My 1994 Packard Bell 486SX 25/33 isn’t that impressive thirty years on but it impressed me in the 90s because it had a the set of matching SVGA monitor and video card. Super VGA my dude. 800x600 pixels, and 24 bit colour, that’s 16,777,216 possible colours per pixel.

I hypothesised back then that if you wrote a program that simply randomised the colour of each of the 480,000 pixels you could see any image ever - eventually.

I called it the Face of God idea. That eventually that computer could just imagine and display any image real or otherwise, even the face of God.

As the Pixel 9 AI “what is a photo” terror arises this week I’m thinking about it all again. What does it mean when a photo isn’t a photo?

I wonder if this is the dawn of a new fantastic era of creativity and wonder, or if my favourite means of creativity - photography - has just been hit with a nuclear bomb?