Rats.

I have spent half of the last week in my shed, learning the dying art of taxidermy. It’s a complicated process, a somewhat disgusting one, but one that has been endlessly fascinating and in truth – quite easy to pick up.

Once you get past the squeamishness associated with the nature of the task at hand -namely the skinning and partial dismemberment of a rat’s corpse, followed by a reconstruction from the inside out- it’s really quite a simple and satisfying activity.
I have spent the first half of the last week in my shed, not looking at LinkedIn.

This is of course a lie. Even when engrossed in the process of delicately cutting around the inside of a rat’s eyelids it’s impossible not to perform one’s little routines on the small screen.

Death has been very much top of the agenda recently. Both literally for me, sat in the shed with the aforementioned rat corpses, but also across the feeds of LinkedIn, Meta and X: The Everything App. 

It’s because the people of the Internet have spent the first half of the last week making stuff look like other stuff. And so, the great lumbering juggernaut of the Generative AI debate continues to ravage every corner of every platform. Everything is dying.

Everything is dead.

‘Slippage’ occurs in taxidermy when bacteria starts to break down the skin layer, leading to bald patches and holes. The epidermis essentially eats itself, and this leads to an aesthetic that can appear unpleasant. It ruins the weird faux-reality we have worked hard to construct.

Aside from trophy displays, most taxidermy falls into two kinds of executions, and it shares these two methods with Generative AI. 

The first is an attempt at realism. The notion that by stuffing and then arranging the animal into a natural pose and realistic environment, we can recreate the glory of its life. Behind the glass of museums the otters and the gazelles appear as they do in the wild. The cat you’ve had since you were little sits on its favourite cushion in the house. In death, they are three-dimensional snapshots of life.

The second execution is more fantastical. It’s about the anthropomorphisation of creatures; the human poses, the outfits, the characters. What if I gave a rat a top hat and a dandy little coat? What if I gave it a little tennis racquet and some sneakers? What if it was Steampunk? (there’s always a Steampunk one).

The material eats itself, and with every new visualisation the potential of the platforms becomes diminished, and we become distracted by the stuff we don’t want to look at.

The debate is certainly not new, but it’s been re-ignited by the launch of the new Chat GPT capabilities and the realisation that you can now ‘Studio Ghibli-fy’ stuff. And so we get an action replay from previous MidJourney versions, except instead of Wes Anderson it’s become:

What if the cast of Severance was Studio Ghibli? What if I was Studio Ghibli? What if Donald Trump was Studio Ghibli? What if The Lord of The Rings was Studio Ghibli? What if that guy who said he hates AI is now ironically Studio Ghibli?

There’s an old wives tale about London that warns that you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat. In 2025 we seem to never be more than 6 minutes away from a mischief of incredibly lukewarm takes regarding “those darn robots”.

The AI ‘slippage’ is undoubtedly caused by the unimaginative self-obsessed hoards, but the damage is certainly enhanced by the relentless pearl clutching.

Is art really being killed? If true, would that make Gen AI a homicidal art-form?

But its not really being killed is it. Not properly. It just sucks right now because some of the most annoying people on Earth are making a terrible bedlam about it.

Unlike its murderous digital counterpart, The ‘Rat GPT’ I’ve been using in my shed doesn’t really have any of the baggage surrounding it. There’s not really an environmental impact as such, the rats were sourced from a pet shop freezer, having been grown for the purposes of feeding snakes (they were euthanized with painless gas). Still, people that I talk to about taxidermy wince and groan when I describe how the rat’s hands move when I place the wires inside the stripped tendons.

But in spite of their disgust, taxidermy has taught me a lot about creativity and craft.

The melding of science and art. The willingness to face the grotesque and the discomfort in order to reach the artistic outcome that you desire. The fact that ear buds are perfect implements for removing brain matter. And most importantly, that just because something is pronounced dead, looks dead, has all the hallmarks of something that is dead, with a little determination you can fashion it into a parody of Matt Damon.

I’ve spent the better part of a week in my shed, learning the ins and outs of an art-form made famous by the Victorians. 

During the Great Exhibition of 1851 at The Crystal Palace in South London, some of the greatest minds of the age declared that there was nothing left to create. 

History has not been kind to that opinion, and yet here we are in 2025 once again bearing witness to pronouncements regarding the death of creativity and invention. This time its at the hands of an AI-powered death squad.  

“Slippage” happens. It’s not the end of the world.