Remember When Art Used to Be Human? Lady Jane to AI Jank

Art moves. Algorithms imitate.

The first time I saw Paul Delaroche's 1833 painting "The Execution of Lady Jane Gray," I stood there, thumbs hooked in my backpack straps, peering into that single canvas at London's National Gallery for over an hour.

The scene shows a dimly lit execution chamber, medieval and humble. Blindfolded and dressed in brilliant white silk, Lady Jane reaches out helplessly to get her bearings. Her gown plays with light, its folds and shadows reflecting Delaroche's mastery of transcendent details.

Two women to her right are a mess, clearly in acute distress, presumably her ladies-in-waiting. A man calmly leans on his ax, ready to do his terrible job, while another gently guides her to the chopping block. Lady Jane herself does not appear to be weeping or pleading, just treading through the last seconds of her life with composure, her mouth closed.

The painting serves as a silent conversation between artist and observer, bridging gaps of time and space.

We become the other witnesses in that execution chamber, bringing our own feelings to this mixture of dynamic human perspectives – unbearable sorrow, calm resignation to fate's irony, helpful compassion, and dutiful pragmatism. Here we stand to feel the weight of just another teenage queen-of-the-week murdered in the meaningless charade of politics.

I keep coming back to this image as I think about AI's growing role in “creating” art. There's nothing like standing in front of genuine paintings that make you forget to breathe – to raise questions about what we're losing (and gaining?) as technology reshapes how we create and consume art.

My biological father, Chaichart, used to take beautiful pictures with what was almost certainly a Canon F1 camera – the kind built like a sexy handheld tank, tough as nails. You could use it as a doorstop, and it would still take great pictures. I treasure some of our earliest family photos, yellowed from the decades. There's one of me, my brother Brathon, and my father (I assume he handed the camera to my mother, as selfies weren't a thing in 1976). Another shows my mother's immediate family at DFW airport, my grandfather Odell looking impatient but dapper in his Texas trilby hat as we prepared to head to the Far East.

These photos, with their rounded corners and hexagonally embossed matte finish you can feel under your fingers, carry a weight that nothing in the digital world can bench. They're priceless not just for their content but for their exquisite medium – physical artifacts that connect us to specific moments in time.

Now, we're watching AI rewrite the rules of image creation entirely. I recently contrasted Boris Eldagsen's AI-generated photograph "The Electrician"—which infamously won first place at the Sony World Photography Awards—with Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother."

Both show women gazing into the middle distance, but the gap between them is infinite.

Florence Owens Thompson, Lange's subject, was a real 32-year-old American-Cherokee woman who survived the Great Depression working as a migrant picker in California to feed her children. "I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids," she told Lange. Her eyes carry real hunger, real desperation, a real human story.

The women in Eldagsen's AI photo? They never existed. They never laughed, cried, or had stories to tell. They're phantoms conjured from algorithms and prompts. The image shows a woman gazing longingly into the middle distance while another woman—perhaps her mother, older sister, or aunt—stands behind her, mouth pressed against her shoulder in a gesture of understanding and support. But it's all artificial, a beautiful lie crafted from patterns in data.

This contrast haunts me as I watch tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and now OpenAI's Sora transform visual creation. Sora can generate entire cinematic scenes from text prompts—no camera, no crew, no location needed—just words transformed into moving images with uncanny perfection. The clips they've released show everything from Tokyo street scenes with cherry blossoms to woolly mammoths trudging through snow, each detail rendered with eerie precision.

I still get giddy watching movies in theaters, constantly elbowing whoever sits beside me – "Whoa, did you catch that angle? How did they get that in one continuous shot? Wow, that's a really dark black." It's annoying, but I can't help myself. There's something magical about human-created images that move us. But as AI grows more capable by the minute, I keep returning to that painting of Lady Jane Gray, trying to understand what makes it stop me.

It's probably because, behind every brush stroke, there was a human hand guided by lived experience. The artist had to imagine themself in that execution chamber, feel the weight of that moment, and translate raw empathy into oil and canvas. No prompt could capture the profound humanity in how he painted Lady Jane's reaching hand or the way her silk gown catches the light.

We're entering an age where images can be conjured from nothing but words and code. The possibilities are extraordinary, but so is what we stand to lose if we forget the difference between images that emerge from human hearts and hands and those born from patterns in data. Like Lady Jane reaching out blindly, we're all trying to find our bearings in this new reality.

I occasionally daydream about that hour I spent in the National Gallery, standing before Lady Jane Gray, seeing her reach out in that final moment, feeling the weight of centuries between us, considering the countless human eyes that had stood where I stood. Even now, I can trace the path of Delaroche's brush—each one a choice, a presence, a moment of connection between artist, subject, and audience.

In an age where any image imaginable can be conjured from a string of words, I’m drawn back to those moments that demand that we show up fully—brush to canvas, eye to viewfinder, human to human—not because they're perfect but because they're real.