There's a scene in Detroit: Become Human that I keep coming back to lately…
Markus, an android, is asked by Carl, an aging artist, to paint something while they're together in Carl's studio. Markus was able to produce a technically perfect still life. Every proportion is accurate, every detail is in the right place, and it was a flawless replication of what happened to be sitting in front of him.
Carl isn't impressed with the replication though… he tells Markus that painting isn't about replicating the world around him, it's about finding a feeling and interpreting it. Essentially, Carl wanted to see if Markus was capable of painting something only he could feel… so he asks Markus to close his eyes and paint from the heart. Through the exercise, Markus finds a way to create something completely different. It turned into a piece that had emotion, depth, identity, and a point of view that no amount of technical accuracy could have produced.
The game came out in 2018… and it's almost unsettling how accurately that scene describes where we are at right now. We have AI tools that can produce complex imagery, write copy, build technically perfect layouts, and scaffold entire applications faster than any human possibly could. In a sobering way, the still life has never been easier to paint.
But Carl's question still applies today: Can the AI do more than replicate? Can AI show us something only it can see? How long will the AI rely on humans until humans become an insignificant part of the process?
People hate change, and it's as historic as the dawn of time.
When photography emerged, painters declared the death of art. Why would someone commission a portrait when a camera can capture the same thing in a fraction of a second? Painting didn't die though... it evolved. Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract art, these movements only existed partly because photography freed painting from the obligation to copy real life. Photography didn't kill painters… however, it did kill the painters who could only replicate what they could see in front of them.
When smartphones put a capable camera in everyone's pocket, professional photographers screamed from the mountaintops. Their years mastering aperture, shutter speed, and composition suddenly seemed less valuable. Photography didn't die either, the professionals who could only point and shoot got replaced. The ones who understood light, story, and composition became more valuable, because now everyone could see the difference between a photo and a photograph.
When Apple introduced the personal computer, IBM scoffed at them. They claimed that computers were meant for work, not for homes. The people who dismissed the personal computer got left behind, while the people who saw it as a tool adapted and built things nobody could have imagined.
The pattern is always the same: a new tool makes the craft accessible, a group of professionals, artists, or somebody else panics. The craft never dies though, it adapts, and evolves, to the changing of times. The people who understood the fundamentals underneath the method brought those forward, and continued to thrive in their craft.
AI is this generation's version of that pattern. We need to admit that our tools have changed, and now we have to adapt. Composition, color theory, hierarchy, emotional resonance, brand alignment... all of these are exactly as important as they were before ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, and other AI tools existed. If anything, they're actually more important now since generating images, copy, and design are essentially free. Now it's up to us to define what taste looks, feels, and sounds like.
The tool is in the eye of the beholder.
Every time the methods have changed, the person has stayed in the loop ensuring things go accordingly. The quality of the work has always relied on the operator, and that part will never change.
AI is a tool. Just like a camera, just like Photoshop, and just like the printing press. The tools are accessible to everyone now, which means having an opinion and taste will matter even more now and into the future.
The fundamentals still matter… they deserve to be understood, appreciated, respected, and followed… until it's time to break them. Knowing when to break the rules requires knowing why they exist in the first place, and we're getting incredibly close to that breaking point.
This is exactly where Detroit felt prophetic to me... Markus could produce the still life incredibly well, but Carl asked for the soul. The difference between the two isn't technical ability, it comes down to interpretation… and if you have something to say, you better have the conviction to say it and mean it.
The still life, done well.
A while back, I was brought on to help Consiglieri, a marketing agency founded by former executives from T-Mobile, Nordstrom, Adobe, Nike, and HTC, with agency backgrounds spanning Publicis, Omnicom, Razorfish, and Slalom. They came to me with a clear direction on how they wanted to revamp their website branding: 60's post-modernism, Bauhaus patterns, and leverage Frank Moth as a reference. At this point, they had already done their own explorations in Dall-E and Midjourney, but they needed someone who could translate that taste into consistent, usable output.
So I started generating… first round, professionals in modern office and studio settings. It was technically solid work, but it became clear that the world these people lived in felt too old. The settings were modern but the people felt dated. They all wore suits and ties, and it felt overly corporate.
During the second round, I focused on modernizing the people. We ditched the formal wear and made the individuals look more contemporary, diverse, and relatable. We were getting closer, but a new problem emerged from this round: we started embarking into the uncanny valley.
The people were becoming so realistic that it felt unsettling. Even when they looked correct, there was a real risk that viewers would assume these were actual Consiglieri employees. We felt like that would be a huge branding problem, and we needed to make a pivot to bring back some kind of warmth or charm to the branding.
The solution was to remove the people entirely. Instead, we would generate modern settings and furnishings that allude to the concepts without the risk. We focused on offices, studios, and curated objects in known settings. We let the spaces tell the story instead of the people.
That pivot needed to happen in order for this new website branding to work. Something wasn't feeling right, and we needed to go in a completely different direction. The work was competent, professional, and well-received… and thus, a still life that was done well.
