Personal Position on AI Usage
As an artist, I use AI (Claude AI) as a conceptual partner while committing to fully-embodied, contemplative photographic practice as my core contribution. AI helps me articulate patterns, test language, develop frameworks - but it cannot do the witnessing, the staying-with, the committing to not knowing that generates genuine human insight. This partnership clarifies what's distinctly human rather than making it obsolete.
The articulation of my art that you see throughout this site emerged through several months of partnership with AI - not as tool for automation, but as collaborator in developing "interrupting the leaping" as an emergent practice through Art and AI. The photography practice trains the capacity; the AI partnership helps articulate what that capacity produces.
This isn't just my artistic method - it's a model for how humans and AI can partner effectively. Individuals and organizations need to develop these same capacities.
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Art & AI: Interrupting the Leap as Individual and Organizational Capacity
You don't need to become an artist. You need to develop the artist's capacity: interrupting your automatic leap from observation to conclusion.
The Pattern We're Trapped In:
We've been trained to leap instantly:
- From seeing to knowing
- From complexity to category
- From uncertainty to answer
- From what's emerging to what we already understand
This compulsive leaping is exhausting us. And it's about to break organizational AI adoption entirely.
Why AI Makes This Worse (and Better):
AI is a conceptual engine - brilliant at generating answers, categorizing patterns, proliferating options at speed. It can leap faster and further than any human.
This tempts organizations to leap even faster. "Let AI analyze it!" "Get me the answer now!" The very tool that could help us stay contextual gets weaponized to accelerate our compulsive leaping.
But here's what AI actually reveals: If machines can handle all the leaping, what's the distinctly human contribution?
Staying present before the leap.
Witnessing what's actually happening in your specific organizational reality. Holding complexity long enough for genuine understanding to emerge. Interrupting the automatic categorization long enough to see what's really there.
AI cannot do this. It cannot witness your contextual reality. It cannot develop felt sense of what's emerging. It cannot interrupt its own processing to just... stay present.
This is the human capacity AI partnership requires.
The Practice:
1. Recognize the leap
- Notice when you're rushing to conclusions
- Feel the discomfort of not-knowing
- Identify the pressure to categorize quickly
2. Interrupt the pattern
- Stay with observation longer than feels comfortable
- Witness what's actually happening vs. what you think should be happening
- Let complexity remain complex
3. Let understanding emerge
- Insights that couldn't come from quick analysis
- Vision that arises from sustained attention to reality
- Decisions grounded in what's actually present
Why Organizations Fail at AI:
- They try to use AI while constantly leaping:
- Design AI pilots based on conceptual models (leaping to "how it should work")
- That fail in production (collision with actual reality)
- Because nobody interrupted the leap long enough to witness what was actually happening
Then they blame the AI.
The artist's practice isn't optional decoration. It's the missing cognitive infrastructure that makes AI partnership actually work.
Develop capacity to interrupt the leap. Use sustained attention as your practice. Let genuine understanding emerge from contextual reality. Then partner with AI's conceptual capabilities to execute on insight that came from actually witnessing what's there.
This is how organizations flourish in the AI age instead of exhausting themselves leaping faster toward conclusions that don't match reality.
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