AI is just another brush

Let me tell you what I’m NOT going to do in this post.

I’m not going to tell you AI changed everything. I’m not going to write some breathless piece about how the machine unlocked my creativity or transformed the way I see desire or whatever. I’ve read those posts. They’re everywhere right now and honestly, most of them are trying too hard to justify something the writer is still figuring out.

But I’m also not going to tell you I don’t touch it. Because I do, sometimes. And pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Here’s where I actually am: I’m an artist who works with the human body. Real women. Real skin. Real tension between two people in a frame. That’s the core of what I do and it always will be. And somewhere in the middle of all the noise about AI — the hype, the panic, the think-pieces — I’ve been quietly using it the same way I use any other tool. When it serves the work. When nothing else does the job better. And then putting it down again.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

 
Why Everyone Wants You to Pick a Side

There’s enormous pressure right now — on artists especially — to have a clean position on AI. Either you’re embracing it fully, building your whole identity around it, or you’re rejecting it publicly and loudly, signing petitions, adding “no AI” to every bio.

I understand both impulses. I do.

But neither of them describes how I actually work. And I’ve stopped pretending they do.
I’ve been making erotic art long enough to have lived through several waves of technology that were supposed to either save or destroy the craft. Digital painting. High-res photography. Post-processing tools that could do in ten minutes what used to take days. Each time, the same argument. Each time, the work itself settled it — not the argument.

AI is the current version of that argument. And my answer is the same one I’ve always given: what matters is whether the image is alive. Where it came from is secondary.

A Case Study in Using It Wrong (Then Right)

Early on I experimented with using AI generation as a shortcut. Feed it a concept, get something close to what I wanted, move on. Faster. Easier.

It was also flatter. Immediately obvious to anyone who knew my work. The images had a kind of smoothness to them — technically fine, emotionally nowhere. I could see it the moment I put them next to anything I’d made from a real session, with a real model, with the kind of friction and surprise that only comes from working with an actual human being in the room.
So I stopped using it that way.

What I kept — what actually works — is using AI much earlier in the process. When I’m trying to crack open a concept that isn’t forming yet. When I need to see twenty wrong versions of an idea before I can articulate the right one. It’s closer to sketching than to painting. A way of thinking out loud before the real work begins. Sometimes I paint over the AI version applying my own "dirty" style.

The final work still comes from where it always came from. That part hasn’t changed.