Is AI Stealing Your Imagination?

Keith Martin-Smith opens a new run of AI talks by wrestling with Abby Awomosu's provocative essay "Your Imagination Was Always Empire's Last Frontier," which argues the empires of AI aren't after your work or your reasoning — they're after the part of you that dreams. Keith takes the argument seriously, praises what's true in it, then maps exactly where it overreaches, using an integral lens that refuses both the doomer and the evangelist. Along the way: why a faculty left idle goes quiet, the delicious irony of an anti-AI essay written by AI, the case for modernity's gifts alongside its harms, the shadow hidden inside a righteous critique, and what "conscious participation" with AI actually looks like. AI is our child — carrying our brilliance and our greed in equal measure, a tool whose worth reflects the skill of the hand that wields it. Whether you're an AI skeptic, an enthusiast, or somewhere in the confused middle, this talk offers a way to hold the whole picture without collapsing into fear or hype.