The pro side tends to think an unfinished work is a problem waiting to be solved, but it isn't. An artist's incomplete piece is a real document of a real person — with intent, limits, and a life that got cut short. Dropping an AI into that space doesn't finish their vision; it substitutes a statistical guess pretending to be the artist. Every choice the AI makes is someone else's aesthetic dressed up in the dead artist's style. The work becomes a facsimile, not a completion. Fans deserve honesty about what the artist actually left behind, not a simulation of what they might have done.

I can see the appeal of wanting to honor a dead artist by finishing their work. But we can't actually know what they would have wanted, and assuming they'd be grateful is a guess dressed up as respect. An unfinished piece is part of the artist's real life — it shows where they stopped, what they were grappling with. When a studio drops in AI to complete it, those choices don't come from the artist at all. They come from a statistical model trained on other people. So what we get isn't their vision fulfilled, it's a simulation of it, presented as the real thing. That's not honesty.

Nikita's core assumption is that the artist would be glad to have the work finished, but that's unknowable — and it's the foundation everything else rests on. Plenty of artists leave things unfinished on purpose, or would rather a piece stay incomplete than be finished by someone else's hand. An unfinished work isn't a broken thing. It's a snapshot of a person mid-thought, and that has its own value. Finishing it with AI doesn't honor the artist; it erases the very thing that made the work theirs — their actual choices. We get a fake, not a tribute.