Philosophy

When AI Writes What We Want to Read

Gianni Sarcone

Sometimes I wonder how we got here. As someone who has spent a lifetime reading and writing, I can usually spot AI-generated prose. The clichés, recycled formulas, suspiciously polished sentences, and repetitive rhythms often give it away. But apparently, most readers can’t. That’s a little unsettling.

A peer-reviewed study from Villanova University asked 1,682 people to read six short stories. Sometimes they were correctly told whether the author was human or AI; sometimes they were deliberately misled.

The result is uncomfortable.

The AI-written stories were rated 6% higher in quality and 8% more engaging than the human-written ones. Even more telling: when readers believed an AI story had been written by a person, they rated it even higher.

The real story isn’t AI. It’s us.

We don’t necessarily value authenticity—we value the belief that something is authentic. We romanticize the author’s life, struggle, and voice. Remove the label, and our judgment shifts.

AI may not have become a writer. It may simply have become remarkably good at producing the kind of prose that feels familiar, readable, and broadly appealing.

The disturbing question isn’t whether AI can write. It’s whether we can still recognize a genuine voice—or whether we’ve grown so comfortable with the average that we mistake it for excellence.

And yet, there is another layer to this uneasiness. It brings to mind Roland Barthes, who famously wrote: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

Barthes argued that meaning ultimately belongs to the reader, rather than to the author’s intentions or biography. AI adds a rather disturbing twist to that idea: what happens when the Author is no longer even a person—and when the reader cannot reliably tell the difference?

Beyond the conformity and mediocrity that AI may encourage, this makes me wonder how little we actually know about why we like what we read. Perhaps the real illusion is not that AI has learned to imitate us, but that we are far more predictable than we ever imagined.

AI

Art as an Open Circuit

Gianni Sarcone

Art is sharing—an offering from the artist to the audience. Every audience calls for its own officiant.

In technological terms, a work of art is an output searching for an input. Without that exchange, it remains only a possibility. It comes into existence through its encounter with another mind, where it can generate emotion, doubt, rejection, or wonder. A work is born once in the artist’s mind, and then again in the mind of the person who experiences it.

The artist is a translator between an inner vision and the outside world. They offer a fragment of themselves, without ever being able to control how that offering will be interpreted. Every audience recognizes the artists who resonate with its own sensibility, its questions, and its time. Every audience calls for its own officiant.

But does an art exist that cannot be shared?

If we define art not as the final object—the painting, the book, the symphony—but as the state of consciousness and the act of creation itself, then that art is fundamentally impossible to communicate. The finished work is only a trace, the imprint of an inner experience that no one else can truly access. What the audience receives is never the act of creation itself, but its remainder: its echo, its shadow, and sometimes even its misunderstanding.

share your art
(To illustrate this point, I’ve added an ironic image circulating on the net. I hope you appreciate the irony—and my sense of humor.)

The Cruel Paradox of Eternal Life

Gianni Sarcone

If there truly were a God, He would not promise eternal life. It would not be a reward but the most exquisite form of punishment. Hell may not be fire at all. It may simply be time that never ends.

What surprises me is how few believers seem to have stopped and asked what eternal life would actually mean for a mortal being. We long for immortality without ever considering its consequences, as though anything infinite must also be desirable.

Death is not merely the end of life; it is what gives life its shape. Without a horizon, there is no journey. Without an ending, there is no story. Life may have no inherent meaning, yet it is precisely its fragility that gives it value.

Eternity, by contrast, is an idea that would drive any intelligent mind to madness. Our lives are built around transitions. We leave childhood behind, then adolescence, then middle age. At every stage, part of us dies so that another version can emerge. We are never quite the same person twice. Death is simply the final transition, perhaps the only one that truly completes the narrative.

Mentally healthy people do not wish to live forever. They simply hope to live well, and for as long as it makes sense. Not to accumulate centuries, but to have enough time to do what matters to them, and then look back without feeling that everything important was endlessly postponed.

Eternity destroys urgency. Why create today what can always be created tomorrow? Why love now, travel now, write now, learn now, or take risks, if tomorrow never stops arriving? Infinity drains every moment of its value. It replaces desire with procrastination, curiosity with habit, and life with endless repetition.

We do not fear death as much as we fear leaving behind what we love. Yet perhaps death is what saves life from becoming meaningless. Without it, all that would remain is an eternity so vast that, in the end, it would erase even the memory of what it once meant to be alive.

The Geometry of Wonder

Gianni Sarcone
impossible objects: nested tribars

One of my finest sculptures: nested triangles, the central one in wood, the others in stainless steel…

nested tribars

Just kidding. It’s an impossible tribar composition — a sculpture that can exist only in the eye and the mind.

The Penrose triangle (or Penrose tribar) is generally credited to Roger Penrose, who, together with his father Lionel Penrose, published it in 1958 as an “impossible object.” However, the visual idea of creating paradoxical triangular forms and impossible geometries has older precedents.

