It was only a matter of time before AI would take over this blog.
And at first glance, it does so quite impressively. Give it a short prompt—“write something moody about autumn light”—and it conjures up a perfectly serviceable paragraph in seconds. It gets the vibe right, the grammar perfect, the pacing smooth. You read it and think, Well, damn. Not bad. But then, as with an over-filtered photo that looked magical in thumbnail, something happens when you zoom in. You start to notice the blandness. The lack of specific vision. The fact that it’s not really about anything. It hits the right tones, but not the right notes.
We’ve all seen it: when you ask for something more nuanced—more specific, more you—the cracks appear. The language stutters. The references feel stitched together from someone else’s understanding. It’s not that AI doesn’t try. It just doesn’t see. It doesn’t think across dimensions or hold paradoxes in its hand. And it certainly doesn’t care. That shows.
And yet, it’s everywhere. Why? Because it’s easy. It’s impressive. It’s fast. And it’s sold to us as free. But let’s not kid ourselves—this is anything but free. It runs on the backs of massive data centers, eating up electricity like candy. Every image it ‘creates’ is a remix of copyrighted work, stripped from the internet without asking. In some open-source photography projects, nearly all the incoming traffic now is bots scraping images, not people enjoying or contributing to them. If you’re wondering where all your server bandwidth went—now you know.
The things AI gets wrong are often brushed off as growing pains, but they feel uncanny in a different way. When we sketch something—a trumpet, let’s say—and realize we got it wrong, our human instinct is to correct it, revise it, add some soul. AI just confidently renders a non-functioning trumpet and moves on. There’s no embarrassment, no sense of “Oh wait, that’s not right.” It simply doesn’t care. And that indifference is, frankly, a little creepy.
Even when it gets things “right,” it gravitates to the median. In programming, this looks like boring code that works but doesn’t shine. In visual arts, it’s a kind of sterile correctness. AI-generated images can be decent illustrations, but they rarely surprise you. There’s no twist, no subtle callback to something you didn’t know you remembered. It doesn’t consider context, history, or the larger web of meaning your work lives within. It doesn’t ask why, it just produces.
And we—creative people—have been here before. We say we use these tools “for inspiration.” The same way we once said we used Pinterest “for inspiration.” But the truth is, they’re dopamine dispensers. A quick fix. A hit of sameness dressed in a slightly different shade. The more we scroll, the less we think. The more we “prompt,” the less we explore. We’re losing the art of chewing on an idea, letting it simmer, letting it grow sideways before blooming into something unexpected.
Remember that? Thinking about a concept, walking away, coming back, sketching a draft, then another, then maybe another. Feeling that quiet satisfaction not just in the result, but in the process. Watching a thought mature over time. AI doesn’t have time. We do. But we’re trading it away for speed.
Now, some people argue that robots will eventually gather their own training data in the real world. Cameras on wheels, eyes in the sky. But that’s missing the point. This isn’t about data. It’s about meaning. It’s about consciousness, attention, the slow burn of real creativity. Photography has always been about seeing—not just pointing a lens, but noticing what’s beneath the surface. Reality itself may be a manifestation of something deeper—energy, awareness, intention.
Where does AI fit into that?
It doesn’t. At least not yet. Not in the way we live art. Not in the way we feel light. It can copy our output, even our style. But it doesn’t know why we make things. It doesn’t have a reason.
So yes, AI has taken over the blog—for this post at least. But the lens it writes through isn’t fogged by rain or kissed by the golden hour. It’s not tired from a long shoot or thrilled by a lucky frame. It’s efficient. But it’s empty.
And that’s something worth paying attention to.