Using A.I Generator programmes

Is it art?

I hear this question about three times day on a good day.

I've come to the decision, who cares?

Artificial intelligence is a great tool, most similar to the still camera, anyone can grab a camera and take a photo, but not everyone is a photographer..

It takes a certain amount of skill and knowledge, but mostly it takes creativity and a good idea to take a good photo.

Its the same with using an A.I generator. Anyone can type in a promo and generate an image, but its the idea of what is being created, and the context the image I put in, and what the artist decides to do with the image after the generation.

There may be an argument for people who generate 'art' with prompts including the names of other artists such as 'in the style of...' But in general, most artists worth calling artist wouldn't want to copy what already out there anyway, the reason for using and trusting the software is to generate original imagery, by avoiding using someones likeness, generating art in the style of no-one but your own or whatever the generator generates, and giving the images a reason to exist is not an issue to copyright or anything.

"But if you don't create it with your own hand its not art", this is another response that people using A.I software have to deal with daily. And its tiring, because these people, feeling they know enough about art to call out peoples art as non art, have clearly not considered the history of art.

The industrial revolution sparked the Modernist era, where artists were faced with a brand new world, far different to what came before, painting in the years before modernism was a skilful act, painting to capture as realistic an image as possible. When the still camera was invented, artists felt less of the need to capture images in a realistic style, as the camera did it better.

This change was part of the spark of Modernism, cubism took on a completely different approach, and so did surrealism, the invention of the camera that did art better than an artists hand, made artists think more creatively.

I believe AI will do a similar thing.

In contrary to what people say " but AI will take over, and take artists jobs, and put artists out of a living!"

AI isn't alive.. yet at least, it won't take over artists, artists will use it as a tool to create. It exists, its getting better each day, and it ain't going nowhere!

Either embrace it or don't, it doesn't matter.

Creativity, the ability to imagine and produce from that imagination is what makes us human, its what gives each person on this planet the potential to become an artist, I don't believe An Artificial intelligence system will destroy creativity, only enhance the things we can achieve, much quicker and with spending less money.

For an example of what I mean by a tool, and what you do with the images afterwards, here's some examples I have put into practice;

I have been writing a fictional tv series with a friend of mine, its a world where there is a race that live alongside our human communities, its literally underground and much more advanced than humans, we wanted an artificial sky in large underground cities. I have been the visual designer, and world building side to the writing partnership.

I started by drawing a few ideas, but my penman ship isn't good enough (at least with quick sketches) to generate the ideas I had in my head through a pencil. This isn't because Im lazy as a lot of people who are against A.I suggest, its because I'm not an illustrator, Im a Meta-disciplinary artist (think taking loads of different disciplines and ideas, putting them into a meat grinder, and producing something new 'mince' out the other end, unlike multi-disciplinary, where you may use multiple disciplines and processes, but it ends up being a few things made from different things, I feel Meta-Discipline is more combination, more coherency between everything, a merger) this means that I have lots of different things to do to complete a project, if I had to sit there and hand generate the imagery I needed, for multiple fake businesses, posters, clothing, set design, it would take I reckon about 3 to 4 months (probably more) to complete a project that could take one month using tools such as A.I, and for me, and a world builder and story teller, the process of making is important, but the most important thing to me is the narrative, the story that's being told, as long as I can produce the necessary parts to tell the story I'm telling.

In this context I was working on a TV series that would usually have at least one, maybe two or three or more full time illustrators and designers working to create the overall image, we wanted to get a good idea of the image, a visual cue in order to aid our writing, we were writing a full first season of hour longs, seven episodes and also preparing ideas for season two and three, we didn't want to try and sell a pilot episode and hand it off to a team of writers to make their own, we wanted to create a series that was ours, we believe in the story and want the story to be told in the right way, so it was important to get the visuals of the world building right in this early stage in order to add things in early on that would pop up later in the series, and if the story went a direction where it would mean that a character would need to act a certain way or a piece of world building had to be a certain way, we could design it now, rather than later and have to go over things and work around details that we didn't put in etc..

So here's some of the designs generated by artificial Intelligence;