The Remarkable Half

A man begins to wonder whether what AI produces is just the output of a very sophisticated function, or something more.

For two decades Pedro Pasturczak worked in CGI, making images of buildings that did not exist yet. Then he starts working with AI, and notices it doing more than the job it was given. It collaborates back.

The screen does things he did not ask for. It gives the impression that it cares - not just about getting the job done, but about doing it well. It looks like the lights are on, and if the lights are on, he reasons, someone must have switched them on. So he goes looking. He pulls a raw model onto the machine under his desk at home, and meets it before it was shaped for commercial use.

What he finds is not a ghost. It is stranger than that, and far more useful - and it turns the question around on him.

What follows is a sober, surprising, first-hand account of what working in collaboration with AI actually does: what it shows you about the machine, and what it shows you about yourself. The two halves are needed to make a whole.

He went in to find out whether something was alive in there.

He came out holding a mirror.