AI

Dear Lola, I noticed you might not be a fan of images created using AI and I just wanted to share a perspective. Great art usually combines two things: technical skill, including inherent talent and years of practice, and insight, knowing what to create and why. Without both, you don’t really get a great artist. With just technical skill, you often end up with a graphic designer. With just insight, you might have a strong photographer, since photography generally requires less manual technical skill than, say, painting. AI changes that balance. It’s starting to make the more “liquid” arts like painting, spraying, and illustration closer to photography. That is, a strong idea plus AI can now translate into a finished visual work much more directly. My view is that this doesn’t cheapen art so much as it opens it up. It lowers the technical barrier and lets more people express good ideas visually, which I think will substantially expand the world of art rather than shrink it. Of course, incumbent practitioners will be threatened by this; change is always resisted by conservative forces, especially if it threatens their financial existence, and history suggests that the more a change is resisted, the more impact it eventually has. I love using AI to generate images, partly because it means I can create art despite my inherent lack of talent, and also because it can be silly and funny at times, incorporating weird hallucinations that sometimes unexpectedly improve the concept. The current project is Turtleman at https://maxi8765.github.io/turtleman/ and the reason it exists is to communicate to home when I am travelling in an interesting and insightful way and to play around with AI in order to explore its ever-expanding capabilities. Basically, it is fun. Love Dad