Imagine your phone or car now capable of running AI without ever reaching for the internet. Your data is now its own, its answers instant, its appetite for power small. Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence is not the large data centers people once envisioned, but their opposite, of small, quiet machines, each thinking for itself.

But that feeling tends to fade with AI-generated art. I’ve tried tools like style transfer, where a drawing takes on the look of a Van Gogh or a Picasso. It’s technically impressive and sometimes fun, but it often feels more like applying a filter than engaging in a creative process.