The Seen and the Unseen: AI's Disquieting Impact

The image appeared on my screen: a humanoid figure with fractured skin, rainbow light pouring through the cracks like stained glass windows in a living cathedral. I stared, breathless, as tears welled up in my eyes. In that moment, this AI-generated image had captured something about my transgender experience that I had struggled for years to articulate in my psychoanalysis sessions—a simultaneous sense of breaking apart and becoming whole, of shattering and emergence. The fractures weren't just wounds but apertures through which something new was emerging—like a butterfly breaking through its chrysalis. This metamorphic quality of gender identity, this process of becoming, had finally found visual expression through an algorithm's interpretation of my emotional prompts.

I began experimenting with AI for creative expression during my own psychoanalytic process in 2022. In my analysis, I often drew pictures to visualize primitive, ineffable emotions. These drawings frequently carried traumatic elements, like one depicting a fetus curled inside a mother's womb that simultaneously resembled a tomb. My analyst encouraged these visual expressions, noting how they often revealed what words alone could not capture about my internal landscape.

However, my limited artistic ability often left me frustrated, unable to truly “draw out” certain internal elements—unable to capture specific feelings, atmospheres, or something vague yet profound. As an independent game developer, writer, and lifelong creator, I felt constrained by my technical limitations in fully expressing what I was experiencing in analysis. This is where AI entered the picture, offering a kind of collaborative creation that extended beyond these limitations.

As someone sensitive to technological shifts, I quickly noticed the emergence of AI art. I began inputting descriptions of my emotions to see what the AI would generate. Initially, the results were crude, even bizarre. Yet even these randomly generated ima