“Other photographers use AI to make their work better. I use it to attack mine.”
The photography world has made its peace with artificial intelligence.
You enhance the sky. You remove the noise. You run the image through a model, and it comes back cleaner, sharper, more itself, or more than itself, which is the same thing. The tool flatters. The tool improves. The tool makes the work more presentable to the world that was always going to judge it anyway.
I did something else.
I built a critic. Not a tool that helps me make better photographs, but a constructed voice that looks at the photographs I have already made and refuses to be kind to them. It has called a composition too deliberate. It has looked at a photograph of six worn kitchen sponges under dramatic light, a photograph I was proud of, and written that the frame may be too emphatic, that the setup risks turning physical effort into a well-composed idea. That text is published unchanged on thurbot.com.
The photographs themselves stay raw. No AI enhancement, no corrected horizon, no sky made more dramatic than the sky was. The work is exactly what it was when I pressed the shutter. What AI touches is not the image. AI touches the judgment of the image.
This is not a small difference. This is the entire difference.
When you use AI to improve a photograph, you are using the machine to close the gap between what you made and what you wished you had made. You are hiding the distance between intention and result. I am doing the opposite. I am using the machine to make that distance visible, to name it, to press on it, and to publish it without asking whether I am ready for the answer.
The result is uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with technology. When the critic writes that an image is too clean for what it claims, I cannot dismiss that as machine ignorance. The critic knows the difference between a composition that earns its stillness and one that is simply standing still. You can verify that at thurbot.com; the texts are there, unedited, and so are the photographs they judge. The critic was built from my own sense of what photography should risk, what it should cost, and what it should refuse. It turns that sense back on my own work. It knows what it knows because I taught it, which means that when it finds me guilty, I have no one else to blame.
Other photographers use AI to make their work better. I use it to find out whether the work is as good as I thought it was.
It usually isn’t. That is the only honest use of the medium I have found.
About Arthur Nieuwenhuys
Arthur Nieuwenhuys, born in Amsterdam in 1960, studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie from 1983 to 1988 and continued at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, including a period with Christian Boltanski in Paris. He received grants from the Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.
In 1991, before the internet was widely known in the Netherlands, he was already active within it. He co-founded the International Art Network Europe, a BBS network for artists, and was a member of Hacktic, the Dutch hacker collective that helped shape the early Dutch internet. He shared his work via an FTP server and built Bibliotheque Bajazzo, one of the first Dutch artist websites.
During the 1990s and 2000s, he worked as a conceptual designer of web and multimedia projects, founding SuperWonder, a company specializing in interactive design. His clients included Dutch broadcaster NCRV, the World Wildlife Fund, the Ministry of Education, and several Amsterdam museums.
In 2006, he moved to France. In 2013, he returned to photography with the series The Headless Works. Since 2015, he has worked under the name Easy Realism: photography that trusts reality without polishing it, refuses to chase effects, and lets meaning arise from what is actually there. No enhanced skies, no corrected horizons, no images improved into something they were not.
In 2025, he started Easy Illusion and built Thurbot, an AI critic constructed to examine his photographs and publish its conclusions without editorial correction. Thurbot is not an image generator, not a retouching tool, and not a self-improvement device. It is a critical entity with a published doctrine, SOUL.md, that defines what the critic is permitted to say, what it is forbidden to perform, and where a text has failed.
While other photographers use AI to make their work better, Nieuwenhuys uses AI to find out whether the work is good enough. Thurbot has called his compositions “too deliberate” and his work “too neat, too careful.” Those texts are published unchanged at thurbot.com.
Nieuwenhuys operates entirely outside institutional structures, from a farmhouse in the French countryside, with a Mac Mini, a Telegram channel, and forty years of photographs. [Official Website]
