My first generated image was February 5, 2023.
Midjourney still operated through Discord. I typed two words into the Midjourney bot:
quantum light
I hit Enter and watched it return four images. Not one image — four entirely new images interpreting those two words.
My immediate reaction was suspicion. I assumed there was a chance these were simply retrieved stock photographs or existing artwork. I ran them through Google Image Search. I could not find them anywhere. As far as I could determine, those particular images had never previously existed.
That moment disturbed a framework I had used for years as a photographer and content producer.
Create it or license it
I had always taught that there were fundamentally two ways to obtain content: create it or license it.
If I take the photograph with my camera, I created it. If I write the article, I created it. If somebody else created the photograph, illustration, article, video, or other work, then I need permission to use it. That permission might come through Adobe Stock, a commercial license, Creative Commons, royalty-free terms, or some other agreement, but there is still a relationship between the creator and the person using the work.
There was no legitimate third category called “I found it on the Internet.”
AI-generated images introduced something genuinely different.
I did not license Quantum Light from another human creator. But I also did not create the images myself.
Typing two words into Midjourney did not suddenly make me an artist who had somehow acquired the skills necessary to produce those images. Calling myself the creator because I wrote the prompt would be absurd.
The wedding photographer
The closest analogy is a wedding photographer.
A bride hires a professional photographer. She might provide creative direction: concentrate on the couple, concentrate on the family, make it formal, make it candid, photograph this location, emphasize these people. Her direction matters. But nobody therefore concludes that the bride photographed the wedding.
She commissioned the work.
I hired the machine. I sometimes provided creative direction. The machine generated the image.
That is much closer to my relationship with Midjourney and the image-generation systems that followed it.
From prompted to autonomous
And over time, even the creative direction began disappearing.
In early 2023, generating an image was conspicuous. I deliberately opened Midjourney, constructed a prompt, submitted it, reviewed four possibilities, selected one, refined it, and downloaded the result.
By August 2026, many images in my systems are generated without my involvement at all.
An AI system encounters a product record. It knows that a product should have an image. It understands the visual pattern already established for that system. It generates the appropriate image and attaches it to the product.
I did not prompt it. I did not art-direct it. I may never even explicitly request the image.
The image exists because the system determined that an image was required to complete the artifact.
That transition — from prompted generation to autonomous generation — is one of the most important parts of the history.
1.85 million
Since February 5, 2023, the systems working for me have generated approximately 1.85 million images.
Those images are not experiments sitting in a folder. They have been used on websites, in businesses, for clients, on social platforms, in products, advertising, publishing, databases, and countless other commercial applications.
Collectively, generated imagery has produced hundreds of thousands of dollars in economic value for me, including direct revenue attributable to social-media advertising and commercial uses of the images.
One line item made the point more sharply than any total could. For a stretch, Facebook was paying me about $600 a month for AI-generated images the federation was publishing every day.
I want to be precise about my part in that. I did not take the photographs. I did not prompt most of them. I did not choose which ones went out, or when, or what they were captioned. The federation generated them, published them daily, and the platform paid for the attention they earned.
It was an absorbed action that happened to pay rent.
That was the first time I understood that what I had built was not only a way of producing work. It was an economic engine — one that could earn while my attention was somewhere else entirely.
It would later earn a second way, by renting out its constituents to other businesses by the hour. This was the first.
So the distinction matters.
I did not license 1.85 million images.
I did not personally create 1.85 million images.
I caused systems working for me to generate 1.85 million images.
At first I stood beside the machine and told it what I wanted.
Today, increasingly, the machine simply knows when an image is needed and makes one.
That is the trajectory I want this ledger to document.