The "sudden" emergence of AI art
[note: all images 'by' Brian Craddock] It's 2022 and this year AI art became a cultural presence. A phenomenon in my creative circles. Something that has stirred up huge emotions. Excitement, awe, fear, panic, sadness... It's very hard to describe the feelings that these fascinating AI generated galleries produce in me. Especially the ones that tweak recognizable things from my youth. Because there's obviously a large component of absurdity, which I'm conditioned to find funny. But the absurd is not intrinsically funny. It can also be unsettling. I've never felt the emotions that people have described feeling from the genre of cosmic horror. But this is maybe the closest thing I can compare my feelings to. The fact that these come from a collective unconscious of our society, interpreted by a non-sentient black box that outputs *almost what a conscious human mind puts out. It's uncanny, unsettling, disturbing, and when I try to probe the logic behin