AI glitches are the most honest art I've ever made in Dubai

Two in the morning, and I was staring blankly at a Midjourney window. The luxury brand campaign I'd been commissioned for was already wrapped up — I just wanted to mess around on my own. I was trying to create something that mixed desert sandstorms with neon light, and when the result came through, I paused. The figure's face had split in two, there were eight fingers on the hand, and light was pouring in from a direction that made no physical sense. It wasn't the image I'd wanted. And yet, strangely — it looked more honest than anything I'd delivered in the past few years.

That was the moment that made me write this.

The particular pressure Dubai creates

Working in this city as an art director means endlessly producing a "perfect surface." Like the Downtown skyline, the visual language here has to be flawless and smooth. Clients in meeting rooms lined with leather interiors show you reference images and say it needs to be better than this. I deliver the rendering that meets those expectations, get paid, and move on to the next brief. Somewhere in between, there ought to be a version of myself — but it's not easy to find.

When I first started using AI image-generation tools seriously, I approached it as a question of efficiency. Faster, more, more convincing. But at some point, the glitches started to grab me.

Figures with arms bent at impossible angles, images of a city skyline swallowing itself, moments where a face with no expression somehow shows more feeling. These come from the places where generative AI doesn't fully understand the world. That imperfection touched something in me.

When mistakes reveal the real

Last year, I made a short video for a personal project drawing on a synthwave aesthetic. It was composed of AI-generated images, and I deliberately chose not to fix the errors. Faces melting out of shape, buildings and people bleeding into each other, colour spreading without logic. Finishing that video was the first time I ever felt like I had made something. Everything before had passed through my hands, but it was a precise execution of someone else's instructions.

Glitches are outside my control. That's the whole point. I've studied colour psychology, I calculate composition, I have brand guidelines memorised. But the errors AI produces are beyond my skill set. I didn't choose them — they happened. Paradoxically, within that uncontrollability, my taste, my anxieties, the images I sketch in my head while walking near Dubai Creek all come through more clearly. How I receive an error is, in the end, who I am.

A polished render is the language you use to persuade clients. A glitch is a language for something else. I can't say exactly what that something is, but I know at the very least that it comes from me without room for negotiation.

Between anxiety and imperfection

I carry a lot of anxiety when I work. The night before a deadline, or when I'm not sure I'm heading in the right direction — those feelings hide inside the render file, and then vanish the moment the client says "looks good." That always felt a little strange to me. Were the emotions delivered, or were they erased?

When I work with AI glitches, that anxiety becomes fuel instead. The fear of not knowing what will come out is exactly what produces an image that stops a scroll. That fear stays inside the work. When I come back to it the next morning, it hasn't gone anywhere.

When I look at Dubai's nightscape, I often feel like this city itself is a kind of glitch. A future of glass and steel placed on top of a desert, architecture fighting its climate, streets mixing 100 nationalities. Nothing was designed from the start to turn out this way. Just as that collision is beautiful, so is the way AI misunderstands the world.

Tonight I'll run another new sequence. I don't know what errors are waiting. I like it that way.