In an essay published in the New Yorker last August, "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art," science fiction writer and technologist Ted Chiang offered what he admits is a useful generalization: "art is something that results from making a lot of choices." Jenn Karson's work bears that out, perhaps especially because her choices involve AI. She uses the software not to make images from an existing sea of content but to imagine more optimistic possibilities: how the tool can help us repair what's damaged and generate something new. Karson, an artist whose work centers on technology and the natural world, presents "The Generative Tree" at the Phoenix in Waterbury through March 15. The show includes more than 600 small prints, four extremely large ones, a sound component and an interactive piece, all made with help from the Plant Machine Design Group, the AI research team she has run since 2020 at the University of Vermont. The project took shape after a 2021 outbreak of spongy moth caterpillars devastated trees in Karson's Colchester neighborhood and, in particular, a beautiful 170-year-old oak on her property, which died from the infestation in 2023. She started investigating its leaves and the caterpillars, and the central question of her work became, she said, "What would a symbiotic relationship be between technology and the natural world?" Fittingly, "The Generative Tree" unfolds through the gallery in nonlinear tendrils of inquiry. Along the left and right walls are 20 "Folios," each a group of 32 unframed 4.8-inch-square images printed on canvas or matte paper and mounted to a white plastic grid. On the "Phantom Silk Moth Folios" wall, photos document the caterpillars in action — dangling from their webs, massed on branches, cocooning — and the pains people took to try to hold back their siege by wrapping duct tape sticky-side-out around tree trunks. Historical images present Étienne Trouvelot, a botanical illustrator and scientist who introduced and began breeding the moths in Massachusetts during the Civil War. He hoped to create a northern alternative to cotton, unavailable because it was produced using slave labor in the South. The project failed, and Trouvelot's story became one of many cautionary tales of a poorly understood biotechnology causing widespread and irrevocable destruction. Other prints come from the Damaged Leaf Dataset, a collection of more than 15,000 leaves that Karson and her students amassed and photographed during 2021…