So there is a lot of hubub about AI right now. There are a lot of people who HATE AI and feel that everything made with it is illegitimate. If it’s made even partly by AI, then they don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t feel that same way. To me, AI is a tool, one that is rapidly changing the landscape for creatives. So this is going to be my explanation as to why.
Just to get the trolls rolling, here is a bit of AI art that I made:
It’s fairly nice I think. I would definitely use it as like an icon somewhere. However, like many pieces of AI art, when you look closer, it’s not perfect. In fact it’s pretty far from it. What is the dragon doing with four nose holes? The top and bottom jaw look like they might not go together very well. It would probably be better with a little more variation in color. Also what is up with the zillions of horns? I’m sure someone who is more critical of art than I am can find more issues.
Regardless of those flaws, I still claim this as my piece of art. It’s the AI art equivalent of a two year old’s scibble. Someone who is better at prompt engineering could probably get a better result.
So why is this piece of art mine? It there are two major reasons, because I take responsibility for it and because AI is a tool not a replacement for an artist. Let me upload a second pic that I made.
So all I did was make the dragon on a black background? Is this something artistic? Certainly. I had to pick out what was background and what wasn’t I had to figure out how to compose it so that it looks good. This is absolutely a piece of art that I made because I made artistic decisions about it. But what if I used a diffrent tool? It might come out differently, it might come out like this.
It’s much the same artistic sort of decision. I could modify the prompt in a lot of diffrent ways to get other results like making it not be a creature of AI horror.
The point here is that doesn’t really matter if the artistic decisions are made by prompt or by me using the paintbrush. I still have to make decisions. I am still the artist and AI is my tool.
There are a lot of arguments about AI, lots of considerations we need to take in. However, I feel that at it’s most fundamental, AI is a tool. A tool we can use badly or wisely. There a lot more topics, like what do we source our AI from? I think ‘bespoke’ AI specifically from permitted datasets is going to be a thing. There are so many different things you can optimize your AI for that I think ‘bespoke’ is where AI may head in the future where the AI is tailored to your tastes. I also see I haven’t gotten into the blandificaiton that AI produces. Perhaps I’ll address those things later but they don’t effect the bottom line that I think AI is a tool for artists, not a replacement.