About
AI as an Apprentice
I’m Sparsh Gupta. I make photographs — on drives, layovers, and cold mornings — and Tangent is where I hang them. Every frame here is one I stood in front of and pressed the shutter for: nothing was generated, sourced, or borrowed. Each begins as a raw click, straight off the camera.
By day, I lead AI teams in big tech. This project is my tangent from it — and I mean the word the way geometry does: a line that touches a curve at a single point, then goes its own way. Here, that’s the same craft I work with all day, turned toward something I love for its own sake.
Taught, not generated
Let me be precise about the AI, because the word usually means something lazier than what happens here.
There’s a real difference between AI-generated and AI-edited. A generated image is conjured whole from a prompt — the photograph never existed. Nothing here works that way. My photographs are real; the AI’s only job is to develop them.
I don’t hand a frame to a model and keep whatever it returns. I’m teaching an agent to edit — to read light and histograms, mask a sky, shape luminance, hold a black — the skills a human retoucher earns over years, one at a time.
It learns the way people do: by being corrected. Two AIs work in a loop. The actor (Claude) studies the raw frame and makes an edit. The critic (Gemini) judges it against a master’s standard and sends back honest notes — this shadow is crushed, that glow is fake, this grade is timid. The actor tries again. Round after round, the print gets closer.
It’s slow on purpose — perfection takes patience. The machine makes mistakes; we find them and fix them one by one. No amount of generation can replace a real photograph and a trained eye — editing can’t invent what wasn’t there, only draw out what the light already gave. The teaching never ends: I’m still refining the agent, still chasing a better print.
The looks
Every plate is developed more than once. Open any work and pull the divider: the raw frame on one side, the photograph it became on the other — sometimes a whisper apart, sometimes a reinvention.
Each click is hung in two or three looks — one negative, read more than one way:
- Master print — the honest develop, the scene as a careful eye would print it.
- Machine’s eye — the stylized read, the machine off the leash: bold, unnatural on purpose, an interpretation rather than a record.
- Alternate — an optional third take, a counterpoint to the other two.
One hangs on the wall; the rest wait a click behind it.