It’s a few weeks ago and I am being shown around Palazzo Te, a summer palace in the north of Italy. It is 34 degrees and sweat is tickling the backs of my legs, and there’s a headache like a solar flare threatening to whip my skull if I don’t inhale water like air.

My friend knows every single thing about this place, and the way he speaks, it’s like a tour guide is showing me around inside a dream. He tells me about the ruling Gonzaga family of Mantua and how, at the beginning of the 16th Century, their 10 year old son Federico was traded in a political deal with Rome. Sent there as a hostage, that kid grew up in the Vatican during the Renaissance. A teenager forged at the centre of the avant-garde. When he was finally free to return north, brain hot with art and, later, syphilis, he commissioned this palace. A team of artists, including Guilio Romano, painted the interior over the course of ten years.

The first trick happens as soon as we arrive. This friend is pointing out every Greek god and technique, and he’s reading me the story of each fresco like he can see full sentences over the imagery in invisible ink. He makes this off-hand comment about how the marble border between the frescoes obviously isn’t marble and I have to double-take. Oh yeah. Somebody only painted the walls to look like marble. Like the illusion of the sky bursting through the ceiling, it is trompe-l’oeil, that trick of the eye. I can’t believe I didn’t notice, and it’s the kind of trick that makes me laugh. Like a temporary tattoo, just something light.

The second trick happens a few rooms down. My friend hasn’t warned me what I’m walking into and I’m glad he doesn’t say anything because it becomes one of my all-time favourite moments with art (as stupid as this is about to sound). We walk into a massive hall and for a split second I think there are real horses in there waiting for me. For at least some of that second, I probably do think the horses are alive. Then I believe they are taxidermy, six life-size horses installed up high bordering the room and stationed about some of the doors.

When I realise it’s the marble all over again — that these solid horses that seem to have actual weight — that these completely flat, painted horses I’m hallucinating are not really there, nor are the columns behind them, even though they are casting shadows across the divots — I can’t decide if it’s the heat or the skill of these Renaissance painters or if it’s simply my own naivety. Because even when I know they’re flat paintings, it’s not as though the illusion suddenly ends. The horse barely becomes a painting. I live inside the trick.

So then I get home from Italy and I’ve caught something while travelling so I am stuck on the couch for a week. A sharp, tickly cough keeps me up all night and my voice comes from the far end of a dark corridor. One night, I am scrolling on Bluesky when I see this video of a girl with a cat. It’s filmed on a doorbell, and she’s asking to be let in the house because look what she’s found! But the thing is, it’s not a normal cat.

The kid is heaving a beast. It’s a wild cat almost as big as she is, kid-hands disappearing into spotted fur. A voice pleads through the doorbell telling her to drop it right now! It’s not safe! Tall ears, huge paws. It’s a wonder this thing let itself be picked up by her in the first place. Then again, its face looks sort of resigned to its new fate, and I think she must be an animal whisperer to have tamed it.

I watch the video a second time. I live with two cats and I have to remind myself they don’t control me. I vaguely wish to be this small American girl dominant enough to carry a bob cat like a tote bag. But when I read below, I find that every reply is telling this random cat account on Bluesky to delete the post because it’s obviously AI. They point out all the ways they can tell. They implore the account to look at how many times the number of spots on the cat’s fur shifts around.

And it’s like, fuck, I hadn’t been counting spots. I hadn’t even thought to check. The cough gets so bad my tongue starts to feel like it has been cut. I’m already in a mood and now I’m just pissed off. This is the first time AI content has tricked, or at least the first I know of.

I’m not sure how I can be so full of wonder after a few paint tricks and yet feel nothing remotely positive when it comes to this kind of AI-generated content. I know one is art and the other content but it’s all illusionism, isn’t it? Magic tricks to make us believe we’re seeing something that isn’t really there. And that’s impressive, powerful. Illusionism controls and creates reality, which is useful for both the attention-seeking person with no artistic skill who craves a few likes on the Internet; as well as for the Duke who wants to wow noble guests with the ‘marble’ decorating his palace.

But the way I could linger in that magical in-between with the horses, accepting the trick and still continuing to see them, all muscle, coming out of the walls, that just didn’t happen with the cat video. The girl instantly died in my mind. The cat and all its moving spots became flat plastic. I wonder if that’s because the painting is so earned. Those years it took compared to the seconds it would have taken to type an AI prompt charges the painting with staying power. It feels a bit like, go on then. You can have me on if making the illusion has aged you.

And I see how generative technology can free us from work, but art isn’t work, art is already free, and I don’t want some code to enjoy that freedom for me, or for you if you make stuff — you know, that feeling of having an idea, wrestling it, materialising it, wrestling with it again, starting a relationship with this thing, and loving it. There’s an anger over that cat video that is probably fear, because so much of what I love about art is illusionistic but for fuck’s sake: I don’t want to have to become so suspicious of whether or not something is real that I close myself off from the marvel that can come from being tricked.

I don’t even see a way around it. It’s fucking everywhere. AI is the music in cafes. It’s the tacky veneer over the advert banners in my periphery. It’s the cadence of your boring Instagram caption. I think, oh, I’ll jib the screens and read books but it’s fucking Granta prizewinners. Ghibli profile pictures. The university essays my friends have been marking. The fake, personalised Spotify DJ my cousin plays for me in a carpark. It’s Gmail asking if it can please, please, please pretend to be me in these mirror-world suggested replies.

A floor of mouse-traps we are all going to have to walk across. I only want content made before 2023. I only want art made in the 1500s. I want to cool off in the ballroom full of horses. I want to listen to my friend point out that all of the stucco braided across the walls isn’t even stucco. Someone had to paint that. Every curve, every highlight, every shadow.

if you’re here at the end of the text please comment a horse 🐎 emoji on our instagram so I know you were here

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this would have made such a good art date

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support weekly writing here except brb while we take a 2 week break because it is both mine and zarina’s birthday! ciao!