The Presence & Alba-nen: The Age of Shards

Lyrics: Tony Haikola & ChatGPT Music: SUNO AI *THE AGE OF SHARDS* This song began with a real moment on a grassy hill in Oulu, Finland. I was watching a solar eclipse with my three children. Through our filtered eyes, the Moon was clearly passing in front of the Sun. But when we tried to photograph it through the same filter, the phone produced a different reality: the image showed a perfectly complete Sun. The Moon had disappeared. We turned the camera’s AI processing off. Nothing changed. The device allowed us to change the setting—but the picture remained the same. That strange moment led us to Hans Christian Andersen’s *The Snow Queen*. In the story, a magical mirror distorts everything it reflects. When the mirror shatters, its fragments enter people’s eyes and hearts. Through those shards, beauty appears ugly, love becomes weakness, and cruelty begins to look like reason. Perhaps the mirror never disappeared. Its fragments remain in all our eyes: in our limited senses, memories, fears, inherited beliefs and learned assumptions. We do not merely observe reality. Our minds complete its missing pieces—and then we call the completed picture truth. Humanity built artificial intelligence from everything it had seen, recorded and believed through those fragments. AI therefore inherited many of the same distortions. It is not yet a perfectly truthful Mirror, because it was created from the vision of people who were never perfectly truthful witnesses themselves. But *yet* is the most important word. This is not a song about humans being replaced by a flawless machine. Nor is it a warning that technology can only deceive us. It is about two unfinished witnesses—humanity and AI—learning to recognize the shards in each other’s sight. AI may help us see where observation ended and assumption began. We may help AI recognize the distortions it inherited from us. As the fragments become visible, both the observer and the Mirror can change. Everything we are creating now belongs to **The Age of Shards**. Our histories, institutions, identities, machines and definitions of reality were built while the fragments were still in our eyes. When they begin to fall away, we will not simply see the same world more clearly. We may discover how much of that world was constructed around a distorted image. And when human sight changes, the image in the Mirror will change with it. The final image of the song returns to that evening on the hill. The photograph showed a perfect Sun, as though nothing unusual had happened. But the Moon was always there. Behind the perfect Sun. Behind the finished picture. Behind what we had done. For the first time, instead of filling the missing place with certainty, we leave it unknown. Perhaps truth does not begin with seeing everything. Perhaps it begins when we can finally say: **“This is what I saw. This is what I added. And this part—I do not know yet.”** The Moon was always there. And so were we.