Wei Yang

III. Conspiring with AI:
Misreadings and Mutual Drift

I started using AI because I was too slow at expressing myself. Emotions get tangled in my head, and language always lags behind. But I know I’m visually sensitive—too often, the images are there, just not yet translated. AI helped speed up that translation. What it generates isn’t an answer—it’s a starting point. I select from its misreadings, as if using someone else’s slip of the tongue to better understand myself.

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Sometimes, the “wrong” images come closer to what I meant than anything I could’ve intentionally made. For instance, I once dreamed I was kissing a cat. I fed that dream—along with childhood photos and animal references—into the AI. It returned a hair-covered, cat-like baby crawling on all fours. The image made me uncomfortable. I even felt ashamed. But I didn’t delete it. I kept it—because it was honest. It captured a feeling I couldn’t name, something like a primitive sense of loss.

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AI-generated images often sit on the threshold between memory and dream—half-fake, half-familiar, half-alien. They bring me closer to a sensation I’ve been chasing for years but could never define. It’s not pain. It’s not joy. It’s that blurry clarity at 5AM in winter—when you walk into an empty primary school classroom and realize your body is a child’s but your mind is an adult’s. That temporal confusion, that quiet dislocation… when I choose images, I’m not picking “aesthetic styles.” I’m selecting fragments that get as close as possible to that kind of state.

I won’t say AI-generated images are “me,” but I do think they form the shape of my inclinations. Not a face, but an outline. Through each act of selection and deletion, I started to see a structure emerge—not a full self-portrait, but a record of how I make decisions. Resonance doesn’t come from clear definitions. It comes from arranging pieces with honesty.

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I’ve never handed over control of editing to AI. It’s not the author. It’s the tool that lays out the chaos in my mind so I can sort through it. This isn’t about giving up control—it’s about realizing that I’ve been avoiding precision all along. AI doesn’t speak for me. But it helps me reassemble the language I’ve been stalling on. People used to say “my hands can’t catch up to my ideas.” AI shortened that distance. I can get to that “almost me” space faster—even if that “me” is wrong, is messy, is made of misunderstood fragments.

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Maybe what I’m building isn’t a statement, but a trace of how I’ve tried to become myself.