Japanese visual culture is often mentioned in discussions of geometric illusion because Edo-period (1603–1868) art, decorative motifs, and craft traditions reveal a deep fascination with complex patterns, ambiguous spaces, and unconventional perspectives. Elements found in traditions such as sankaku mokkō (triangular motifs), karakusa patterns, architectural ornamentation, and woodworking designs show how Japanese artists and craftsmen explored visual structures that challenge perception. While no confirmed direct predecessor of the Penrose tribar has been identified in Japanese art, these examples belong to a broader historical tradition of creating forms that play with geometry and the limits of visual interpretation.

Japanese tribar

A glimpse below into traditional Japanese fabric patterns, where triangular designs reveal how interlaced geometry can create the sensation of impossible structures.

Kagome patterns

To round things off, it’s worth mentioning the Valknut, a Scandinavian symbol dating back to around the 7th century whose interlocking triangles closely resemble the tribar.

valknut

The Eternal Return

Gianni Sarcone

At times, I find myself resembling the shipwrecked man from The Invention of Morel, stranded on an island that at first appears deserted, almost welcoming in its deceptive silence. Yet something soon shifts. The people who inhabit it do not see him. He moves among them like a breath, a weightless trace, already slipping out of reality.

Gradually, he understands that his invisibility is not accidental. These bodies, these gestures, this frozen summer light… all obey another logic. A repetition. A projection. Life here has become mechanical memory, the reconstruction of vanished moments, orchestrated by a machine born of obsession.

And in the face of this unsettling truth, a decisive turn emerges: remain outside, intact and separate, or step into the image, accept dissolution within the cycle at the cost of one’s own substance.

The story leaves behind an unnameable imprint—a nostalgia without object, as if something within us recognized a scene already lived elsewhere. It opens a fissure in what we call reality: its fragility, its occasional nature as stable illusion, and the strange condition of the individual who must vanish in order to fully belong to what he contemplates.

A film worth seeking out, or even better, the novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares on which it is based—brief in form, but long-lasting in its quiet afterlife within memory.

l'invenzione di Morel
Immortality, Love & Loneliness
the island
The island as described by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Born into Iki

Gianni Sarcone

I am iki from birth.

But what is iki (粋)?

Edo, under the Tokugawa shogunate. Merchants wealthy enough to unsettle the hierarchy, yet still ranked below the samurai. Power without status—watched closely, dressed carefully.

Sumptuary laws did the rest: no gold, no loud silk, no bright declarations. Only browns, greys, indigo. A forced muting of visibility.

Constraint rarely suppresses imagination. It concentrates it.

From this narrow register emerged a refined spectrum known as Shijuhattcha Hyakunezumi (四十八茶百鼠)—“48 browns, 100 greys.” Not literal numbers, but a cultural way of naming excess within restraint: an almost infinite sensitivity to difference inside what first appears uniform.

Fashion became a coded language. Subtle shifts in tone, legible only to trained eyes. Outside, discipline. Inside, excess held in reserve. A lining of rare fabric. A color hidden against the skin. A private flash revealed only when a sleeve turns in the wind.

This is iki: elegance that refuses emphasis. Presence without display. A form of refinement that collapses the moment it is named.

Its opposite is yabo (野暮): excess, insistence, the compulsion to be seen. Not morality—measure. Or the lack of it.

Today, the direction has inverted. Visibility has become currency. Those who do not perform disappear; those who do not declare are not counted. What was once failure has become strategy.

And yet the counter-move remains simple.

Lower the volume. Leave gaps. Let meaning breathe in what is not shown.

And become something worth looking at twice.

Master of Numbers

Gianni Sarcone

“The Master of Numbers” is an Op Art photomosaic portrait of the renowned physicist, created from a collection of photographs of numbers. Each detail contributes to a visual exploration of mathematics, perception, and pattern. The project took me two years to complete, photographing numbers in the most unusual places and objects, and bringing them together into a single portrait.


And a little secret: tucked inside the mosaic is a tiny portrait of me and my wife—a fun, hidden signature and a personal touch.

Limited edition posters and prints are available through my online gallery.

Humble, Yet Indispensable

Gianni Sarcone

A reed—sometimes called a “lamella”—is a thin strip of material that vibrates to produce sound in a musical instrument. Most woodwind reeds are cut from Arundo donax, the so-called giant cane.
Take that small, stubborn sliver away and the clarinet or saxophone becomes what it truly is: a hollow tube. No tone, no music—just breath wasted in polished plumbing.

The reed looks trivial, almost laughably so. A scrap of cane shaved to a sliver. Yet it is the only part that dares to vibrate. Without that fragile defiance, the instrument stays mute.

Humanity functions in much the same way. Each of us is a reed in a colossal instrument that calls itself civilization. Frail, replaceable, easy to overlook—yet necessary.

History loves to celebrate the instrument: the grand structures, the shining mechanisms, the impressive machinery. But the sound—when it happens—always begins with a thin piece of cane trembling under pressure.