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. 

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