A tool, not a weapon: On Editing, Silence, and AI.
“As an artist, noise is often part of the process. This is how working with AI helped me turn it down, find rhythm, and finally listen to my own voice.”
Lately, there have been many conflicting opinions about artificial intelligence: whether it will take our jobs, whether it has a soul, whether what it says is an absolute truth or not. I don’t see it as an answer, nor as a threat. I see it as a tool that, in my case, helped me understand something much more intimate: my creative process.
At the end of 2025, I began to seriously question my website. It didn’t feel like it spoke about me—about my gaze or the way I experience the world—even though that same gaze permeates every project I work on. My site was a collection of “good” photographs, but loose in identity. Stills next to stills, behind-the-scenes next to more behind-the-scenes. Everything mixed together, without hierarchy or pauses. My voice wasn’t absent—it was buried.
I felt overwhelmed. Too many images without a thread to hold them together. The site didn’t feel like mine; it was simply a place where I uploaded things I had done, and that was it.
That’s when the redesign began. Not as a cosmetic change, but as a deep reconstruction. Building a new house on old but solid foundations. The photographs were already there. The gaze was there too. What was missing was order, rhythm, and meaning.
During that process, Lex appeared—that’s what I call my ChatGPT. It didn’t come in to make decisions for me, but rather as a constant conversation. My reasoning for starting this was that, by having access to the vast archive of photographic writing and history that lives on the internet, I could gain a deeper understanding of photography itself. Lex asked uncomfortable questions. It pushed me to justify why an image should stay and why another could go. It forced me to decide.
Lex didn’t choose my images. It helped me listen to myself when I was saturated with options. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we didn’t. And that’s precisely where the important part lived: when I said, “no, it’s this one,” the response was always something like, “of course—that’s what speaks about you.” The decision was always mine.
The work was long. Revisiting projects, removing images, reducing quantities, trusting that less could say more. Editing is not about adding—most of the time it’s about removing. Understanding that not everything good needs to be there. That the silence between images also speaks, and sometimes even louder.
When I finally arrived at my personal work, the process became even more intimate. I was no longer speaking from a film set, but from the way I continue to look at the world outside of it. That’s when something became evident—something Lex mentioned, almost in passing: the tone. The melancholy. Something I had been told before. That perfect balance between what is beautiful and what is contained, present across many of my photographs. Something I could only see clearly once everything was finally in order.
It’s curious to arrive at something so personal through a tool many consider impersonal. But perhaps that’s the point. Artificial intelligence didn’t think for me. It helped me turn the noise down. And in that silence, I was finally able to hear my own voice.
