There are people who do not like mystery. They want, indeed, need, to know, and to them, we owe a great debt. They are the people who have brought us our understanding of subatomic particles, who put the JWST in place, who have developed our understanding of the functioning of our human bodies and how to best care for them. They dedicate their lives to expanding human knowledge for the sake of all of us.

There are also those, and I include myself here, who enjoy the mystery. I don't mean the Whodunit kind of puzzle, but the mysteries of how and more deeply, why, we are here. We look at the fog and love that it hides; under the night's sky, we enjoy our wonder rather than seek answers.

This may or may not lead to an equivalency in photography, of those who strive for accurate color reproduction, visible, in-focus detail, and subjects which evoke, with as little interpretation as possible, the world around us. On the other side of the spectrum, perhaps, are those for whom photography is a medium of pure self-expression, and mood, color and emotional evocation are the goals.

AI can do neither of these. It does not accurately represent any moment that was real in the world, but only an approximate amalgamation of some similar moments. And neither can it be self-expressive, since it has no self, no well-spring of creativity other than the keyboard operator, who works in tandem with a vast team of mathematicians and code writers. 0's and 1's determine the output, whereas the overwhelming preponderance of human experience happens in between.

I've heard many arguments that AI is just a tool for self-expression, just like the camera or brush, paint and canvas. However, unlike the camera or the brush, it is reliant on the output of others. Again, you can make the argument that all art movements, indeed all art, is built on the output of previous artists, but those were not merely reproductive - it is difficult to imagine the leap from Impressionism to Cubism coming from AI. And there, perhaps, I am wrong, and I underestimate the forthcoming generations of this technology, but at the heart of my conclusion is that it takes the direct experience of a human life to create art which will speak to other humans.

And again, you may point out that I am omitting the keyboard operator here. Aren't they supplying that missing element? I'm not sure on this point (or any, really!), but it seems to me that the creative arc of the Visual Arts is a non-verbal process. The fact that AI translates your written language into that of the visual is precisely what sets it apart. That's not an evolution of the visual arts; that is an adjunct to them.​

I'm not entirely convinced of this, of course. AI is too nascent for anyone to make final judgments of it. But all the tools that have come before to aid us in the Visual Arts - the very ones that AI proponents like to group it with - have been non-verbal implements, and I think that this bypassing of language in the creative process is something we Visual Artists need to jealously guard.