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 behind how such a system could do the things it's doing, it does feel like staring into the abyss. Into the mouth of madness.
This is a truly alien 'mind' that 'gets us' enough to come SO close to accurately interpret our words into these fever dream images. And my impression is that systems like there are going to be exerting more and more influence over our culture, minds, institutions, and IS CURRENTLY mediating a lot of our social lives. It is truly unsettling. But I can't look away.
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 behind how such a system could do the things it's doing, it does feel like staring into the abyss. Into the mouth of madness.
This is a truly alien 'mind' that 'gets us' enough to come SO close to accurately interpret our words into these fever dream images. And my impression is that systems like there are going to be exerting more and more influence over our culture, minds, institutions, and IS CURRENTLY mediating a lot of our social lives. It is truly unsettling. But I can't look away.
There's a ton of issues that this sudden emergence brings up. I don't want to dive deep into those issues now because this blog is intended to simply be a record of what I thought when it first emerged. I wrote about a bit ago:
I definitely have conflicted feelings about AI art. On the one hand I'm happy that people who lack artistic skill can still get their ideas visually represented. On the other, this isn't going to stop with happy people giving prompts. AI will subsume the whole creative industry, including prompts, story telling, and media production. That pretty much erases the foundation of what I've determined to be my reason for existing. As far as I can tell there's nothing we can do about this.
What strikes me emotionally is a mid-long term forecast. (which I think could be anywhere from 5-20 years) where virtually ALL creative content is made by AI without human input. I'm trying to come up with any countervailing force that could overturn this conclusion, but I'm failing to do so.
To add, it doesn't NEED to be ALL creative content. Just enough that there is no viable path for human-made stuff to be seen by significant eyeballs to make the effort 'worth it' for those who need external validation to create. (Which I think is more of us than we'd like to admit.)
I definitely have conflicted feelings about AI art. On the one hand I'm happy that people who lack artistic skill can still get their ideas visually represented. On the other, this isn't going to stop with happy people giving prompts. AI will subsume the whole creative industry, including prompts, story telling, and media production. That pretty much erases the foundation of what I've determined to be my reason for existing. As far as I can tell there's nothing we can do about this.
What strikes me emotionally is a mid-long term forecast. (which I think could be anywhere from 5-20 years) where virtually ALL creative content is made by AI without human input. I'm trying to come up with any countervailing force that could overturn this conclusion, but I'm failing to do so.
To add, it doesn't NEED to be ALL creative content. Just enough that there is no viable path for human-made stuff to be seen by significant eyeballs to make the effort 'worth it' for those who need external validation to create. (Which I think is more of us than we'd like to admit.)
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