Avery Lake: Before AI, the Alphabet Stole My Thoughts

Avery Lake, Alphabet Generated: A Disclosure, 2026. Digital artwork, unique 1/1 Patron Edition. Now in the patron collection of polardots.studio. Collected on Networked. Courtesy of the artist and collector.

Alphabet generated

ALPHABET GENERATED. The phrase appears as a disclosure label, plain enough to pass unnoticed. We have learned to look for such labels when an image, voice, or sentence might have been made with artificial intelligence. The label interrupts the illusion of seamlessness. It asks us to remember that a medium is present.

But why disclose the machine and not the alphabet? Why identify the newest technology while the older one remains invisible? The alphabet is so thoroughly inside our habits of thought that it no longer presents itself as an interface. It feels like thought itself.

I made Alphabet Generated: A Disclosure by reversing the familiar label. The unique 1/1 Patron Edition now belongs to polardots.studio, the team behind The AI Art Magazine. Their decision to acquire it matters: the work has already entered the editorial context it now interrogates. A magazine is made from letters, yet it is also a place where letters can become strange enough to be seen again.

The work does not accuse the alphabet of deception. It asks what happens when a technology succeeds so completely that we stop noticing it. AI is arriving with arguments about authorship, cognition, memory, originality, and agency. These questions may seem new. Many of them are old questions, resurfacing through a medium that now answers back.

The water we stopped seeing

Writing changed the conditions of memory. Breath became mark. Speech could outlive the body that produced it. A thought could travel without its speaker, be stored, copied, compared, and arranged in a line. These capacities opened extraordinary forms of knowledge, law, art, science, and collective memory. They also trained perception toward what could be fixed, separated, and made sequential.

In When the Alphabet Becomes Strange: Socrates, his face assembles from binary and Greek letters, then collapses back into the eight letters of his name. The work makes material an old warning. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing will not strengthen memory but produce reliance on external signs. Written words appear intelligent, he says, but cannot answer when questioned. Socrates wrote nothing, yet we remember his suspicion because Plato wrote it down. The critique survives through the technology it critiques.

The alphabet did not invent abstraction, and thought outside writing is not a state of purity. Every medium selects. Every form reveals something and conceals something else. My claim is more personal and phenomenological: after a lifetime of literacy, I cannot easily tell where language ends and I begin.

In When the Alphabet Becomes Strange: Apple, a red apple passes through binary, letters, and phonetics before the symbols collapse. Before the word arrives, there is colour, weight, sweetness, resistance against the teeth, the smell released when the skin breaks, and perhaps a memory of another apple in another place. Then five marks arrive: A P P L E. The marks are useful. They let us share and archive the experience. Yet the word also gathers the event into a portable category. Much of its living excess disappears.

This is the water we stopped seeing. Literacy is not simply a tool held in the hand. It is an environment in which the literate mind learns to move. Walter J. Ong described writing as a technology that restructures consciousness. Marshall McLuhan insisted that media shape the scale and form of human association. Both propositions become newly visible when a language machine begins to complete our sentences.

When the alphabet began to answer

A large language model receives language as tokens and predicts probable continuations. Its output can feel conversational because the statistical structure of written language has been made responsive. The alphabet, once mute on the page, appears to speak. We ask, and it produces an answer in the same symbolic medium through which the question was formed.

A familiar phrase pulls its next word behind it. A genre supplies its expected rhythm. A sentence suggests which thought may count as coherent enough to follow. AI intensifies this inherited tendency and returns it to us at speed. What had been an internalized pressure of language becomes visible as autocomplete.

The Alphabet That Answers explores this threshold through nine historical figures: Socrates and voice, Jesus and dust, Paul and ink, Luther and print, Ada Lovelace and code, Alan Turing and machine, Marshall McLuhan and mirror, a self-portrait with the answering alphabet, and Laozi with silence. Each figure marks a shift in the relation between thought and its medium.

The work is not a timeline of progress. It is a sequence of dependencies. The spoken word depends on a body. The written word can leave the body behind. Print multiplies that separation. Code makes instructions executable. AI turns the archive of written language into a system that can answer. The orphaned text answers, but it answers without a body.

This is what makes AI both compelling and unsettling. It speaks in the material of thought as we have learned to recognize it. It can mirror fluency without breath, biography, hunger, mortality, or a place from which the words are spoken. It reveals how easily coherence can be mistaken for presence.

