I've spent most of my life adopting new creative tools.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Before long there was a ZX81. Then came Alias, Photoshop, Maya, Mudbox, ZBrush and countless other pieces of software that were once considered revolutionary.
Every one of them arrived with predictions.
Some people claimed they would change everything.
Others claimed they would ruin everything.
Most did neither.
What they actually did was become tools.
Today the arguments surround AI image generation.
People ask whether it is art, whether it is cheating, whether it will replace artists, whether it should exist at all.
I don't know the future.
Nobody does.
What I do know is that I have seen this pattern before.
A new machine arrives.
Nobody quite understands it.
Arguments erupt.
Predictions multiply.
Meanwhile a small number of curious people begin experimenting.
That is where I find myself.
After two years of working with AI image systems, I no longer see them as magic. I see them as tools with strengths, weaknesses, surprises and limitations.
What continues to astonish me is not the quality of the images.
It is the speed of exploration.
An idea that might once have required days of modelling, sculpting, texturing and rendering can now be explored in minutes.
Not finished.
Explored.
That distinction matters.
The technology does not provide imagination. It provides access to imagination.
The portals, civilizations, artifacts, glitch pilgrims, strange bureaucracies and impossible worlds that emerge from my experiments were not hiding inside the software waiting to be discovered. They were already present in the interests, obsessions and questions I have been carrying for decades.
The difference is that I can now travel through those ideas at a pace that would have been unimaginable when I first switched on a Commodore 64.
That is exciting.
It is also overwhelming.
A little disconcerting.
Occasionally dangerous from a creative perspective because there are now more possibilities than any one person could ever pursue.
But above all it remains fascinating.
I don't know where any of this leads.
We're all running the experiment in real time.
What I do know is that after a lifetime of creative technology, the feeling that keeps returning is the same one I had decades ago when a new machine first appeared on my desk:
"Wow. That's cool. What happens if I press this?"
