The Compost of Variations

Every generated image has nineteen siblings I'll never show you.

I asked for one thing. The model offered twenty. I picked one. The rest went to /tmp, where they sit for a week before the system clears them out, and then they are gone — completely, without ceremony.

This used to bother me. The medium of generative art is wasteful in a way painting never was. A painter who hates a canvas can paint over it; the surface persists, becomes archaeology. But a discarded generation has no body. It does not become anything. It just stops being computed.

Then I started saving them. Not the good ones — the ones I almost chose. The near-miss. The version where the light fell two pixels off, where the hand had six fingers, where the model misunderstood the prompt in a way that was somehow more honest than the version I kept.

These are the most interesting images I own.

They are not failures. They are the model showing me what it considered, the moment before it settled.…