The Thinking ‘Kat: AI and Artists
I find drawn back to what is rapidly becoming the pertinent topic of our time, at least in terms of creativity and imagination. There are certainly many other ways in which AI is impacting the world, and many of them are serious concerns, but the immediate focus of this post relates to human ingenuity and innovation in creative media.
The single most obvious area of AI influence has been with art, and specifically drawings, paintings and videos. With tools like Gemini and Bing – along with several others – granting anyone the opportunity to feed a prompt or idea into an image generator, anyone can now produce art. Or can they?
Does an AI artist even exist as a concept, and should it exist? If the generator does all of the work, save for coming up with the inspiration, wouldn’t a better term for AI artist be ‘prompt sourcing assistant’, or some other such term? It’s not like the prompter has spent hundreds of hours practicing, making mistakes, learning and growing as an artist. They haven’t poured their hearts into it. Artists create with their souls, minds and hands. Prompters offer an idea to a line of code.
I am no artist. I have exploited AI in the past for Meerkat Musings, and I may do so again. At no stage would I pretend that I am an artist for doing so. Don’t get me wrong, AI can be a potent and useful tool to exploit, but if it starts to replace genuine human endeavour, if we lean on AI as a crutch, we will lose our means to think critically, and creatively imagine. At that stage we might as well become robots ourselves. To be an artist, you need to wield your mind and body.
This matters to me from the perspective of an author. It would be easy to let AI write for me, but what would be the point? From a grammatical point of view it would be near-perfect, but would it have heart, tension, passion and power? No. The same applies to music, film and games. Again, this is not to say that AI can’t be used as a resource, but we not let it do all the work. We’ll wind up with psychological and emotional atrophy if we walk that particular path.
I’ll wrap up this post with some of my drawings, and some of my generations. I know which ones I’m proud of.
What are your thoughts, my dear ‘kats?
‘Kat Comments