AI: Shit Floats

Art Discipline is a monthly drop of thoughts, processes, and behind-the-scenes from the artist behind OlliOlli World (BAFTA-nominated). Dive into character design, world building, and the weird joys of making art. Stay weird.

Hating AI as a general term and a technology that could enhance some aspects of our lives is questionable and up to debate. But when it comes to AI generating images and doing the “creative process” for you, well, I got some thoughts.

When we talk about the creative process and why AI image generators are fundamentally not just a “new tool” I separate this topic into different parts:

1. Creativity Can’t Be Outsourced: Skipping the steps of a creative process and not controlling the outcome. Atrophy of skills.

2. Art & Accessibility

3. Tools: Is ordering from a restaurant like cooking something yourself?

4. Ethical issues with Copyright Infringement (I won’t expand on this since AI companies steal our data and copyright, there’s not much to add here)

Creativity Can’t Be Outsourced

Creativity and working on art projects is about the journey. You challenge your brain and your knowledge by working on something. Doing that process you materialize how far can you get with your skills. In other words, you can see the gap between your actual skills and the perception in your mind of what you can achieve. This process makes your brain work, think creatively on what you can do and get ideas during the process.

Why not pressing a button and getting a final thing, like an image or a video?

If you describe with words what you want, it should give you something accurate, right?

This sounds like ordering from a restaurant, you’re not making it.

Reality is more complicated than that, the creative process is not just “you have an image in your brain and you want to express it” or “take a couple of things you like and mix them randomly”.

When you take a couple of things as references and you want to mix them to create something new, one could say that it makes sense to put them in a mixer, press a button and ready to go.

On one hand, anyone can do that so where’s the merit on that?

This is one of the arguments pro AI creating images: AI does the same as the human brain, mixes images or ideas from others and creates something new.

But there’s a key question most people forget. When an artist take references and create a project base on these, the process goes through the artist’s mind, filtering the world and projecting their personality into the project. This is what creates style, happy accidents and gives room to experimentation. Something that just can be achieved by experiencing the process of creating something.

But it’s not your brain doing the work. You’re typing some words and pressing a button hoping for the best. You’re not learning, you don’t know how to modify an image to achieve what you want. Skills atrophy if you don’t use them.

You can’t outsource creativity, once it’s not going through your brain, is not going to be you.

Art & Accessibility

There’re talks about art being accessible with AI, about “democratization of creativity”. What does this even mean? What’s creativity? What does it mean to be democratized?

Art is already accessible, take a pen and write your story or draw a doodle. You suck? Learn from others. Information is what’s been democratized thanks to the internet and we can use it in our advantage. But there’s always a price and in the case of creating something the price is hard work.

Everything can’t be free.

To achieve some things you need to learn your craft and develop skills. This is not a waste of time. These are paths to mastery and getting a deeper understanding of the art you want to express your ideas in.

Learning your craft and the process involved in creating a piece of art gives you power to create what’s in your mind.

Independence means freedom to create.

Tools: Is ordering from a restaurant like cooking something yourself?

We all have heard repeatedly about this comparison of AI with other tools in the past that produced a revolution.

“Is just another tool, adapt or die.”

There’s a universal law with humans, and it’s that we don’t want to see reality if we suck big time at something.

Most people think that they have great vision and taste.

This is a big majority of people so it makes sense that generative AI had such a big welcome. All of this people with great taste and no knowledge can type down a prompt and ask for something thinking it’s because of them that this image exists.

The trick of the century.

This is also easy to do and gives you a hit of dopamine so it’s the perfect combination.

Can this be a tool?

Maybe, if we remove the copyright infringement and scraping the data from all the internet I can see some uses. In the creative process I think it affects in a very negative way because of the reasons explained earlier.

Maybe in the future as part of a brainstorming session combining your own work?

Maybe just as part of some early explorations but never as the final thing?

Maybe to use it for technical aspects like correcting the light in your image the same way you would ask for feedback to another person?

A lot of open questions in that regard, but about the creative process I got no doubts. Laziness tends to win and we will miss some amazing art because of this.

Creativity is about the actual journey, not the destination.

See you in the next drop <3

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