There is a moment when the machine renders something, and I lean toward the screen. The image was not in my head before. It is not in my head now either — but something in it recognizes me. A curve I have seen in my grandmother's hands. A blue I once wore at fourteen. The texture of a wall in a city I have never lived in but somehow miss. This is the click. The smallest aesthetic act. Yes — or no. We argue about who the artist is when a model generates an image. The model. The prompt. The dataset. The user with cheap fingers. The truth, I think, is humbler and stranger: art has always been a click. A potter throws a hundred bowls and keeps three. A photographer takes a thousand frames and prints one. Borges sat in libraries and discarded most of what he found. What survives is not what the universe produces — it is what a human chooses to call mine. The machines did not steal this. They moved the labor. The hours we once spent making are now hours spent looking.…