Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to have more impact on art and design than anything since the personal computer. Here is a video of some things that I’ve made using AI tools along with more traditional video editing techniques. Keep in mind that this is only the beginning and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what is now possible.
AI Experiments
As a designer it is important to keep experimenting, to keep pushing limits and possibilities. I use a TikTok account as a home for my AI experiments. Some of these short videos work artistically, and some fail miserably but I don’t delete anything as this site serves as as a kind of digital sketchpad.
I posted the following short essay on the blog section of this site but have added it here as well as it answers some concerns about the place of AI in art and design.
AI is Not the Artist’s Enemy
This will be a short post that will illustrate why, as a traditional artist and graphic designer, AI does not worry me at all. Hopefully it will do something to counteract the feelings of impending doom and gloom currently pervading the artistic community.
The history of photography, I think, gives us all hope.
Photography became more than just a curiosity in the mid 1800s due to a couple of technical developments. This caused great consternation among traditional artists. i.e. painters. The complaints were very similar to the ones being heard today with regard to AI.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and claims that art was now dead and that making a living would be impossible for those with any sort of artistic sensibility. The root cause this this discomfort was that it would now be easy to make art, what took days previously could now be accomplished in minutes and by the unskilled.
Seeing the parallels yet? Today artists and designers are worried that they will be replaced due to the fact that what took them years to perfect can now be done by anyone with a computer and half an hour to kill.
Now for the interesting bit. The early photographers did try to imitate painting techniques, going as far as to smear grease on their lenses to imitate the soft impressionistic painting style of the time. This is where we are now in the AI cycle; we are trying our best to reproduce what already exists.
Now, back to early photography. Things changed drastically when photographers began to move away from the imitative and started to create new art, art that could only be created with a camera. This was the shift from Pictorialism (imitation of painting) to Modernism (the camera being an artistic tool in its own right).
Now things get even more interesting. This is shift was the single most freeing thing that has ever happened to drawing and painting. Artists in those disciplines could now free to do anything they wanted as they were no longer tied to having to reproduce reality. The camera removed that responsibility.
It is not overstating things to say that the adoption of photography was the best thing that ever happened with regard to art and especially with regard to painters.
As stated, we are currently in the imitative phase of the AI process and that is what has so many worried. At some point his phase will end and AI art will find its own place just as photography did and the vast majority of us will be happy. Of course the process won’t be quite as cut and dried as I’ve implied. The shift from Pictorialism to Modernism wasn’t an abrupt overnight one, photographers came to it in their own way and in their own time. Many worked with a foot in both camps for their entire careers.
There will be some losers in this process, they the ones that refuse to accept that art and design is a dynamic process not one that was set in stone at the precise time that they perfected their own particular skillset. For the rest of us though, I suspect that we are in for an incredibly exciting and stimulating time.