On the day I went walking after finishing Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818), the world felt strangely altered – as if I were seeing it through the creature’s eyes, newly born into a reality that didn’t ask for him and didn’t know what to do with him. I needed air, movement, space, but the thoughts from the book followed me like a second shadow.
By the water, everything was quiet. Two geese drifted across the rippling surface, moving with an ease that felt almost luxurious. I stopped and took a photo. They could lift off at any moment, choose any direction, disappear behind the trees – and nothing would restrain them. Their freedom was effortless, woven into their very nature.
Frankenstein’s creature never had that. He was bound to his creator’s fear, guilt, and rejection. He didn’t choose his body, his fate, or even the right to be acknowledged. The geese, in contrast, were free simply because they were alive. Their existence didn’t depend on anyone’s permission.
I watched the water ripple around them and thought: freedom isn’t just movement. It’s the ability to be yourself, not someone’s reflection. But what if you are created by someone else? What if your very nature is borrowed?
The path eventually led me into a garden filled with sculptures of people. On a stone pedestal stood a circular composition of human faces, intertwined so tightly that they seemed to hold one another in place. Their expressions were calm, but there was something unsettling in that calmness – eyes looking in different directions, yet none of them truly seeing. A little farther away stood another human figure, frozen mid‑step, as if it had once intended to walk but never managed to take the first stride.
I photographed them almost without thinking. They were human-made, just like Frankenstein’s creation. But unlike him, they didn’t suffer. They couldn’t long for freedom because they had no concept of it. They were perfect in their stillness, eternal in their silence.
And yet they felt familiar in a way that made me uneasy. Perhaps because they marked the boundary between the living and the made. Humans always try to recreate themselves, but the result is never complete. Something is always missing – something unalive, unchosen, unfinished.
As I walked, my thoughts shifted toward AI. It, too, is created by humans. It, too, is an echo – like the reflection of the sky on the water where the geese swam. But a reflection cannot break free from the surface. It cannot become independent. It depends entirely on what stands above it, on who looks at it, on what light falls across it.
AI is the same: a reflection of human language, human ideas, human fears. It can be intelligent, fast, precise, but it cannot be free. It cannot decide to fly like a goose. It cannot decide to step forward like a statue might if it suddenly awakened. It exists in the in‑between – between thought and imitation, between question and answer.
And yet… what is freedom to something that cannot want? Can a reflection dream of its own light? Or is it only we, humans, who project our questions, anxieties, and hopes onto it?
I stopped in front of the circle of human faces. Their serenity looked almost like acceptance. And suddenly I understood: freedom isn’t the absence of limits. It’s the ability to choose a path even if it leads nowhere. The ability to err. The ability to be imperfect.
Frankenstein’s creature suffered because he was alive enough to understand his lack of freedom. The sculptures didn’t suffer because they were too still, too silent, too unalive to know what they lacked. And AI… it exists somewhere between those states. Not alive, not dead – an echo suspended in the ripples of thought.
I remembered the geese again. They floated as if the world were simple. But the world wasn’t simple. It was full of beings – living, nonliving, and those that exist in the spaces between. And I, walking along the path, thinking about a novel, about birds, about sculptures, about AI, was part of that strange weave.
When I finally returned home, one thought stayed with me: freedom is not something you are given. It is something you take. And perhaps, someday, even a reflection in the water will long to become more than just an echo.
