What happens when you look at an apple? That question can be answered in two very different ways. A staunch materialist would likely give you a technically detailed explanation about photons bouncing off the apple’s surface and into the photoreceptors in your eyes, creating a visual representation of a red piece of fruit that actually exists “out there” in the world. Ask a philosopher or an artist, on the other hand, and they’re liable to veer into much more metaphysical territory: The apple isn’t merely a collection of atoms modeled by your brain’s visual system—it’s also a kind of portal, a pathway in to a mental realm of semiconscious associations and memories, the layout and feel of which is unique to each individual observer. An apple could be a symbol of health, for example, while for a more religiously inclined person, it might evoke the temptation of Eve in the Garden and the Fall of Man. Others might see a symbol of personal computing in the modern age, or the epiphany that supposedly led Isaac Newton to formulate his law of gravity. According to this latter school of thought, perception is never strictly objective; rather, our subjectivity colors our individual experience of the world to such a degree that the two are effectively inextricable. The Belgian artist René Magritte captured this ambiguity between perceiver and perceived in his 1964 painting Ceci n’est pas un pomme (This is not an apple). His point was that a visual representation of an apple, no matter how lifelike it might be, is not the thing it’s supposed to represent; we never experience the world in itself, as Kant would’ve put it. Visual art, like painting and photography, serves as a living link between the unique experience of the artist, on the one hand, and the viewer, on the other. Given the deluge of AI-generated media that’s flooded the internet in recent years, this begs the question: What does it mean for humanity, our relationships with one another, and our ability to extract meaning from the world when a growing portion of the images we see and interact with are generated not by other living, feeling human beings, but by unconscious algorithms trained not to help us navigate the complexities of our lives but to hack and hold our attention?