennale before any human artist from an emerging country, what does that say about the role of merit, meaning, and memory in the digital age?

Let us not pretend we are above it. 

Even the most hardened ethicist has giggled at the image of a courtroom filled with sentient toasters. There is something irresistibly clever about the stupidity of it all. But cleverness is not meaning. And meaning, in this age, is in short supply.

Wittgenstein warned: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But in the AI era, silence is drowned out by a relentless stream of images of owls wearing Beats headphones, standing on Mars, yelling: “I miss the smell of Tuesdays.”

One might ask: is this art? Or is it something else entirely — a kind of digital dreaming, outsourced to machines, shared by humans, and celebrated not for depth but for derangement?

The concern is not the images themselves. It is the passivity they invite. 

A generation raised on surreal, algorithmic absurdity risks losing its appetite for clarity, coherence, or even causality. Why analyze the “Iliad” when you can generate an image of Achilles as a grumpy cat in a trench coat yelling at a holographic Helen?

And yet — ironically, tragically, wonderfully — some of these AI creations do resonate. Like dreams or parables, they bypass logic and tap into something weirder and older: our deep love of surprise, of nonsense, of fractured truth.

Kierkegaard, of all people, might understand. He once wrote: “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” 

Maybe that is what the AI duck in a spaceship is trying to tell us.

But we must not look away. Because behind every absurd AI image is a real question: who shapes our imagination? Who owns our attention? And what happens to a society that forgets how to ask why, as long as it keeps saying “wow”?

It is tempting to laugh and move on. To repost the image of a minotaur doing taxes under a disco ball with the caption: “He files, therefore he is.” But we are in dangerous waters. Or worse, dangerous milk. Because the cow now has laser eyes and speaks French. And it is trending.

In conclusion, though in this genre, conclusions are entirely optional, the AI brain-rot phenomenon is not just a meme. It is a mirror. A funhouse mirror, yes, one cracked and sprayed with digital nonsense, but a mirror nonetheless.

We must reflect, not only on the images but on ourselves. Why do we laugh at a shark in sneakers? Why does it stay with us? Why does it feel truer than the news?

Maybe that is the real concern. That meaning has been replaced by mood. That critique has been swallowed by consumption. That we are all just raccoons in suits, holding signs that read: “Context is cancelled.”

• Rafael Hernandez de Santiago, viscount of Espes, is a Spanish national residing in Saudi Arabia and working at the Gulf Research Center.