Trendsspeaking topic
AI art is usually the art of the average: the statistical middle of millions of works. That's why it's familiar, pretty, and safe. Real art often unsettles and shakes us. Do we want smoothness, or do we also need the ugliness that challenges us?
— online discourse
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Did ghosting become a communication method? Erasing someone in an instant: is it a convenience technology handed us, or proof that we stopped seeing the person on the other end as human?
- Some people mourn the 'third place,' others defend the peace of being home alone. Is loneliness really an epidemic, or a lifestyle a new generation freely chose, one we're unfairly turning into a pathology?
- In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam observed that people still bowl but no longer form leagues. We too seem together but not together. Does being alone one by one in the same space count as being together?
- In online communities we can easily hit the 'block' button; in real life you can't block the annoying neighbor. Has the habit of blocking people out of relationships made us too fragile to carry real ones?
- Nostalgia seems to power every aesthetic: dark academia longs for old schools, cottagecore for a lost countryside. Is longing for a past we never lived an innocent daydream, or a way of rejecting the present?