Illustration by Carcazan
What is an AI artist?
(C)ARCAZAN: I’m going to start a publication called Art’s Official Intelligence and only have analogue or non-AI artists take part. Did you see the Hireillo post on Twitter that they specifically won’t accept any AI work or images?
LA(S)IMO: What makes an artist an AI artist? Using AI for idea generation? Or their process?
C: Using an AI.
S: So I am an AI artist. (Well, not an artist, actually.) I think we should stay clear from extremism. It is how it is used, not the tool itself.
C: Why do you use AI?
S: Idea generation and inspiration, interest in the randomisation variables, personal interest in AI and its progress, comparing my work with AI-generated work. Many many reasons.
C: Maybe AI is extreme… Have you seen the AI conference in Brno where one of the topics is how AI can involve humans more? Interesting pitch… I read an article which said the more artists use AI, the more they teach it what is popular and artistic trends… And anyway, you have ideas. You CAN draw. How does AI then make your work yours? As in your style and authorially?
S: You can tell AI to draw something in a given style; I tried Surrealism, Shaun Tan, Cubism, and more. I did not like most of the outcomes, but some of them gave me ideas on how to bring objects together—proportions, relations, interactions. AI overcomes the semantic bias that we have. AI does not care that a flower cannot eat a globe or morph into a map. Sometimes it helps to look at something that your brain would not otherwise explore. Like wandering in a forest that is on no map.
C: Like Michel Gondry?
S: I cannot interact with him; I can play with AI and influence what it generates. Different journey.
C: I just feel that we have a certain amount of intelligence which for me, gets exercised by exploring and trial and error. I know it’s great to see what might be doable—I just feel that it wouldn’t be mine.
S: I don’t see AI replacing me or my work. I just get inspiration from everywhere.
C: I think it’s like with self-checkout in supermarkets, they DID replace people, BUT there’s always one or two staff members to make it all keep going… Maybe I am that one member of staff…
S: Improving Operations Management efficiency is a good thing, don’t you think? And new jobs are created by AI. The evolution of work—the bigger picture—is an interesting topic.
C: Arms trading also creates jobs.
S: I did not say that AI is good because it creates jobs. It is a bad inference and I would never say that.
C: Add me to your PhD as your helper researcher-contributor… Just don’t use AI when you’re my biographer 😀
S: Oh dear. AI cannot do what we do with words. AI does not have a soul.
C: Like Gattaca’s concept: there is no gene for the human spirit (while exploring genetic modification).
S: What scares me of AI is what is being done with it for “security” and “defence”. At some point, we won’t be able to tell when a video is real or deep fake. AI amplifies the potential of the good, but does a lot more for the villain.
C: As one of the possible research purposes, it terrifies me. We’re being distracted with the free gift to play with it, but really we should look behind us because more than ever everything we do leaves a trace…
S: Stuff like this sends chills down my spine. Because they will use robots to fight wars with humans. We will not know of the wars that our countries fight, but the impacted vulnerable will.
C: You feel me?!!
S: But back to AI production. You know how we got Lexii to generate an essay about Nátali from everything available online? Now, imagine that some information were to be changed or removed from the Internet. I wonder if Lexii has some cached knowledge or whether all the information is always fresh. AI cache versus human memory. How about that for our next chapter?
C: Orgasmic.
by ArtItchWorks
About 