The machines can build now. Not sketch, not assist. Build. And the question that has been circling my trade for a couple of years has finally landed.
If anyone can make anything, what is a maker for?
I have heard a few answers I do not trust. One is that there is a soul in the handmade thing the machine can never reach. I would like that to be true, and some days I even feel it, but I am wary of a comfort that happens to protect my own livelihood.
Another is to give up the deciding entirely and just run the machine — write the prompts, take what comes. I understand the appeal. But prompting is still operating software, and software keeps getting easier to operate. I do not think that ground holds for long.
The answer I keep returning to is quieter. The making was never really the job. It was the visible part, the part you could photograph and put in a portfolio, so it was easy to mistake it for the work. The work was always the deciding.
What should exist and what should not. What a business needs and what it only wants. Where to spend the money and where to refuse it. Which of the fifty things the machine just made is the right one, and why, and what it is missing, and what to take away.
That is judgment, and I do not know a shortcut to it. Mine came from being wrong, over and over, in front of real people with real money at stake. You cannot download it. You gather it slowly, and it costs you, and it takes the better part of twenty years.
Which means, and I say this without any triumph, that the machines have not made experience cheap. If anything they have left it as one of the few things still worth paying for.