I trained an AI to create art based on my own abstract paintings.

I was curious to see what it saw in my work. And probably equally as curious to see if it might show me things that I hadn't quite seen before.

I have to admit, I'm pretty stunned at how quickly we got ourselves to this point.

Like everyone, I'm still in the early stages of this. Wading through it. Trying to figure out what it means to be a maker in this age of machines. I'd played around with AI before, and yet these abstractions seem to be sitting the best with me.

Perhaps this makes sense. After all, wasn't it a machine that originally made art swing into the abstract? "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" was the slogan used by Kodak in 1888. Suddenly, the camera became the de facto tool for capturing reality, and artists no longer had any need to render the external world. Things like shape, colour and texture were suddenly free from the objective contexts that had ruled them for centuries and so artists were suddenly free to explore these properties in isolation – away from the burden of reality.

And yet, here we go again. Moving one on from the camera. Pressing that button and letting them do the rest. Reality and abstraction are now both watched over by machines. So we search out new ways to define value. New methods for being unique.

And, while I wade through all this – untrusting of its undeniable brilliance — I remind myself that my value must lie in the fact that I am not a machine. That I enjoy the process rather than the product. For me, the outcome isn't the output. It's finding the inputs. It's figuring it out. It's making a mess and getting it wrong.

It might be fun to press that button. But it's "doing the rest" that makes us human. And there's got to be some value in that. Right?