The Gift of the Mirror
AI has done something unexpected: it has shown us, with startling clarity, what actually matters about art making.
Just as photography once forced painting to confront its true strengths (painters could no longer compete on mere documentation and had to dig deeper into expression, composition, and meaning) AI is doing the same thing now, but more radically.
The machines can simulate surfaces brilliantly. They can remix styles, generate compositions, and produce technically impressive images. What they cannot do, what they will never be able to do, is become something through the making.
And that's the heart of it.
The Transformation That Matters
When you spend hundreds of hours learning to draw the figure, your brain rewires. Your capacity to see changes. You begin to perceive rhythms, weights, tensions that were invisible before. The discipline doesn't just produce drawings: it transforms the one doing the drawing.
This is what I call embodiment: the process by which a skill merges with the self. The technique hybridizes with the psyche. You don't just know anatomy in an abstract way - it becomes part of your perceptual apparatus, stored in your hands, your eyes, your intuitive sense of form.
Using AI to generate an image skips all of this. It produces output without experience. It has no body to remember with, no struggles that shape its vision, no midnight hours of doubt that deepen its empathy. Which means you, as an individual miss out on becoming something new by your blood, sweat and tears. You miss out on being part of the community of people who can instantly recognise someone who knows how to draw, who gets it.
And audiences too can sense this to some extent. We are drawn to work that carries the weight of genuine human experience: the evidence of someone having wrestled with form, with meaning, with their own limitations and breakthroughs. I suspect that going forward this sense will become more important than ever as the artificial pervades the world. We will want more than ever the imperfect excellence achieved by a human above standard-issue artificial perfection.
