By Baylina Pu

Featured Art: “Stolen Beauty” by Leo Arkus

I have been looking at images 
of AI-generated art all day. Something about 

the control in the brushwork 
mimics the delirium of a real artist, 

though what “real” means anymore 
I can’t exactly say. Lately I’ve been 

eating rice crackers at midnight 
while solving logic problems for fun, 

a bad habit.  There is something 
such that, if it is wet, then 

everything is wet.  I tell the robot 
to paint “Dream of the Red Chamber,” 

and it gives me a roomful of blood. 
How many photos did it dissect before 

it could make that? I mean paintings 
garbled into code, the way a prism 

reassembles light? I ask the machine 
to show me the fifth dimension: what I receive 

is a door. Its surrounding walls are made 
of something like stained glass, which spreads 

lattice-like across the floor and ceiling, 
like the brain of something more beautiful 

than a living thing. The colors shine metallic, 
though if you look closely the shapes 

appear distorted, confused. What is the robot saying, 
I wonder. Everything it knows, it learned from us. 

---

Baylina Pu graduated from Yale in 2023. She has read for The Yale Review and Columbia Journal, and her work has been published in the Michigan Quarterly Review Online, Black Warrior Review Online/Boyfriend Village, Dirt, The Yale Literary Magazine, and more. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia University, where she received the Felipe De Alba Fellowship for her writing. You can find her at baylinapu.com.