The Straits Times · Jun 13, 2026
Megan Wee · The Straits Times
The Straits Times featured me in a piece this week on what the rise of GenAI means for Singapore’s creative arts industry, with a section on my practice and how I use AI in my work. The piece spans a real range of voices, from artists who have turned down job offers over it to those finding it genuinely useful, and I think that range is an honest picture of where things are.
It prompted me to write down where I actually stand. I use AI to talk about AI. Whether you believe it is good or bad, it is likely going to be one of the most transformative forces of our lifetimes and I cannot just ignore that. My role as an artist is to observe the world and have opinions about it through my work, and this is the world. I do think we are past the point of going back to life without AI, especially with how geopolitical it has become. And if that is the case, ignoring it will not make it go away.
But I also think there is a difference between being angry that a technology exists and being angry at how it is used. One is being angry at the sky and one is a conversation worth having. That conversation is about what responsible use looks like, and what standards we hold ourselves and these companies to.
If artists judged tools by purity, there would be no tools we could use. The question is not whether to engage, but to engage in ways that help us understand what to look out for, how these tools actually work, and how to push for better standards around them. And whatever we learn from those explorations, for good and bad, to treat as material we can actually do something with, not just things to accept.
For what it is worth, the balance that makes sense to me is going in both directions at once. Use it for what it is genuinely good at. The tedious, the repeatable, the information gathering that used to eat hours, and the things that were not possible to do on your own before, like prototyping and building out ideas to see if they work. And at the same time, go further into what makes us human. Friendships, falling in love, the actual pleasure of making something, the wandering that comes from being curious about something for no particular reason.
