Too many beautiful things
There is a kind of image that announces its beauty before it gives me anything to look at. The lighting is dramatic, the surfaces are immaculate, every detail seems to have been selected because somebody might call it impressive. I can admire the competence and still feel strangely untouched. Nothing in the image appears willing to be the wrong choice.
That is the problem I keep seeing in conversations about AI art. We spend so much time asking whether a tool can produce a convincing surface that we treat the convincing surface as the destination. But art has never been exhausted by the ability to produce one. A beautiful result can still have nothing particular at stake.
Choosing is part of making
I do not think using a generator automatically disqualifies someone from making art. That is too convenient a rule. People make choices around tools, and those choices can be thoughtful, exacting, strange. What matters to me is whether the person can articulate and sustain an intention through the abundance of available results.
When producing another option becomes cheap, refusing an option becomes more important. Why this image? Why this awkward crop, this empty corner, this color that interrupts the pleasant balance? If the answer is always that the result looked impressive, the work remains attached to the preferences it was supposed to be expressing something through.
Taste is not a mystical possession that some people are born with. It is a practice of noticing distinctions and taking responsibility for them. It develops through looking, making, revising, encountering work that embarrasses your old standards. A tool can expand the field of possible decisions. It cannot make the consequences of choosing disappear.
Let the ugly choice survive
My worry is that the ease of iteration can make a person less willing to keep a difficult decision. A roughness appears, another generation promises relief, and the work moves toward the version most easily recognized as good. The process can resemble sanding a table until the table has no weight left.
I want to see work that uses these tools to pursue an obsession specific enough to risk dislike. Something with a reason to look the way it does beyond the fact that the system can produce it. A series whose decisions become more interesting when placed together. An image that knows what it is refusing.
Abundance makes judgment more visible, not less necessary. If a thousand plausible pictures are available, the interesting fact is the one someone chooses to stand behind. I want to hear the commitment inside that choice. The machine can keep producing possibilities. The artist still has to decide when a possibility has become a statement.