No maps for these territories

I keep returning to the impulse to automate using AI. I feel it even when I’m doing something I enjoy. Some part of me is already wondering which bit I could hand over, and what I’d do with the little piece of afternoon I got back.

But I’m realising there’s a break between mechanising a task and giving a machine a goal. With a farming machine, you can point to the work you’re taking out of human hands and say what for. More food, fewer hours in the field. With an AI agent, you describe where you want to end up and leave some of the route open. You have to find a new way of talking, both to the machine and to the people working with it. What counts as done? What can it decide? When should it come back and ask?

Then I get to art and wonder what I wanted the afternoon back for. Part of what I take in when I stand in front of a painting is the time in it. The years it took to learn what to do with a brush. The afternoon spent mixing a colour that covers half an inch of canvas. Photography is an odd case. The picture happens in a fraction of a second, but the time is there in knowing where to stand, when to wait, and sometimes in the hours spent with the image afterwards.

With AI, I could spend that afternoon making dozens of versions of something I might otherwise have made once or twice. That feels like a real gain. I can change one thing at a time, put the versions next to each other, and see what I was missing. Sometimes the first one turns out to be better. I can only see why after making the others.

I’ve probably always been impatient in one particular way. I want something rough in front of me as soon as possible. Once it’s there, I’ll spend an absurd amount of time going back over it, sometimes painfully, sometimes quite happily. That’s where my patience seems to live.

I can stumble into an image I love in minutes. Knowing how to make that accident part of a style, or carry an idea through a body of work, takes a different kind of time. I can be pleased with an image that leaves someone else cold. They can love the one I nearly threw away. When we both want to spend a little longer with it, I think there’s something worth keeping, or at least sharing.

Most of what I see AI models making in the name of art right now could fairly be called slop. Most of what comes out of my own efforts could, too. Sometimes I’m amazed by how quickly a model makes an image and feel almost nothing about the image itself. I understand the people who see that and dismiss the whole medium. I think both reactions are early. We’ve had so little time to see how artists and their tools might change each other, or what kind of work that could make possible.