Me, Myself and AI

Before playlists could be shared with a tap, I made mixtapes. They were love letters with tracklists.

I made them for friends, and I made the covers too. Hand-cut typography, little drawings, and photocopy grain. A private graphic language wrapped around sound. It wasn’t a “project”. It took hours, and that was the point. A way of saying: I thought about you while making this.

Over time, more and more people asked who made them. I ended up with a small, handmade production, but it was still only for people who were dear to me. It felt important that it stayed that way.

As a child in the 1980s, I used to think: how cool would it be to design vinyl record sleeves for a living?

A decade later, I did.

In the late 90s, I was studying at the art university HFG. I started in Fine Art. Then the new Apple Macs arrived, and something shifted. The screen wasn’t just a tool; it felt like a new dimension. I moved into Graphic Design and couldn’t stop. I was genuinely stunned by what suddenly became possible: the speed, the layering, the ability to test an idea.

Curiosity pulled me further. I went from flat layout into space, experimenting with early 3D design on Silicon Graphics machines. At the time, those computers felt almost ceremonial: heavy, expensive, mythic. The work stopped being a picture and started becoming a place.

I landed at a techno label while still in school, half student, half professional. Techno was a perfect education. It didn’t fear the machine. It danced with it. It treated technology as culture, not a threat.

I also began working in film language, making edits and intros, learning to think in time, not just frames. That was the beginning of the thing that would become my whole working life: translating between mediums. Turning feeling into form, then turning form into experience.

Then the first big panic arrived.

MP3s hit the world, and the record industry freaked out. Alarm bells, lawsuits, the whole performance. Music began slipping out of the old containers.

I learned something then that I’ve seen repeat itself ever since:

Every time a new tool arrives, the industry performs the same little funeral. Then it gets up and goes back to work.

In 1999, I moved to London and co-founded Hi-ReS!. Flash arrived like a new kind of stage: animation, typography, illustration, sound, film logic and interactivity, all stitched into a browser. We built soulbath.com, void of colour, celebrating malfunction as beauty. It wasn’t a brochure site; it was an atmosphere.

That spirit carried into what we became known for: immersive digital storytelling, the web as a mood you could enter. We worked with films, musicians, and artists. The impulse was always the same: build a world, not a webpage.

Later, the platform shifted. It always does. Flash was phased out. We were hit hard. It was our tool, our language. Another funeral.

But something else changed, too. The digital world professionalised. Platforms took over. Templates populated the space. A kind of digital sameness spread. It was efficient, scalable, measurable, and a bit boring.

The weirdness drained out. But the pattern stayed the same: new tool, new panic, new possibilities.

Here’s the deeper pattern underneath all this.

Every new tool not only disrupts an industry. It lets new people speak. It lowers the cost of entry, and suddenly those who were locked out start making culture.

Photography didn’t kill painting. It pushed painting somewhere else entirely. Impressionism wasn’t a retreat; it was a rebellion: if a camera can capture reality, then the human hand becomes free to chase light, feeling, and atmosphere.

Synthesisers didn’t kill rock. They expanded the palette and helped launch whole new genres. Sampling didn’t end music either. It helped create hip hop.

That’s the pattern that matters to me. Not who “wins”. But what new kinds of art become possible when the old gatekeepers lose their grip?

There’s also a personal layer to this, and I want to say it plainly.

I’m grateful I get to live and work in this era. Not because it’s easy. Not because it’s tidy. But because my whole life has been built in the spaces between things: analogue and digital, art and commerce, underground culture and global platforms, fine art sensibility and real-world delivery. I’ve always been a translator, a bridge, someone who enjoys the voltage that runs between opposites.

Now we’re here.

Another shift. Another reckoning.

AI

My favourite way to work has always been inside a creative team: the electricity of it, the shared rhythm, the moment someone says something half-formed and someone else catches it.

But for a few years, it’s been mainly me, myself and AI. A studio of one, plus an inexhaustible assistant that never sleeps. Useful, yes. Sometimes brilliant. But the work changed shape.

Because AI doesn’t push back, it responds. The craft moved into the prompt: the question you ask, the frame you set, the standard you hold. You become an auditor and a curator in one breath. You learn to spot the hallucination, the confident fabrication, the answer that sounds right but isn’t.

It’s not a button you push. It’s a conversation you steer.

And when it works, when the tenth iteration finally lands because you knew what question to ask, there’s a satisfaction to it. A different kind of electricity.

But here’s what shifts: you’re the only nervous system in the room holding the standard. The only one who knows what “better” means. The only one who can tell the difference between polish and precision, between coherent and correct.

That’s where the loneliness lives, not in AI’s limits, but in being the sole keeper of intention.

Lately, something shifted again. I am working with a human team remotely, and everyone’s using their own AI, too. So there are more minds in the room now, even though we’re scattered across cities. Each person shows up with their invisible assistant already running in the background.

Ideas move faster. Drafts stack up. You can test ten directions before lunch. It’s exhilarating and strange at the same time.

Because here’s what I keep thinking about: if everyone can generate endless versions of everything, what actually matters?

The tool keeps changing. The human intention doesn’t.

And meaning still takes a human. Someone to ask the right question first. The poet in the prompt. The curator, the tastemaker. The one who looks, listens, decides what to choose and why it matters.

AI can make the thing. Only you can decide what it should mean.

Here’s what I notice: people get stuck in binaries. Either AI kills creativity, or it saves it. Either you’re pure and human, or you’ve sold out to the machine.

I think you can hold both. You can embrace the tool and keep the intention. You can collaborate with the machine and still be the one who decides what matters.

Many creatives are already collaborating with AI. And some will take this further, to make things that weren’t possible before. New art forms we don’t have names for yet.

So I keep coming back to the mixtape.

Not because I’m nostalgic, but because it reminds me what authorship actually is: a choice made in private. A small act of care that takes time on purpose.

AI can generate output in seconds. It can mimic the shape of a voice. But it can’t want anything into existence.

That part is still on us.

And one day we might look back on this era and see it more clearly than we can from inside it. Maybe we’ll call it the flattening. Perhaps we’ll call it the beginning of a new craft. Either way, I suspect the same old human truth might be sitting there, quietly unchanged:

Tools will keep changing.

But the gesture, the one that says I thought about you while making this, is still ours to keep.

— Alexandra

Humanity in Pixels. Essays on the soul within systems, and what we risk losing if we automate the human out of everything.

Reflections on design, storytelling, and human futures by Alexandra Jugović. ©

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