Seeing something

I didn't buy it. Any of it. For years I watched the AI hype cycle with the same skepticism I had for crypto and NFTs. Another gold rush where the real product was the marketing. Companies slapping "AI-powered" on their landing pages the way they once slapped "blockchain" on everything. I'd seen this movie before.

Then July 3rd, 2022 happened. Just me sitting at my computer, trying DALL-E for the first time. I typed "An oil painting of a campfire on the beach." A few seconds later, an image appeared. Something that had never existed before, generated from a single sentence.

I typed another prompt. And another. An NBA basketball game in the style of Hokusai. A time travel machine in a warehouse. An abstract watercolor of true love. Each one came back strange and imperfect and somehow right. I kept going. I couldn't stop.

I'd built NLP tools. I considered myself technical. I understood, at least in broad strokes, what was happening under the hood. But understanding the mechanics didn't blunt the feeling. A one-sentence prompt producing a passable image (not gallery-worthy, but passable) felt like watching someone pull a rabbit from a hat while you're holding the instruction manual and still can't explain the trick.

I printed six of them. Arranged them in a grid with the prompts underneath. Had them framed. Hung the frame in my office.

People sometimes ask why. It's not because the images are beautiful. A few are decent. But most of them are mediocre or worse by any real artistic standard.

I framed them because of what they represent to me. A line. A before and after. The moment I went from thinking AI was mostly theater to realizing something had actually shifted underneath all the noise.

We've grown accustomed to AI now. Image generation is a feature, not a miracle. But in that moment, sitting alone, watching an algorithm turn my words into pictures I'd never imagined, I knew I was seeing something.