AI Art: Initial Thoughts - Chapter 001

Hello everyone! Not sure how many of you have been engaged with the current controversial debate regarding AI, but I have had a long think on it. To those of you who are only here for a pretty dress, here's a pretty dress with a print made in collaboration with an AI bot. My prompt was a simple "art nouveau" into MidJourney, and then I followed paths to land on a base image I liked enough to use as a base. Here is the dress.

To everyone else, let's talk about AI art.

I believe honest and open conversations with people are the best way forward on anything, so I try to be open with my views. Please read until the end so we can have a thoughtful conversation regarding AI art, because there is a lot of anger around this topic and remaining calm is the best way forward, always.

1. I do not want artists that are being abused by AI art copyright circumvention to continue to be abused.

2. I do think AI technology is our future as a part of history, and I embrace it.

3. I want to be open in talking about it as we develop the ethics of it TOGETHER.

There has been a lot of understandable anger regarding AI art, so let's talk about it. Fear appears to be a big part of it, and feeling threatened by the "technological singularity point" is completely understandable. Acknowledging that, I do not want to be the kind of person ruled by fear; while AI art does well up my anxiety, it is also a challenge to be better as an artist to hone in on who I am. There is a sort of cookie-cutter look that AI art has, and I think the special touch as an artist is what we do with it. We are not irrelevant as artists just because AI exists; I think just like digital art challenged traditional art, there is a place for AI art to exist alongside digital art and traditional art. Eventually, android artists will exists as AI develops sentience, and I DO believe it will happen in our lifetime. I think we need to begin talking about it, because how we treat people or things we perceive as "less than" ourselves are always relevant to our humanity. It is okay to have the OPINION that traditional art is better than digital art, and people do that. Getting angry when people disagree is unhelpful.

I am not going to have all the answers on how to "fix" AI to be ethical in every way immediately. People want it to be stopped altogether, and that is just not going to happen. Just like when the gun was invented, it did not stop its popularity. So the best we can realistically do is have conversations about the terms of use of AI art, how to regulate it, and continuing to engage in conversations to all learn together. One idea I like so far is to have AI code restrict scraping to "public domain" works. I am a big fan of this idea because the works are already for-public unrestricted use, and it would incentivize the digital preservation of ancient works. Museums have already begun to archive and share public domain works online, and I do think making the old greats more available to all is a wonderful idea. The downside is that regulation is going to vary WILDLY from country to country.

Working with AI is an exceptional tool to take art in a fresh direction. Until sourcing gets figured out, I am going to do my best to search for avenues that use public domain works or things to make better FanArt. I spent years learning traditional drawing in architecture school, painting in art school, and think this is a new frontier of 2D art. We recently came to a head as a society with pottery/sculpting vs. 3Dmodeling/3Dprinting, and I think we can all work through this new issue together.

So what am I going to do about it? Things that have heavily generated human faces, I will use those as reference and draw from blank scratch so that the actual digital work itself gets the onus put back on me. I intend to sample portions of textures, but as far as trying to shade and all that... I need to improve as an artist and will take AI that I use with a grain of salt as suggestions on direction I could take my art in.

In conclusion, I wanted to be open with my thoughts so my audience knows what kind of person they are supporting. I apologize if this offends anyone, and am sorry if it is a dealbreaker. I at least want to give my supporters the choice to go or stay. I hope you DO stay, though, even if we won't always agree on things. Please do share your thoughts, ask questions aloud for all of us to engage, and let's all be civil.

Thank you for reading and listening.