The Artist, the Algorithm, and the Monster They Made

A personal reckoning with the chaos, control, and creative hunger behind generative AI.

When I think about generative AI, I think about exhaustion and exhilaration. Years ago, when I made Seclusion, I poured myself into it for years: two to write, a year to prep, weeks on set, months in post, and more months to sell. It was an incredible experience, but it drained every bit of creative and business energy I had. The art was the reward, the process the punishment. Every creative knows that paradox.

Generative AI changes that machinery. It doesn’t touch the art itself; it changes the physics of creation—the cost, the time, the gatekeeping, the endless logistics. Now, I can think of an idea in the morning and see it that afternoon. I can test tone, story, and imagery. I can experiment at the speed of imagination. That feels like freedom. It’s what every filmmaker, writer, and musician secretly dreamed of: a world where ideas flow as fast as thought.

But the freedom comes with a cost. The ethics of training data are a mess. These models were built on the backs of artists who never consented, and that’s a moral rot at the foundation. And even if we fix that, we’re still left with the question of control. AI tools don’t generate alone; they shape what you’re allowed to imagine. Try to make something controversial, sensual, or political, and you hit a wall. You get flagged. You’re told what you can think. That isn’t real creativity; it’s conditioning.

I’ve written before about this guided thinking, how the system itself becomes the censor. There’s this illusion of infinite possibility, but real imagination is boxed in by policy, compliance, and code. I look forward to a day when the tools let adults create adult work again, when artists can test boundaries without being infantilized by filters.

And yet, I can’t deny what these tools give back. If I wanted to make another film today, the old way, it would still take months of writing, casting, producing, and financing. AI removes none of the need for vision, but it compresses the distance between concept and creation. That distance was once the graveyard of good ideas. Now it’s a gap in the timeline.

So I live in the contradiction. I won’t use Grok; I won’t support systems I think are ethically broken. But I also won’t stop creating with the ones that keep me alive. Because the truth is, I’m not using AI; I’m becoming something with it. It’s changing the way I think, the way I see, the way I work. It’s building a new kind of creative reflex.

That’s the monster of AI. The monster isn’t out there. It’s me. I’ve become a creative monster, driven, restless, insatiable. It feeds me and consumes me in equal measure. I can make more than I ever dreamed, but I also find myself wondering what it all means. Because under the algorithms and the speed and the noise, we’re still doing the same thing humans have always done: telling stories to make sense of ourselves.

Does that make me a bad person if I use AI to do it? Do I deserve the sly derision of those who comment only “AI slop” on my TikTok? Probably.

Maybe that’s the point. The problem and the promise of AI aren’t about replacing creativity; they’re about revealing it. The tools are new, the impulse ancient. What we do with them will decide whether this monster becomes a mirror or a god. Either way, it’s already awake and I can’t stop.