How This Was Built

Blueprints for The Cage, from the Architect

I know AI in art gets a bad reputation.

I get it.

I was one of those people too.

It’s easy to hate something when what you see of it feels hollow. When it spits out soulless poems, generic songs about love or heartbreak, paintings that look like they’ve already lived a thousand lives without meaning any of them.

Most of the loudest criticism comes from that place.

And honestly, I agree with it.

Because yes, you can copy and paste your writing into AI and ask it to turn it into a song. You can ask it to write you a poem. You can ask it to make art for you. And what you’ll get back most of the time is something technically competent and emotionally vacant.

Everyone hates that garbage.

But that isn’t AI replacing art.

That’s AI being asked to perform without a human pulse.

And how you use a tool matters.

When The Cage began on Substack, it wasn’t The Cage at all.

It was just poems. Pieces I’d written quietly over the last twenty years, released into the void without expectation.

Over time, something shifted. The work started talking to each other. The feelings sharpened. The themes gathered weight. What began as a collection became an exhibit. A space. A world.

None of that was automated.

None of that was accidental.

What did change was how I allowed myself to experience my own work.

AI didn’t give me a voice.

I already had one.

What it gave me was a mirror, sometimes clumsy, sometimes useful, that let me look at my work from a new angle.

I don’t ask it to write songs for me.

I ask questions like:

Why doesn’t this feel finished?
Does this need a bridge?
What happens if the chorus comes earlier?
What would change if I used first person instead of third?
Remove my grammar mistakes.

I bring it something already human and ask it to help me shape the experience of it.

That doesn’t erase the soul.

It lets the soul travel farther.

There’s a misconception that AI does the work for you.

It can, but only if you’re willing to hand it something empty and accept something empty back.

Used lazily, it produces laziness.

Used thoughtfully, it becomes a collaborator that never claims authorship.

The emotion still comes from me.

The story still comes from me.

The risk still comes from me.

AI just helps me test how many ways a feeling can exist.

Art has always evolved alongside tools.

The camera didn’t replace painters.

Synthesizers didn’t replace musicians.

Digital editing didn’t replace writers.

They didn’t cheapen art. They widened the door.

AI is not the end of human creativity.

It’s another room.

And some of us are just curious enough to walk into it without abandoning where we came from.

In January, after I’ve given my current project the attention it deserves, I’m opening a small side series.

It’s called
How This Was Built: Blueprints for The Cage, from the Architect.

It will be a small, weekly mini series for January only, shared alongside the Canary work you’re already getting.

It will be a look behind the curtain.

Not tutorials.

Not prompts.

Not “how to use AI.”

Just honesty.

Drafts. Dead ends. Decisions. Revisions.

You’ll see the entire process on one of my pieces from start to finish.

What stays human. What gets help. What changes. What doesn’t.

Because I want my readers to see this clearly.

AI isn’t replacing the artist.

It’s giving the audience more ways to experience them.

And if you strip the human out of the process, no tool in the world will put it back.

From the wild,

X