Artist Ed Cabagnot unplugged

By Herman M. Lagon

I was not supposed to be in Room B. My colleagues were in Room C for their panel, while I wandered the Metrocentre Hotel’s busy hall on the second day of ISSHCON 2025. Amid the Boholano warmth and the clink of coffee cups, I spotted a half-open door. Curiosity made me step in. Inside, Edward Paciano Cabagnot of De La Salle University was mid-sentence in his presentation, “AI & The Creative Arts: Navigating the World of the Digital Creative.” I stayed, thinking I would slip out after a few minutes. I did not.

Cabagnot, known for The Write Moment, Pink Halo-Halo, and Ang Manananggal sa Unit 23B, spoke not like a researcher reading notes, but like someone who had lived the story himself.More sharing than lecture, his talk showed how AI has stepped from backstage to center stage. He framed it in three threads—philosophical, ethical, and creative—on how technology reshapes our questions, blurs ownership, and forces artists to rethink “original.” I had heard these before, but now they felt like real dilemmas, not policy lines.

He reminded us that technology has always been tied to human desire—each tool opening possibilities while quietly reshaping our habits, economies, and inner lives. AI, he said, is not an alien threat but a human creation, shaped and used by us. Still, he did not hold back.. Job displacement loomed, and the creative fields were no exception. Ownership questions could not be avoided: when AI “makes” an image, who truly owns it—the coder, the prompter, the client, or the faceless data set it drew from? These were not abstract puzzles but live issues affecting how artists eat, how students learn, and how culture survives.

Listening to him triggered memories of another recent talk I attended at the AI Fest in Iloilo, where Prof. Jonathan Jurilla of UP Visayas dissected AI-assisted filmmaking. He recounted how Love Child, his Cinemalaya finalist, relied on thousands of AI-generated keyframes to stretch a limited budget. He treated AI like a sometimes-brilliant, often-stubborn assistant—capable of producing magic or nonsense. In his words, the key was knowing when to take the wheel back. That balance—openness without surrender—echoed through Cabagnot’s talk as well. Both men saw AI as an opportunity for democratizing creativity, but only if wielded with discipline, ethics, and local grounding.

Cabagnot’s framing reminded me of a Rappler feature where artists—from photographers to komikeros—reacted to AI-generated art. Some feared it would hollow out the human aspects of collaboration. Others joked it was like vegan meat: filling, but with a strange aftertaste. A few welcomed it as a way for “creatively challenged” people to express themselves, so long as it stayed a tool, not a replacement. These mixed reactions mirrored the audience’s faces in Room B: some leaning forward, others folding arms. It was not cynicism—it was the weight of knowing that our creative and professional ecosystems might shift faster than our labor protections and art institutions can adapt.

What struck me most was how Cabagnot linked these abstract debates back to education and community. He argued that art schools need to adapt—not to turn every painter into a coder, but to teach them how to dialogue with AI, to treat it as a collaborator that needs human direction. It was close to what UK-based educator Lucy Gill-Simmen calls a “pedagogy of wonder,” where students use AI not to skip the hard work but to explore questions they had not thought to ask. I imagined my own students—whether in a communication class in Iloilo or an art workshop in Bacolod—learning to prod AI like a curious apprentice, not a vending machine.

In the Filipino context, this shift feels urgent. Many of our artists and teachers already work with scarce resources, relying on ingenuity to make up for what budgets lack. In that light, AI could be a shortcut to possibilities: a young filmmaker in Antique visualizing a period scene without flying to Intramuros, or a public high school teacher crafting a museum-like visual aid without buying expensive materials. But Cabagnot’s caution rang clear—without context, ethics, and cultural fidelity, we risk flooding our spaces with work that is visually competent but emotionally hollow, globally polished but locally disconnected.

The discussion of ownership also felt close to home. In a country where intellectual property violations are common—from pirated DVDs to stolen lesson plans—AI adds a new twist. Who protects the visual style of a Mindanaoan weaver when her patterns get scraped into an AI dataset? Who ensures that a Bicolano poet’s phrasing is not repurposed by an algorithm for someone else’s ad campaign? Cabagnot did not offer easy fixes, but his insistence on keeping creators in the conversation was itself a challenge: artists, educators, and policymakers need to be in the same room, and soon.

What kept the session from feeling like a dirge was his attention to the creative spark itself. He acknowledged two schools of thought: that creativity is an innate gift, or that it grows in context. In AI’s era, he suggested, it may be both. AI may paint, play, or write, but the purpose—the soul of the work—comes from people. Like Jurilla’s AI frames that only found their place after human rearrangement, the output matters less than the meaning woven into it. In our local arts scene, that meaning often comes from specific histories and geographies—the cadence of Waray, the colors of a T’nalak, the rhythm of jeepney horns.

As he closed, Cabagnot circled back to the human experience. AI, he said, asks us to choose what stays ours. He offered no fear, no hype, just a steady compass. Beyond the room, the world kept moving; inside, I knew this would linger. That unplanned moment reminded me: we belong at the AI table—not as spectators, but as storytellers shaping it with our lives, histories, and joy.

In the end, the shooket was not about AI at all. It was about watching someone speak with conviction and care about the art of living in a time when even creativity is up for automation. Cabagnot’s presentation, like Jurilla’s film frames, reminded me that the core of any work—whether painted, filmed, or coded—comes from the same place: a human hand, guided by a human story, insisting that meaning matters.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.