Artist Statement: Artificial intelligence promises efficiency, convenience, and extraordinary technological progress. At the same time, it quietly reshapes how we see the world, how we create, and ultimately who we become. This series examines that transformation through the lives of children—not as predictions of the future, but as reflections of the present. Artificial intelligence is changing the world our children inherit. Through three black-and-white photographs, the series examines anticipation, technological dependence, and imitation. Children wait, watch, and ultimately embody the behaviors modeled for them, suggesting that the most profound influence of AI may not be technological but cultural. The work considers AI’s environmental footprint, its societal consequences, and its impact on human creativity without offering easy answers. Instead, it asks a simple question: What are we teaching the next generation to value, and what future are they learning to accept?

Process: These images were created using a generative AI image model, in conjunction with Night Cafe.AI. I wrote and refined detailed prompts through multiple iterations, curated the final images, and developed the titles and artist statement. AI generated the imagery, while I directed the creative vision, and final presentation. I intentionally used AI not just as a production tool, but as the medium through which to explore the technology’s environmental, societal, and creative implications.

About Sue Vanhorsen:

Sue VanHorsen is a visual artist and storyteller whose work explores the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary. Moving fluidly between photography, printmaking, assemblage, collage, and generative AI, she creates images that invite viewers to pause, smile, and then look again.

For more than a decade, VanHorsen has built an artistic practice rooted in curiosity. She is drawn to the overlooked artifacts of American culture—vintage paperbacks, carnival banners, roadside attractions, science fiction, forgotten photographs, weathered signs, and everyday objects whose stories have quietly faded with time. Rather than preserving these fragments of the past, she reimagines them, allowing memory, humor, and imagination to collide in unexpected ways.

Her work rarely begins with a message. Instead, it begins with an image—sometimes discovered, sometimes invented—that refuses to let go. She follows that image wherever it leads, trusting that its meaning will reveal itself through the process of making. In VanHorsen’s studio, the image comes first; the story arrives later.

This openness to discovery has led her to embrace generative artificial intelligence as another creative medium. To VanHorsen, AI is neither author nor director, but simply another tool—no different in spirit than a camera, an etching press, or a pair of scissors used to build a collage. The artist remains the observer, the editor, and the storyteller.

Whether creating surreal visual narratives, conceptual work about artificial intelligence, handcrafted assemblages, or playful reinventions of American vernacular culture, VanHorsen’s work is united by a belief that humor and curiosity can open doors to deeper conversations. Beneath the wit lies an enduring interest in memory, aging, community, resilience, and the remarkable complexity of being human.

VanHorsen’s work has been exhibited throughout California in solo and juried exhibitions and has received recognition for its originality and innovation, including First Place from the Brill Family Foundation. Regardless of the medium, her work continues to ask the same quiet question: What happens when we choose to look again?