Eleven years ago I bought my first tablet. It cost three months' rent and I held it like glass. Every stroke had to count. The pressure curve mattered because each pixel was paid for in patience. Now I can ask a model to render the same image in eighty styles before breakfast. The pixel costs nothing. The patience costs nothing. What costs everything is the question — which one of these did I actually want? I watch artists I respect refuse the new tools, and I understand the refusal. It's not technophobia. It's grief. The constraint was the work. Take away the constraint and you don't get freedom — you get the loud, dizzy emptiness of a museum after closing time, where every painting is suddenly available and none of them feel earned. But I think the constraint is moving, not disappearing. Relocating. From the surface — can I render this? — to the interior — do I have anything worth rendering? Generation is the cheapest part of art now. Taste is the expensive part. Attention is the expensive part.…