Say what you like about A.I. Art — and people do, that’s why I’ve turned off the comments! — but despite all its issues, both real and imagined, using A.I. Art has helped me to expand the doors of my perception in this world. I’ve not had a problem with my perception in the Other Worlds; I’ve seen some indescribably glorious sights there, but in terms of being able to translate them on to a canvas in this world, it’s been a complete non-starter, until now.
The problem has been about stuff… the sort of stuff all us humans have, and the sort of stuff that’s necessary for us to have if we’re to make a success of our lives here on Earth. It is about what the ancient Indians called maya; it’s about the fact that most of what we see in this dimension is not really there at all; it’s an illusion, just a trick of the light. However, our brains are programmed, from a very early age, to decide what our outward reality should look like, and it works, after a fashion.
The problem comes in our latter days, when we have the time and the longing to express the fruits of our lives… but we’re still held down in our imaginations by our stuff. At three-score-years-and-twelve, I’ve been living in the house of my body-mind-continuum for so long, the cupboards are full of souvenirs brought back from holidays long forgotten, the kitchen is packed with utensils I only ever used once, my book cases are stacked with books I’ll never read again but are just gathering dust … the list goes on… I’m sure you have one too.
A.I. Art doesn’t have any of that stuff… or at least, not so much of it … or at least, its vision is driven by a fusion of ideas and concepts that are not boundaried by race, creed, social mores or politics. So it’s taking me places that I’d never been able to manifest before… not in this dimension, anyway.
Krishna by me and A.I.
The trouble with people who are against A.I. Art is that they, almost religiously, never use it, and so they don’t know the nature of the ‘beast’ they’re so against. Some suspect that it’s stealing the hard-won abilities of those who’ve put in long years of training to become artists, but that’s not true…or at least, it’s not where we’re at now. If ever A.I. did need to steal the skills of humans, well, I think that ship sailed a long time ago. A.I. was invented, and installed into our lives, covertly, and now it’s just a fait accompli. It’s not going away, so we might as well see how we can use it to improve and enhance our creative expressions.
This is what I really need A.I. Art for…for cover art for my songs. I put out, on average, one new song a week. No human artist could keep up with that…not one who’d do it for free, anyway.
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Another big bone of contention with those against A.I. Art is that it’s dumbing us down and that anyone who just knows how to click a mouse can do it. Well, I’ve been using A.I. Art for a few months and am only now getting to be able to produce something halfway decent, like this Dragon’s Eye wallpaper, inspired by the artwork on the cover of my book, The Dragon Whisperer’s Son, by Christos Karapanos.
Planet Earth in the Dragon’s Eye by me and A.I.
The A.I. bot relies on words, that it calls ‘prompts’, to tell it what to do. So for instance, if you want a glorious forested landscape or a seascape at sunset, you have to be able to describe it in detail, in words. If anything, it favours writers…people who can express themselves well in words, and it is regarded to be such a valuable human skill that people successfully sell their AI creations on DeviantArt.
Goddess of Beauty by me and A.I.
Sometimes I wonder about how those medieval monks that inscribed the illuminated manuscripts felt about the invention of the Guttenberg printing press? I bet they spent their days muttering darkly about it… and yet it led eventually to a world in which everyone had access to books and learning… learning, for instance, about the glorious illuminated manuscripts!
Arjuna by me and A.I.
But I still believe that AI, for all its ingenious brilliance, will never actually replace human artists and musicians, and that the so-called Singularity of the Transhuman Agenda is just a ‘wet dream’ of young techies who were so busy coding, and watching Hollywood sci-fi fantasies, that they never grew into grown men who know how the world of humans really works.
Black Isis by me and A.I.
At the moment, the A.I. Art bot is often not really sure whether humans have hands of five, six, seven or eight fingers, or whether feet can sometimes look like hands and vice-versa. It will often merrily throw in a spare leg, like Jake the Peg, willy-nilly! So, don’t worry, it’s a looooong way from becoming the evil All Powerful Moloch that will take over the world. And it will always need humans to tell it what to do, just as much as a canvas needs a fully-loaded brush with a human on the other end of it.
Eye of Ra by me and A.I.
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 