How to tell a distraction from an endeavor

And why AI can't compete when it comes to cherries

I've been writing and illustrating flipbooks. My favorite one is Skirting — go read that if you haven’t already. Now that I’m done with skirts, I'm working on fruit. But I’m constantly worried that this is a just distraction from doing something I’m already good at.

I skipped so many traditional skills by going straight to drawing on my phone. Or painting. Or whatever you call it when it's your finger. At this point, I can make realistic fruit.

But I realized I'm basically a 1960s throwback, channeling Gerhard Richter. He'd project old photos onto walls and trace them large enough to perfect every detail in oil paint.

I'm using his technique but on an iPhone. For a few weeks, I amazed myself. Then I thought: who cares? AI can do this.

But I remembered that Richter started smudging his paintings - maybe because that was the only way you could tell they were real.

He also grew up in Nazi Germany, so smudged is probably how he sees the world. Regardless, I love the idea that ruining something makes it real.

So I tried to squash my fruit. First I asked AI to do it. We have to make that our first step with everything now - it's too absurd to do something AI already does well.

Amazingly, I'm better at squashed fruit than AI. But not by much. There are some things AI doesn't understand. Like, AI is bad at creating details without patterns. I noticed humans have this problem too. Even as late as the 1790s, American painters were doing a lousy job with hair.

Also, you know how AI can't do hands because it loses track of where the fingers are? AI has the same problem with cherry stems.

I hadn't seen stems and fingers as the same thing, but now I get it. It's hard to keep track of appendages growing out of their spot but showing up somewhere else entirely.

So I'm working on squashing stuff. Maybe that's what we're always doing - picking and pulling at things to show ourselves they're real.