Carlos: Wo Orons has been drawing by hand for more than thirty years, and it turns out that this is almost an act of resistance.
Mara: Today we review a reflection on what it means to give something made by a human being when artificial intelligence can generate thousands of images in seconds.
Carlos: Let's start there.
The value of handmade when everything can be generated
Mara: The fundamental question is this: in a world where any image can be manufactured automatically, what is left of value to an object created by a person?
Carlos: And the answer proposed by the text is not sentimental, it is almost arithmetic.
Mara: Exactly. The argument starts from a direct comparison: Throughout your life, you will buy hundreds of T-shirts, colognes, mugs or gadgets. They are gifts that fulfill their function and end up forgotten in a drawer. However, how many custom caricatures Are you going to order in your whole life? Probably one or two.
Carlos: That is, scarcity is not imposed by the price, it is imposed by the nature of the object. There's no serial version of a portrait of you.
Mara: That is what the text holds. And it directly counterposes it to what it calls the soullessness of generative AI: an image produced by an algorithm has no history or observational process behind it. It is, in his words, "just a mathematical combination of pixels."
Carlos: Which is technically accurate and also, let's face it, a phrase that no pixel is going to refute.
Mara: The text also distinguishes between two types of work: the personalized caricature, which exaggerates features to capture humor and essence, and the Illustrated Portrait, which seeks fidelity without deformations but with artistic treatment. They are two different approaches with different intentions.
Mara: And the process he describes is completely manual: observe photos, interpret traits, decide what to exaggerate and draw each stroke. Decades of trade applied to each assignment.
Carlos: Which turns the gift into an investment in a memory, not an expense. That distinction is at the core of the whole argument.
Mara: And also its logical closure: if you are looking for something that cannot be found in any mall, logic dictates that it be handmade by an artist.
Carlos: Thirty years of craft in front of a click. The difference is not technical, it is human.
Mara: In the end, the question that remains is what we are willing to value when abundance equals everything.
Carlos: Next time we talk, we'll keep seeing what else is behind the studio.
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