Reaching for something more personal.
When it came time to create hero images for this blog, the challenge was very different. I knew I wanted something distinctive, something that felt like me, and something that would stop a scroll in a LinkedIn feed full of gradients, stock photography, and your typical AI generated stuff.
One of my favorite games growing up was Earthbound. There's something about the bold colors, slightly surreal atmosphere, bizarre story telling, and playing through a world that feels like a curation of memories to places you've been to, or feel incredibly familiar. That felt like the right foundation for my generated artwork.
The first prompts were pretty bad... I was basically painting a still life with words. I described every detail I could see in my head from floor-to-ceiling windows, city skylines, rain streaking glass, evergreen treelines, and screens glowing with creative work. The more I wrote, the more Midjourney tried to render, and the less the image actually communicated.
That's when I started stripping things away. I started calling in the Picasso Principle, which made me start asking myself "What's the minimum prompt that communicates the maximum feeling?" The early images felt rustic and old with cabins and starry nights.
It wasn't wrong per se, but it wasn't sitting well with me. However, two phrases changed everything for me: "contemporary setting, clean architecture." along with "wide shot, open sky."
It felt like a breakthrough happened in this exercise. I stopped describing scenes entirely and started describing feelings. Each post got a one-word metaphor, whether it was 'threshold,' 'partnership,' 'bridge,' or something else. "Small figure in a vast vibrant world" became the anchor phrase for everything, since this is a journey I've been going through on my own in the new frontier of AI generated everything. The images stopped being illustrations and instead became emotional companions to the writing.
This shift is incredibly important, as it's a step away from the still life and the first step toward something with a soul. The Consiglieri work was directed outward, translating someone else's vision through AI. The blog images were directed inward, finding my own visual voice with the same tools. Both used Midjourney and the appropriate creative direction… but one was replication, and the other was gearing more towards interpretation.
But this… neither of us could have made this alone.
The image at the top of this post has its own story, and funny enough it's the one that surprised me the most… and what prompted me to get so philosophical and existential with this post.
My first attempt was kind of obvious… a hard geometric split between a cold digital blueprint on one side and a warm organic landscape on the other. It was technically clear, conceptually on-the-nose, and thus incredibly boring.
So we pushed along… I asked for more contrast between the two sides. I started experimenting with the surrealism of Salvador Dali, the incredibly mundane with Edward Hopper, and we landed somewhere that looked like the plains of a very bizarre Kansas. I'm never going to mix Dali and Hopper ever again.
For some reason, through this whole process, I somehow landed on the anime Your Name to experiment with.
If you haven't seen it, it's an anime where two characters are connected across time and space due to a comet. Both characters experience the same world from different perspectives, with the characters switching bodies from time to time and learning to adapt to the world that was presented to them the next day. They never see each other until they reach a specific moment... twilight on a mountain where day and night exist in the same sky. It's one of the most visually stunning films I've personally ever seen, and it hit me that the concept we were chasing wasn't about two different worlds at all. It was about the same world being seen through two different eyes.
I completely changed my prompt: I brought back my Earthbound inspired scenery, rooted it back into the pacific northwest, but one side is in a cold blue twilight with faint geometric constellations in the sky… the other in the warm glow of golden hour. The figure now stands where the light changes. Everything feels like it's a part of the atmosphere now, as if it was always there… we just needed a shift in perspective to see what's been there all along.
What makes this image matter to me is that neither of us could have made it independently. Claude proposed a concept, the split in composition, and gave input about historical and artistic references… I corrected and redirected the course when it felt wrong, continued to reject what didn't feel right, and identified when we hit something remarkable.
It's not still life anymore, but I'm not sure if it's the soul quite yet… but it's somewhere between the two, and it's closer than anything I've made before.
The same world, experienced with different lights.
Carl challenged Markus with a simple prompt: can you do more than replicate the world around you? And at the moment, this continues to be an issue that most of us are experiencing when working with AI.
It was never about two different worlds... whether it's the geometric versus the organic, the cold against the warmth, or the artificial taking what feels alive... they're the same place at different times of day. Taki and Mitsuha stand on the same mountain at twilight for one single moment where day and night coexist in the same sky… and that's where I think we are with AI and creative work. Both exist in the same space, and both can share that space in peace when each one respects, and collaborates, with the other.
The painters who survived photography didn't fight the camera, they realized it freed them to see the world differently. The photographers who survived the iPhone didn't fight the phone, they proved that seeing the story within the frame matters more than the equipment. AI freed us from still life, and now we need to find what we're going to create next.
The journey is never over. Each project I work on gets a little warmer, finds a little more interpretation, and marches a little closer to something with a soul. I haven't arrived there yet, and I'm not sure when I will. However, I sure as hell know I'm moving in the right direction.
The fundamentals still matter, and they always will. If there's anything to pull from this piece, it's to identify how important the fundamentals are… seek to understand them, respect them, follow them, and only do so until you've learned when it's right to break them. That's where the soul lives.