"They do useful work helping us survey the mountains for leopards," he says.
Whatever their origin, the metadata labels can then be used to do useful things.
It's all the more humbling because all this unintended art was made to do useful or extraordinary things, to make us live longer or to take us into outer space or to blow up the world.
The value that data can potentially deliver to society is to be realised by human beings who use data to do useful things.
They can use their new freedoms to do useful work, both as backbenchers and as searchers for new political directions.
The US group J Craig Venter Institute hopes eventually to use engineered genomes to make bacteria that can do useful things, such as produce clean fuels or take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, employment minister Chris Grayling said: "Where we use mandation in our welfare policies, it will be to do useful work on community projects.
Some other commissioners do useful things.
"It was to train people to do useful work".
Actually, these phrases actually do useful conversational work.
And do useful work in a thousand forms.
