If you’ve been anywhere close to the interwebs recently, you’ll have heard of DALL-E and MidJourney. The types of art the neural networks can generate — and with a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the tech — means that we are facing a whole new world of hurt. Often the butt of tasteless jokes (How do you get a waiter’s attention? Call out “Hey, artist!?”), computer-generated art is another punchline in the “they took our jobs” narrative of human versus machine.
To me, the interesting part of this is that robots and machines taking certain jobs have been begrudgingly accepted, because the jobs are repetitive, boring, dangerous or just generally awful. Machines welding car chassis do a far better job, faster and safer, than humans ever could. Art, however, is another matter.
As with all technology, there’s going to be a time when you no longer trust your own eyes or ears; machines are going to learn and evolve at breakneck speed.
In the recent movie “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann puts a quote in Colonel Tom Parker’s mouth, saying that a great act “gives the audience feelings they weren’t sure they should enjoy.” To me, that’s one of the greatest quotes I’ve heard about art in a while.
Commercial art is nothing new; whether your mind goes to Pixar movies, music or the prints that come with the frames in Ikea, art has been peddled at great scale for a long time. But what it, by and large, has in common, is that it was created by humans who had a creative vision of sorts.
The picture at the top of this article was generated using MidJourney, as I fed the algorithm a slightly ludicrous prompt: A man dances as if Prozac was a cloud of laughter. As someone who’s had a lifetime of mental health wobbles, including somewhat severe depression and anxiety, I was curious what a machine would come up with. And, my goodness; none of these generated graphics are something I’d have conceptually come up with myself. But, not gonna lie, they did something to me. I feel more graphically represented by these machine-generated works of art than almost anything else I’ve seen. And the wild thing is, I did that. These illustrations weren’t drawn or conceptualized by me. All I did was type a bizarre prompt into Discord, but these images wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been for my hare-brained idea. Not only did it come up with the image at the top of this article, it spat out four completely different — and oddly perfect — illustrations of a concept that’s hard to wrap my head around:
It’s hard to put words to exactly what that means to conceptual illustrators around the world. When someone can, at the click of a button, generate artworks of anything, emulating any style, creating pretty much anything you can think of, in minutes — what does it mean to be an artist?
Over the past week or so, …read more