Tuesday night, and a message came in about a character I had already drawn twice. It was a small commission, the anime-style kind people put on a badge or a keychain, and the client did not write that it was perfect. They wrote that the hair could be shorter, and that the head needed to turn. I read it twice, the way I read “target” last week, because it was such an ordinary sentence and such a specific kind of work.
I had spent the afternoon watching people type one line into an AI tool and receive a whole character before my pencil was even sharp. The pictures were smoother than mine. The eyes matched. Nothing hesitated. They also looked as if they belonged to a crowd instead of a person, which is a strange kind of success, being so finished that nobody can point to a place and say “not like that.”
So I shortened the hair. Then I turned the face. The third version is the one they kept, and it is not the cleanest of the three. One ear is still a little large. They did not mention the ear, so I left it. What they paid for was not the most polished file. They paid for the fact that I would sit at this desk and move a line until it matched someone they could already see, someone the generator had never met.
In Business we call this customisation, as if it were a box you tick on a form. On my desk it is the whole product. An AI image arrives already sure of itself, the way those pitchbook sentences did, and if the left hand is wrong you do not really correct it. You ask again, and you get a different stranger. A commission is slower. It is also a conversation with paper in the middle, which sounds inefficient until you notice that the inefficiency is what people are buying.
I used to think this kind of work would vanish as soon as the pictures got prettier. Some of it will, I think: the part that only needed a pretty picture, and did not need a reply. The messages I still get are not about pretty. They are about “a bit more like her,” which is an instruction a perfect image cannot hear. It does not know her. It does not know how to be slightly wrong on purpose, and then slightly less wrong, and then stop.
The files live in a folder called commissions, which is a more serious name than this desk deserves. Tomorrow I have Maths, which will not ask me to move a hand. I am keeping the large ear. It is the proof that a person was holding the pencil, and that someone, somewhere, still wanted that.