Look closely at a painting, and you might be able to see where an artist changed their mind. Beneath the finished surface, there may be an abandoned line, a figure moved several inches to the left, a color that looked splendid in the morning and became unbearable by night. There may be a smudgy fingerprint at the edge of the canvas. The back may hold a date, a repair, uneven staples, a signature, or the name of a previous owner. These messy marks were once incidental to the artwork. Today they are considered evidence.

AI can produce an image in nano-seconds, then create hundreds of variations before a painter has mixed a color or cleaned a brush. Some of the results are technically bewildering and others inspire disbelief: How is this possible? Yet their abundance is changing our relationship to novelty. When nearly any visual idea can be summoned on demand, newness becomes easier to manufacture but harder to believe in. In an age of effortless images, the mess left behind by making something may become part of what makes it valuable.

So much recent visual culture can appear at once new and strangely familiar. Generative systems learn from immense archives of existing images, then assemble patterns according to statistical relationships. Their output can startle........

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