The other day I saw a time-lapse video in which four Tibetan Buddhist monks created a 5′ x 5′ sand mandala.

The video lasted only 1 minute, but the whole project took 5 days of 8–10 hours of work each day; roughly 50 hours to complete. In the end, they perform their traditional ritual and destroy it. But that is not what this piece is about.

For the audience, all that remained was the memory of having watched the work being completed and the final piece itself.

For those who worked on it, what remains is the memory of the coordinated effort over long days; and, of course, the lifelong satisfaction of having created such a work of art (even if it lasted only a short time in its completed form).

So, what do we see? Those of us on the other side of the screen.

A digital photo of the finished work.

Anyone who doesn’t know its process or history will never be able to grasp the effort and dedication it took to create the final product. They’ll just see an image with a pattern of colors on a screen (the length of time you spend thinking about it while scrolling: 1–2 seconds).

Barely two minutes later, while I was wasting my time on social media, more mandala designs started popping up in my feed (thanks, Mark Zuckerberg, for the invasive algorithm).

The tragic thing about this is that the designs weren’t even photographs of actual artwork—they were images generated by artificial intelligence.

The work of four extremely talented geniuses, who labored with patience and meticulous care for 50 hours, was reduced to a 1-minute video summarizing the feat, and a digital photograph that captured, with a timestamp, the moment before and after it ceased to exist.

It’s still valid and valuable within what we consider art. No material was stolen or appropriated. The effort was documented for the sake of appreciating it. The beauty was captured in memory, photography, and on a digital screen. Its use was entirely ethical and justifiable.

Now comes THE main problem: the images being spread by the all-powerful algorithm and displayed (or rather, forced) onto our screens are created by artificial intelligence to gradually replace the original photo—which is just one image, yet represents 50 hours of work by several people.

This is just one personal example I’ve observed of how we continue to widen the gap between what is real, tangible, human… and what is created as digital content to be consumed instantly, without collective memory, documented history, or further studies.

In the near future, we run the risk of losing the tradition and ritual of creation (from works of art to culinary recipes).

Little by little, the memory of what began as an idea within the human mind—and which we had the ability to turn into reality—will fade away.

In the end, that idea, which was ultimately captured in a sand painting, documented in photo and video, and then destroyed in our physical realm, will be replaced by a copied image generated in microseconds thanks to the (illegal) collection and appropriation of digital content that will never stop cannibalizing itself and will continue to regenerate with recycled creations from the very same collection and appropriation that was once the source content and has since ceased to exist.

The idea that once was is now a copy of a copy of a copy… Devised and conceived by a complex digital code that feels nothing, exerts no effort, and creates nothing.

It merely recycles and redefines until it replaces what we have already forgotten.