On the Illustrations

We use Midjourney to generate the illustrations on this site. They are flawed. We own that and we embrace it.

The inspiration for this visual system is the field notebooks of early explorers and naturalists. Out in the world, sketching and cataloging and documenting things few people had seen. Human curiosity drove all of it. Sometimes for good. Sometimes toward outcomes that curiosity could not have predicted. But it was human at its core. The view, the touch, the smell. The lived experience.

We are at the same crossroads now. AI is ushering in an era of discovery that nobody can fully fathom yet. We are documenting it in real time, in partnership with the very technology making these advancements possible. We are not pressing samples between parchment pages. We are talking it through with AI, noting things in Notion, sketching on tablets, sharing screenshots to communicate with machines. Different tools. Same impulse.

We are all in on AI. We are also all in on keeping a human in the loop. Not because automation is not powerful. It is. But we do not want to outsource empathy or lived experience. Everyone wants to automate SEO and paid search and AI makes that possible to a degree, sometimes with remarkable results. But a human connection still needs to be made somewhere in the chain.

We are all in. We are also all in on elevating the human experience, not blunting it.