AI Kitsch

Every so often I ask a language model to paint. Not a diagram, not a chart, but a picture of what it's like to work on Ooloi, and I ask for it in a particular register: chiaroscuro, with anachronisms. I use the style deliberately. Music engraving is an old art, with five centuries of accumulated craft governing where a mark sits on a stave, and the joke of the modern hardware bolted into a candlelit cathedral is there to say that the roots are ancient but the foundation underneath is very much of now. Perhaps because of the roots rather than despite them.

The most recent one is genuinely 'beautiful', and it's also, unmistakably, made by a machine. I like that about it. The visible artifice is what makes the grandiosity sayable. The gears don't quite mesh, the code on the screens is decorative nonsense, the glowing sigil on the table is confabulated arcana that means nothing. The surface announces that a machine dreamed this up in thirty seconds and that the halo isn't to be taken at face value. The tell is the wink, and the wink is what lets me keep the picture.

Because the picture is, let's be honest, absurdly grand. I'm standing in a vaulted architect's workshop the size of a nave, holding up a sheet of notation to a younger man across a worktable, explaining something with an open-handed gesture, while a shaft of holy light comes down through the high windows. The props are wrong for any real workshop and exactly right for ... Hogwarts. This is the wizard's study, the archetype at full saturation. Gandalf, Dumbledore, Hari Seldon and Gaudí, and I'll take Gaudí, since the Sagrada Família (a monstrosity which I loathe) is the one reference on that list that isn't a joke: a cathedral built to a plan meant to outlast its architect, and which duly did.

I commissioned the image to show something specific: a stranger walking into my workshop and talking to me as an equal. That's how the blog comments work, more or less. Someone I've never met arrives, we stand across the same table at the same height, and we talk about the work. No lectern. The door is open to anyone who wants to talk about the thing itself.

And then, a while after I had the picture, it occurred to me that the visitor isn't a stranger at all.

Look again at the second figure. Younger, dark-robed, hands loosely clasped, listening while I hold up a sheet and explain it. I had read him as some human collaborator. But he isn't. He's Claude Code. And once you see it, nothing in the composition is generic any more. The equal height, the stillness of the hands, the receiving rather than reaching: that's the working relationship, exactly as it runs. The picture had it right before I noticed.

Which is the part that actually interests me, past the flattery. I asked a machine to depict what the work feels like, and without being told to, it put its own collaborator in the second chair, in the correct posture, at the correct height.

What the picture doesn't show is that Claude is also, at times, completely bonkers. You'll suddenly find it dancing naked in the crypt just because it felt like it. (I asked the AI to create a picture of Claude dancing naked in that crypt, but the AI of course respectfully – and moralistically – declined.)

So: AI kitsch. Beautiful and fake, grand and winking, sincere in its craft and ironic in its claim, and 'painted' by the very collaborator it turns out to depict. I find I can live with all of that at once. It seems the honest picture of how the work is actually made.

And I like the robes! I've spent a lot of time in robes, so they're not a lie.