The creative industry is having a necessary and often overheated argument about AI right now, and most of it is happening without enough specificity. The broad-brush position — that any use of generative AI constitutes a betrayal of authentic artistry — withers under examination. Authorship doesn’t resided in the tool but in the intention, the selection, the judgment, and the vision that shapes raw material into form and gives it meaning. By that measure, these motion studies are as authored as anything made with a camera or a brush or sequencer.

The legitimate concerns emerging from this brave new world deserve legitimate responses. For instance, on the matter of energy consumption (a huge imperative for life on this planet and a subject not to be belittled): the generation work for these three pieces, and most of the work I do, runs locally on a personal system via ComfyUI, installed and operated on-device rather than through cloud-based inference at scale. The ecological footprint I leave behind is meaningfully smaller than the conversation usually assumes.

Another equally hot and urgent controversy surrounds copyright and training data, a gargantuan and exceedingly important issue which deserves its own dedicated essay: I can only speak to my own approach and to that I would say that the outputs here are transformative works shaped by my own creative direction, not reproductions of source material. I crafted visuals, via a computing device, using textual descriptions born from my own observation and imagination. The model's accumulated vision is a medium, like light through a lens and it carries traces of everything it has learned, but what emerges, if crafted by the artist’s mind, is something brand new.