Unless you have been hunkering down in a remote cabin in Idaho, or maybe in the rain forests of Southeast Asia you have been hearing about the coming tsunami of AI - aka - artificial intelligence - and how it is going to change the world while unfortunately eliminating millions of blue collar and entry level jobs. Could be. Who knows? But I thought we were all supposed to have flying cars and teleportation pods by now. I guess we will all just have to wait and see.
My concern is with the supposed impact on the creativity sector, you know, "the arts." Perfect prose, perfect sculpture with 3D printing, perfect images with filters and CG. Everything we now struggle through with tools, and physical processes, and physical effort will all be handled with AI. Al-lelujah!
I don't think so.
There is this wonderful book; Almost Lost Arts: Traditional Crafts and the Artisans Keeping Them Alive by Emily Freidenrich and Margaret Shepard that chronicles the activities of a variety of artisans from potters to weavers, to folks making world globes - all without the "help" of AI.
I cannot speak to those crafts, I have no experience with them, but I will share some thoughts on image creation - an area that I do spend a significant amount of time with. It is a bit more nuanced.
First let us consider the value of "the hand of the master." Right now here in Chicago there is a bubbling controversy as to whether the Rembrandt painting Man with a Golden Chain on display at the Art Institute of Chicago is an original Rembrandt or a copy - or perhaps even a copy that was also painted by Rembrandt. And each version would make a huge difference. Bottom line, in the world of fine art a work created directly by "the hand of the master" can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, while a copy - perhaps even an exact replica created by AI - would be worth maybe a few hundred. So for the marketplace anyhow, AI would have a hard time replacing, in terms of value, works from "the hand of the master."
In that creation of images I need to fall back on my own experiences. I spent much of my career exposing students to the creative potential of various tools, film cameras, still cameras and video, so naturally when the current spate of digital tools came on the scene I played with therm as well.
For me the result has been three categories of works:
Pure drawing. These are works that are basic "hand to paper" pieces. No tech involved at all. A good example is a series of images I did back during the first round of covid when nobody really knew much about the disease. So I drew these images to "put a face on it." The first is one of the faces. The second is the virus itself.
And then there is portraiture in "pure drawing":
Significantly augmented images. These are works that made significant use of image technology - primarily Photoshop. A couple of examples. In this image that I call The Ghost of Anne Boleyn, the background is painted completely in Photoshop, while Anne's head is clipped from a "pure drawing" piece called Girl on My Shoulder, [below the larger image of Anne] and feathered in Photoshop. The bottles are from a separate "pure drawing" created specifically as a "framing" image for this piece and saved as a separate layer. Then the three layers, background, head and bottles were all merged into a single image and printed commercially, a print that I then framed.
Images with Augmented Elements. These are images in which elements from my photographs or "pure drawings" are placed in a digital "page" that I then have commercially printed on heavy grade white paper. From that point on the process is pure drawings. The most recent examples are the Venice Grand Canal image [just below] in Not Crazy After All these Years post from December of last year and the Carriage Ride [below Canal] post from February 18th. The Grand Canal image was based on a photograph from our hotel window, while carriage ride comes from a photograph of a model carriage that lives in our living room. The photo based images are visually important, yet, everything else in those images is "hand to paper", and equally important.
Gently Touched Images. This is a flexible category since the image I will discuss in the rest of the post could actually fit in Images with Augmented Elements just as Carriage Ride could possibly fit here. I think it is a question of degree. In both Carriage Ride and this current image, which I am tentatively calling Lighting the Loggias, creating the augmented elements and getting them printed onto the drawing paper was the work of an hour or two. Drawing the additional elements in Carriage Ride literally took a couple of months. I am a few weeks into Loggias. [To clarify, I don't draw for more than a couple of hours a day. My hands begin to give out after that. I have discovered tho' as we are puppy sitting without the normal distractions of home, that I can get two sessions in during a day! :-)]
I'm going to show you Loggias in process so I can touch the AI issue with you. Here it is:
Let's first talk about the loggias and the lampposts first. Those are "cut and pastes" from two photographs. The lampposts are from a photograph I took on the bridge that separates old Buda and old Pest in Budapest. The loggias are photographs, as I believe I have already mentioned, of a maybe 15x8x6 inch architectural model. I duplicated and flipped image horizontally to create the central focus of the image. Then drew and colored the designs within the loggias and the lampposts.
Now about the black squares and circles and other little unfinished elements. Yes, I draw each one, and yes, they are taking a long time. And yes, there is an easier way to do it. Back it the 0-somethings I did a drawing called Through Every Window. I'll stick it in here if I can find it. The image featured brick walls, and rather than drawing each brick I created a cluster of four bricks, copied them, and then created a new layer copied the bricks into the new layer and dragged them into the appropriate place on the wall. A new layer for each cluster of four bricks and then merged them all. Ah, here is Through Every Window. I've already mentioned the bricks. The strange flowers in the foreground windows are "pure drawings" drawn separately and pasted in the windows. The windows in the background buildings are filled with my photographs.
Back to Loggias, I'm sure that AI would allow me "insert squares in designated space, adapt as necessary. Mimic style of provided sample." And there it would be, neat, clean, but definitively not from "the hand of the master," or my hand for that matter. But getting a slew of clean precise design elements isn't the point.
You see, I like drawing those elements. I can shift direction on a whim. I can shoot out a line of blocks to wherever I feel the light from the moon might go. Heck, I even decided to add another little moon. Same with the lampposts. And there is something very zen about drawing the little boxes while listening to a whole variety of music - again, faces and places accompany me.
There is an acronym - HUMINT. For those of us not actually involved in international espionage we encounter it mostly in novels and video, though I have learned it is actually used out there in the "real world." It stands for "human intelligence." We usually hear it dialogue:
Head protagonist: "Dammit! We're sending people in blind! We need HUMINT, boots on the ground. Don't we have anyone in there?!"
Other person: "I'll check on it!"
Perhaps we should take heed of that admonition. When it comes to art we can really do well without turning the creative process over to artificial intelligence. There is still something valuable, unique and fulfilling about HUMINT, not so much boots on the ground as hands on the brushes putting color on the paper, the canvas, tools and fingers in the clay, pressing on the frets, chisels to stone, tickling the ivories, breath through the reeds, all of it - human intelligence.
