I’m a lousy artist.
I definitely have the creative skills of a five-year-old when it comes to drawing stick figures and the like, but I can typically color inside the lines in a coloring book, so I’m not entirely lacking in talent.
Being a writer, on the other hand, makes me feel a bit better about myself when it comes to making articles.
I’m also aware that I have a vivid imagination. If only I could find a method to portray it, since taking images is nearly always about documenting the actual world rather than the make-believe that exists in my imagination.
Then I spotted a friend uploading these wonderful photos on social media that were too beautiful to be true, realms that could only have sprung from my own mind. The people and settings he created were so real that it was difficult to reject them as purely fictitious at times.
That was my first encounter with AI art – images created by artificial intelligence (AI) software. Essentially, computer visuals generated from a word prompt.
The user — or “artist” — writes in a description of a scene they want to create, using as many or as few descriptive words as they choose, and the program automatically generates that scene using a formulaic algebra-based algorithm. And within minutes… presto! You are shown a piece of “art” that was generated by machine learning.
Computer algorithms are built to “learn” a certain aesthetic by analyzing tens of thousands of photos on the internet, and the algorithm then attempts to build an entirely new image that corresponds to the aesthetics it has learnt.
Using this new technology has been a wonderfully amusing rabbit hole into which I’ve fallen, and it may be addicting for anyone with a little time and a limitless imagination.
Is it, however, art?
I consider it an art form since the algorithms and computational power are analogous to the instruments used by traditional artists, such as a canvas, brush, and paints.
The art is just in a different physical form, and what drives the outcomes in both the instance of the painter and the person utilizing a computer, is that person’s imagination.
This is not a new debate. Decades ago, the same could be said about using PhotoShop to produce and change pictures, and since then, graphic art has essentially been a consequence of software algorithms.
Even before picking up a paint brush or pencil, artists may utilize technology to physically map out a design or mood of what they perceive in their heads.
And, of course, “artistically challenged” folks like me may express myself indefinitely without fear of losing the hand-eye coordination necessary to correctly transfer idea to canvas.