Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that generative AI has been making humongous in-roads lately. Companies have been launching techno-gizmos that you can feed prompts to and have it generate art, text, and music for you, resulting in all kinds of sturm und drang about the future of art made by humans.
My take on all of this is pretty simple:
- The technology, if we can talk about its implementation sans all the other legal, social, ethical and other knock-on effects etc etc etc, is pretty amazing. (But see below, we can’t not talk about all those implications!)
- In the long-term, there is zero existential threat to human beings making art with their own hands and wits; that in fact, in a world flooded with AI-generated crapola, my belief is that human art will go up in value.
- In the short-term, and maybe the medium-term, yeah, there’s going to be a ton of shenanigans related to AI art (see, for example, the scammy shit that overflows the world of NFTs, the ethics of feeding these machines with copyrighted work, and shitty capitalistic practices of putting skilled artisans out of work just to make even more profits).
But this blog post is not about all of that. Instead, it’s about how I had a little fun with generative AI, restricting myself only to artists whose work would be considered in the public domain. I mostly stuck with Dalle-2, and mostly did one-off runs with single prompts and no followups. Occasionally, though, I would ask Dalle-2 to refine a bit of work, using the output of certain runs as input for the next run.
Before I go on though, I have to address the ethics issue, because I’m 100% in the camp of “most of this is suspect because these models were trained on bodies of work used without approval, consent, attribution, or compensation.” IE, it feels to me (and many others) that a bunch of hand waving is happening on the part of these companies as they wholesale sweep up all kinds of copyrighted artworks to feed their machines without compensating the makers of those artworks.
So if that keeps you from playing around with what is essentially a very big, neat, toy, then that’s 100% understandable. As I stated before, I figured I would try to keep my prompts related to artists whose works were made centuries ago – knowing full well that this doesn’t exonerate me in any way, as the models were likely trained on a whole bunch of art made by living, breathing people today who need to pay their bills.
The best way to learn how to use these tools, really, is to log on to one or two of them and just start piddling around with them. They all take a text prompt (“an oil painting of a dog in a space suit running happily through a jungle landscape filled with butterflies”) and turn that prompt into one or more visual pieces of art. Many of the tools also allow you to feed in a piece of art to start the process, and to then recursively feed in successive output of generated art into a loop to see what might “evolve” through the process.
At the time that I used it, I was painting a great deal of abstracts, and I thought to myself, “hey I wonder what kind of abstract art might have been created by the grand masters throughout history?” I then asked what different historical (and pre-historical!) groups might do with the abstract form.
For your amusement, here are some of the masters/periods I asked about, and the responses. I found them interesting and instructive, mostly because what the model is doing is taking what it knows about each artist’s (or culture’s) use of color/line/shape/perspective/etc and basically vomiting up what it thinks is a “good” answer.
How did I use these responses? Mostly, I had a good laugh, because let’s face it, the idea is silly! As silly as wondering if Bach would have composed good 80s hair metal music (the answer is yes, of course, DUH).
But also, I used it as a bit of a check on some of the compositional studies I was doing as I was painting 3-5 canvases a day during my initial learning curve.
Okay, enough of that, let’s get on to the fun bits. I particularly liked the Neanderthal abstract art, and Picasso’s dogs playing poker.
Here’s Van Gogh:
Matisse:
Rembrandt:
Reubens:
Da Vinci:
Bruegel:
Raphael:
Neanderthals:
Vikings
Aztecs:
Iroquois:
Last but not least, I wanted to know, what if Picasso had painted Dogs Playing Poker? Well, here’s what DALLE-2 thinks:
