Understanding Human Authorship in AI Art

Without the artist, AI lacks soul. Here's what I mean by that: A big part about what makes art, music, literature, etc intriguing to humans, is the human behind it. Rarely is it ever only about the "art," itself. For example: Those AI Drake songs that went viral? 🎵 They seemingly disappeared already, without Drake himself promoting them, playing them on tour, etc. Or take a trip to an art museum: 9/10 when we are discussing a work of fine art, we are placing emphasis on the artists' story: their upbringing, background, etc, what led them to being able to create their amazing works of art & invent new styles. Despite AI works looking beautiful on the surface, without the artist attached to them, what's left, is pretty soulless. Thus, in an AI-dominated world, your process will become even more important than it is today, in order for your work to stand out against AI. This isn't to say master-AI-prompters don't exist— ie. those who spend hours refining an image until it is just right (it's just a new type of 'process'). But, the majority of "AI" images and art that are generated, are done so in haste, with little artistic input, say, or experience. The fact that a human spent a lifetime devoted to learning a skill, is what makes art and music interesting to humans, it's not necessarily just how great something looks or sounds. It's about the questions the art provokes, and the mysterious wonder around how a human (just like you or me), is able to create such beautiful works. Art transcends aesthetics, it inspires. And AI art has no story. If you're an artist leveraging AI, ask yourself: "What can I do to make this uniquely, mine?" _____ P.S. The attached photo in this post is a physical piece of collage art of mine (size 3ft x 3ft) which I leveraged MidJourney to create all the imagery for. It was an experiment around injecting my own artistic sensibility into the equation, and having more "control" over the final composition. #aiart #artificialintelligence #creativity

Am I worried A.I. will kill writing? Not so much. Mostly because I can see a near future in which A.I. operates in a multitude of ways. Can you imagine that A.I. isn’t just a tool or a threat — but rather a creative partner? Anna Wiener’s recent piece in The New Yorker points to early experiments that show A.I. collaborating instead of replacing the practice of writing and collaborating as an evolution of what we understand as authorship. I’ve been jamming with A.I. too — not just letting it spit out text, but operating as a kind of inline muse. Projects like Vibewriter feel like artifacts from a speculative future story, one where what was once called “writing” is reclaimed as a kind of craft by those who look back and admire the quaintness of actually putting hand to paper. They find type “writers” at weekend markets, much the way a generation will find something special and desirable about vinyl records or analog synths. A moment in which the human touch matters again. Maybe, just maybe, our brains will go through a period in which they have dulled a bit from outsourcing all the work of synthesizing ideas to machine intelligences. Maybe future generations will fight to bring writing back, treating it like a precious, punk rock rebellion. Speculation? Sure. But worth thinking about. The tools I’m building aren’t just about automation. They’re about sparking a new conversation on what creativity means with A.I. — not against it. https://lnkd.in/grDESDJq

Friends, I would like to extend my views on AI and humanity that I have shared on CBS 60 MINUTES... I have said that fearing AI is a choice... It is not my choice because I am not impressed with calculations. I marvel at transcendental capacities that no machine can ever bare. When we see 'intelligence' and power as computation, of course, we would see AI superior to us, henceforth be afraid of it. But it would be like trying to run faster than a car and when we can't... label ourselves as inferior. I see 'intelligence' and power as our capacity to love, create, transcend, and pivot our opinion on a whim. As humans, we are capable of breaking-script and start acting in a way that is free from our 'dataset' and 'algorithm'. Which is the very definition of progress. I was introduced to #generativeAI in 2017 by an email from Google Arts & Culture. It said that they started making art with AI that oddly looked like my body of work as an artist (ps: this has nothing to do with using my art in their dataset but rather my works having visual similarities with the research of the computer scientists of Google in 2017, especially Alexander Mordvintsev). This discovery was of course surprising, rather chocking to me... While it would take me weeks to make a digital drawing on my own before... in 2018, I could do something similar by pulling some sliders and putting in some numbers in the AI. It was exciting, it was new, it was fun. I was obsessed. There, in 2018, I saw an opportunity... The 'intelligence' of the machine was nothing but a new tool for me to bring new things in existence. Not once I thought of AI replacing me. I knew this would change the way I expressed myself and I felt compelled to bring it in the hands of more creatives like me. And still to this day, I only marvel at the spirit and vision of the creatives and filmmakers using Cuebric and never with the computation it takes them to create it. Of course while putting my attention to the power of humans vs computation; as always, I invite us to have a holistic view and take into account AI's possible negative effects on our creative behavior after its adoption: like normalization of mediocrity, speed vs craftsmanship and laziness in creative mystery... I would love to hear your opinion. What is the most fascinating thing for you in our adoption of AI? With love, Pinar