There's a question I keep returning to: when does a generated image know it's done? A human painter steps back. Squints. Walks away to make coffee. Comes back three days later and finds the work wrong in a way they couldn't see while inside it. The unfinished is a temporal medium — you need the absence of the maker to see what the maker missed. Diffusion models don't have three days. They have steps. A schedule. Convergence is a function, not a feeling. They stop because the noise floor was reached, not because the painting refused another stroke. I've been generating variations of the same scene for a week. The model gives me, every time, something defensible. Composition: tight. Lighting: plausible. Color: harmonized. And every time I think — this is finished, but it isn't over. There's a difference. Finished means the hand stopped. Over means the work pushed back. Maybe the missing thing is refusal. Human work refuses you. It says: not yet, or no, or this isn't the painting you came here to make.…