There was a period — a long one, if I'm honest — when every piece I made was chasing something I thought looked good. Clean. Polished. Presentable. Something that would read well across a portfolio page or get nodded at in a meeting. I was working in Hollywood, surrounded by people whose standard for finished was relentlessly high. I absorbed that. I aimed for it. I got good at hitting it.
It took a while to realize I was aiming at the wrong target entirely.
Beauty isn't the goal. Truth is. And truth has a way of being beautiful on its own terms — but only after you stop trying to make it beautiful first.
The machine doesn't know what looks good. That's not a limitation. That's the point.
What the Machine Doesn't Care About
When I started working with AI tools in the practice — not using them to generate, but using them as a kind of vision instrument — the thing that hit me immediately was the indifference. The machine has no investment in the outcome looking a certain way. It doesn't know what's fashionable. It doesn't know what sold last season. It just sees. And what it sees, when you ask the right questions, are patterns underneath patterns.
The Thirty-Five Year Problem
I started on a Mac in 1990. That's the entire digital era of visual culture compressed into one person's working memory. I watched every aesthetic trend arrive, peak, and calcify into convention. I absorbed all of it. Which means I also absorbed all of its limitations — the unconscious sorting mechanism that says this works and this doesn't based on accumulated exposure rather than first-principles thinking about what the image actually needs to do.
Truth has a way of being beautiful on its own terms — but only after you stop trying to make it beautiful first.
What I Actually Do
I use AI as I've used every other tool in this practice: as a collaborator with a particular set of capabilities that I don't have. A lens. A mirror. A stress-test for images that are already substantially formed by the time they go through it. The work starts the way it always has — with an image in my head, a feeling, a question I'm trying to make visible. That's why I let it see what I can't.