I cannot think without it

Dependence is the subject of The Alphabet Stole My Thoughts. The sentence appears as an eye chart: THE ALPHABET STOLE MY THOUGHTS AND NOW I CANNOT THINK WITHOUT IT. Each line becomes smaller and fainter until the final word nearly vanishes.

The work can be read as a confession, an accusation, or a joke that turns serious. To read it, the viewer leans closer, narrows the eyes, and becomes aware of the act of seeing. At exactly the moment language leaves the work, the body enters.

The sentence admits that the theft cannot simply be reversed. I am writing this critique with the thing I am critiquing. The alphabet gives form to my practice, lets this text reach you, and makes an archive possible. Its gift and its cost are entangled.

AI adds another layer of dependence. It can externalize not only memory but formulation. It can propose the sentence before uncertainty has had time to become sensation, image, hesitation, or thought. The risk is not merely that a machine will think for us. It is that we will accept the machine's fluency as the shape thought was always supposed to take.

Still, dependence is not destiny. A medium can shape attention without fully determining it. The remaining freedom may begin with noticing: where did this sentence come from, what did it exclude, and what was present before it arrived?

Avery Lake, The Alphabet Stole My Thoughts, 2026. Typographic digital artwork, unique 1/1. Available to mint on request through Avery Lake's Networked artist profile. Contact the artist.

What remains outside capture

My practice does not search for a pure outside of technology. There may be no uncontaminated place to return to. The Capture gathers this wider field around a simple claim: every medium is a capture technology. Digital capture is not the only capture. Analogue media also select, frame, preserve, and exclude. The question is whether a medium hides that operation or makes it visible.

In Answering Circles, the phrase AI-FREE becomes ALPHABET-FREE. The line collapses into circles, pigment, light, and movement. The work is made with digital tools, but it refuses the demand that digital experience must become language. The circles do not explain themselves. They invite a different kind of attention.

I, Uncaptured takes the refusal further. The work remains sealed in a black vault, has no official image or digital surrogate, and can be encountered only in person under a no-capture protocol. The vault still frames the encounter and controls access. It does so to expose capture rather than conceal it. The visitor leaves without a file. What remains is embodied memory, presence, and the here and now.

Pneuma: The Gift of Breath extends this movement into installation. Seven masks face the viewer. Breath, which is usually invisible, becomes the central medium. The screen and the sentence are set down. What remains is not an argument about being human but an embodied encounter with breathing.

AI can model language about breath. It can describe presence, imitate confession, and predict the next words in a meditation. It does not breathe. This distinction is not a claim that biology guarantees wisdom or authenticity. Humans can speak without presence too. It is a reminder that representation is not the event it represents.

For me, the human signal is found in breath, presence, embodiment, relation, and the here and now. These are not romantic escapes from media. They are practices of returning to what the medium cannot fully carry. A word can point toward the body. It cannot be the body.

Perhaps this is one gift of AI. By exaggerating the alphabet's power, it makes the alphabet visible. By producing language without lived presence, it sharpens our awareness of presence. The new medium becomes a mirror for the old one, and both can be held at a slight distance.

The task is not to destroy the alphabet or refuse AI. It is to stop confusing either one with the whole of thought. We can use symbols while remembering their edges. We can receive an answer without surrendering the silence from which a different response might arise.

Before the prompt, before the letter, before the answer, we breathe. The medium changes. The human signal remains.

References and further reading

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Plato, Phaedrus, page 275

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Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

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Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Avery Lake, Substack Archive

Substack

Works

Avery Lake, Alphabet Generated: A Disclosure

networked.art

Avery Lake, When the Alphabet Becomes Strange: Socrates

Moving image studies

Avery Lake, When the Alphabet Becomes Strange: Apple

Moving image studies

Avery Lake, The Capture

capture.avery

Avery Lake, I, Uncaptured

uncaptured.avery

Avery Lake, The Alphabet That Answers

alphabet.avery

Avery Lake, The Alphabet Stole My Thoughts

stolen.avery

Avery Lake, Answering Circles

netwoked.art

Avery Lake, Pneuma: The Gift of Breath

pneuma.avery

About the artist

Patrick Tresset

Avery Lake is a Swiss-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and ethicist working across sculpture, installation, digital media, and participatory formats. Based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Stó:lō, Lake examines what it means to be human amid technological transformation. A background in theology, bioethics, and philosophy, together with more than a decade of research into human enhancement and AI ethics, grounds a practice searching for the human signal: breath, presence, and lived experience beyond machine logic.

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