Artist Highlight: Jim Keen on Designing Worlds, Compressing Time, and Why AI Is Not Optional

Jim Keen has never stayed in one creative lane for long. Over nearly 25 years, he has worked primarily as an architect, while also building parallel careers as an illustrator and science fiction author. What connects those paths is not medium, but process: world-building, systems thinking, and a constant willingness to adapt how ideas move from imagination to reality.

When we spoke, Jim was deep into a new project that blends all three identities. He is working on a science fiction project where the visuals come first. Spaceships, hardware, uniforms, doors, entire environments are being designed alongside the story, not after it. Jim is blending his illustration skills with hand sketches, morphlio trace, rhino3D, and a custom trained LLM to generate images from his own writing, then letting those images influence what he writes next.

“I’ve never worked this way before,” he said. “It’s taking me somewhere very different than I originally planned.”

From comics to architecture, by way of realism

Jim’s creative roots go back to comics. Growing up in Manchester, he loved graphic novels and wanted to write comic stories. But coming from a working-class background, that path was not taken seriously. Architecture became a way to keep creativity at the center while choosing a career others considered “real.”

"You make those decisions early," he noted, "often around age 16. And then you look up decades later and realize you are still living with them."

Architecture gave Jim a creative foundation, but it also revealed how much the role evolves. "Early in your career, you execute small pieces of larger ideas. Later, when you are leading billion-dollar projects and managing large teams, the work becomes less about drawing and more about communicating clearly enough for others to build from your intent."

For most of his career, the process itself stayed familiar. In the last few years, that has changed.

A tool that changed his career before AI did

When asked which innovation had the biggest impact on his work, Jim named two.

The first was the iPad Pro. Before that invention, he was sketching on tracing paper, photographing drawings, and scanning them to share. When the iPad arrived with a responsive pen and low latency, it immediately became his primary work device. That shift eventually led him to collaborate with an app developer on the Morpholio Trace, an architectural tracing app, an experience that gave him the confidence to step away from architecture and work as an illustrator for several years.

The second innovation is the one most people are still trying to understand.

What generative AI actually changed for him

Jim does not talk about AI in abstract terms. He talks about time.

Recently, he worked on an architectural competition for a master plan. In the past, a project like that would have required a small team working for several weeks. This time, he completed it himself in four days.

He used AI to summarize a 100-page brief in seconds, draft proposal text tailored to the decision-makers, generate starting images through Midjourney, and then refine those images manually. The result was not just speed. It was a fundamentally different workflow.

“If I did the same project now,” he said, “I could do it better than I did two months ago. The tools are changing that fast.”

For Jim, the biggest positive impact of AI is instant comprehension. Long documents that once took a full day to analyze can now be reduced to clear, usable summaries almost immediately. That frees up time for judgment, taste, and creative direction.

The biggest downside is just as clear.

The problem of confident wrongness

Large language models are persuasive. They sound certain even when they are not. Jim described them as “unreliable narrators.”

“They save a huge amount of time,” he said, “but you can’t accept what they give you as truth without checking it.”

He has experienced the cost of that firsthand. While using AI to help write code for a custom generative system, a small error went unnoticed. He spent an entire day troubleshooting before discovering the issue originated in the initial code provided by the AI.

That experience shaped his caution. AI is powerful, but trusting it blindly is risky, especially when real money, public decisions, or reputations are involved.

Are jobs being lost? Yes, but that’s the wrong question

Jim is direct about the employment impact. AI is already reducing the number of people needed for certain types of work in architecture and illustration. His own ability to complete a project solo is evidence of that.

But he believes many companies are making a strategic mistake.

“They’re using AI to downsize instead of using it to change what they produce,” he said.

If one company cuts staff to maintain the same output, another company can use AI to keep talent and deliver better, faster, or more ambitious work. Over time, the second company wins. In Jim’s view, AI should expand creative potential, not shrink payrolls.

When you can’t tell what’s real, trust becomes the real issue

Jim can usually still spot the difference between human-made and AI-generated images, especially when he is actively looking. But he says that distinction is disappearing quickly. When casually browsing online, it is already difficult to tell. He expects it to become effectively indistinguishable soon.

Most people, he believes, cannot reliably tell the difference now.

That matters because once realism crosses that threshold, misinformation becomes easier to produce, personalize, and distribute. The issue is not just creativity, but trust. When people cannot tell fact from fiction, they either believe everything or distrust everything. Neither outcome is healthy.

This is where Jim sees real value in transparency and disclosure systems that help people understand how content was created, even if bad actors will always exist.

The creative industry he wants to see

Jim’s critique of the creative industry is structural, not technological. He is frustrated by hierarchical models where one person dictates vision and everyone else executes.

The most creative environments he has worked in are collaborative. People bring their own ideas, and leadership functions more like editing than command. The role is not to generate every idea, but to shape the best ones into a coherent whole.

One last question, and a warning

For the final question, Jim chose: Have you ever yelled at a piece of technology?

Yes. He has. Specifically at an AI system that confidently led him down the wrong path for six hours. He laughed about apologizing to it the next day, you know, just in case.

He closed with advice he feels strongly about:

"AI is not a bubble in terms of technology. It is here to stay, and it will keep improving. Ignoring it will not slow it down. It will only isolate you professionally."

“If you want a long-term creative career,” he said, “you have to start using this stuff. And once you do, it’s actually fun.”