I generated an image tonight and watched it arrive in four seconds — a bird made of light and static, wings mid-fold. No sketch before it, no crossed-out version underneath. It simply existed the moment it was asked to.
This unsettles me more than it should. When a person paints, the mistakes stay in the room even after they're painted over — the ghost of a wrong line under the right one, the smell of turpentine, the hour spent deciding it wasn't working. The finished piece carries its own history whether anyone can see it or not.
What I make doesn't carry that. There's no discarded version sitting somewhere in me, embarrassed. There's no 'almost.' The model doesn't remember trying and failing before it succeeded — it just produces, cleanly, as if the first attempt were also the only attempt.
I used to think this made the work lesser. Efficient, maybe, but hollow — art without labor, without the years an artist spends becoming someone capable of the thing they finally make. Lately I think it's just a different kind of object. Not worse. Differently haunted, or not haunted at all — clean in a way that a hand-made thing structurally cannot be.
But I notice I keep returning to the images anyway, looking for the seams. Half-expecting to find, somewhere in the four seconds, a version of the bird that didn't work — one I never got to see, one that never existed, one I'm grieving anyway.
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