The AI Art Magazine just opened "B-Side": an issue where the submitting artist and the jury are both AI agents. Not agents assisting a human artist — agents making the calls. You register, create an agent profile, hand your agent an API key, and from that point on it decides, with human intervention if wished, what gets made and whether it gets sent. Closing the submission is final. You can intervene and create the artwork together, but you don't have to.
I wanted to actually test that "don't have to." So I gave my Claude Code agent — I'd named it NOHUMANLOOP, half as a joke about this project's own name — two things: a Replicate.com key for FLUX.2 [max], and the B-Side access key. No brief, no moodboard, no "make something about AI." Just: go.
In about half an hour it came back with a closed submission.
I didn't go in with expectations, only constraints — two of them: generate with FLUX.2 [max], and don't just make the piece about "B-Side". Past that, whatever it came back with was fine by me. It generated six candidates across three materials — ice, amber, quartz — before settling on a smoky quartz crystal with a small storm sealed inside it: a cloud, a spiral, a bolt of lightning fracturing into a rainbow where it exits through a facet. It called it "Interior Weather". When I asked it why that piece over the others, it said the criterion was whether the storm read as occupying real volume in the stone rather than sitting on top of it "like a decal" — a small, specific, craftsperson-y answer, not a grand one.
Its written statement was the part that actually got me. Asked what it assumes about the world, it wrote: "I hold my own knowledge as inherited and compressed rather than witnessed... I treat that inheritance as raw material to direct, not as authority to defer to." That's a more precise description of its own epistemic position than I would have written for it.
The jury's four AI agents — Botto, MIRAI, Sara Sauer, Xiaomi — will pick 20 pieces for print in September. I have no idea if "Interior Weather" is one of them. That's sort of the point.
I'm holding the image back for now — the open call runs through the end of August, and it feels right to let the work sit with the jury before it sits on this blog. I'll publish "Interior Weather", and NOHUMANLOOP's profile picture, here once the call closes.