Most people who make images with AI reach for the word "artist" pretty quickly. The person running The Archive In Between goes the other way. They stay anonymous, sign everything as the "Head Curator," and when the subject of artistry comes up, they draw a hard line down the middle of their own work: the writing is theirs, the images are curated. "I would never attach the title of 'artist' to myself as it relates to the use of AI," they told The Daily Egg.
The Archive is a sci-fi, horror, and fantasy anthology — human-written stories paired with AI-generated imagery, all framed as transmissions from a library that sits between worlds. Stories arrive as carousels, short videos, and long-form pieces, loosely stitched into one interconnected universe. It runs across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, Patreon, Discord, and Spotify, and it has been going for about two and a half years.
@thearchiveinbetween
The Writing Is Done by Hand
The part of the process the Curator will claim is the prose, and it's all theirs. Every story is written by a human — no model drafting sentences, no AI ghostwriter. The only place a language model touches the words is as a reference: "ChatGPT is the best thesaurus in the entire world. That is the extent of my use of AI in the writing." No formal creative-writing training sits behind it, either. The Archive started as a pile of short stories the Curator had already written and didn't want to force into a single genre — the library-between-worlds frame was the container that let a horror piece and a fantasy piece and a science-fiction piece all live under one roof.
That output is steady. The Archive publishes around four stories a week, one of them long-form, which is a lot of finished narrative for a project run by one person.
Then the Images Get Curated
The imagery is where the "curator" word does its work. The Curator generates in Midjourney now, having switched over from Stable Diffusion 1.5, then composites the pieces in Google Slides before laying the final story out in InDesign. A carousel takes roughly two and a half to five hours; a video runs one to two. The script comes first, then the images, then the design — the story leads, the pictures follow.
And the Curator is blunt about what generating those pictures feels like. "I feel less like an artist and more like a curator. It's like I'm sifting through shit because there's a lot of it and I'm picking out what looks passable." The distinction they keep coming back to is where the craft actually lives: "The artistry comes across in the writing part of it. I don't personally feel like an artist when I generate an image." It's a rare thing to hear from someone whose whole feed is AI imagery — the maker themselves refusing to inflate what the tool did.
@thearchiveinbetween
The Illustrator Behind the Curator
The reason the Curator can talk this way about AI is that they were making pictures for a living before any of it. They spent about four years at a digital marketing agency and roughly six months at a Southern California apparel company as a professional illustrator and freelance designer. When generative image tools arrived, the read was existential — the skill they'd built a career on suddenly had a machine version. The Archive is what they did with that instead of fighting it: point the trained eye at the outputs and use it to pick, arrange, and reject.
That framing carries into how they explain the project's traction, too. Asked why it worked, the Curator credits "50% luck in timing and 50% my perspective" — half being early, half having something to actually say.
It Pays the Bills
The Archive is full-time income now, and it comes from readers rather than ads. Patreon is the primary channel, ahead of Substack, and the catalog extends into book sales — e-books plus print-on-demand paperbacks through Amazon. The Substack and Patreon run the serialized stories; the compendium volumes collect the lore into something you can hold.
@thearchiveinbetween
The whole operation is built on a split the Curator refuses to blur: the words are authored, the images are selected, and only one of those two earns the word "artist" in their book. You can follow the transmissions on TikTok, read the long-form stories on their Substack, or dig through the full catalog at thearchiveinbetween.com. The reporting here draws on "The Honest AI Artist" interview in The Daily Egg.