Decoration – a Form of Meaningless Art? – In my last post titled ‘If I want Blue Bananas, I’ll have them’ I explored the ease of image generation using the new text to image tools from Midjourney, Dalle and Dalle 2. Indeed it would be very easy for me as an artist to take my existing body of work and create myself a whole new portfolio based on it. Below are some random examples of work generated using Dalle 2. I took some existing images, uploaded them to the Ai software and it ‘spat out’ the following pieces of work. However, the question in my mind is are the new images devalued by the use of Ai? Initially my work was an exploration of oil on water with light. The concept was about whether or not beauty could be found by mixing substances that typically repelled each other. I was fascinated by the way the oil lit up once light was added to it. This, for me, was like a metaphor for society. Anyone who is a fan of social media knows how savage it can sometimes be. I’ve heard Twitter likened to one big long shouting match. Having tried […]
Has Ai Killed Art? – Ai or Artificial Inteligence/Machine Learning has been around for a while now, but never has it’s presence been more keenly felt than in and around the Creative Arts. Producing imagery was once the domain of illustrators and graphic designs. Now it appears that everyone with a computer/tablet/smartphone and a connection to Dalle and Midjourney can produce the most amazing images. At first as a photographer I didn’t feel particularly threatened by ai. I suspected that what I was producing was safe for a while and that everyone would always need good photographers? As a simple test I ran a text prompt through Midjourney – a text to image ai generator. The results to me seemed less than impressive. Below is an example of what I do and what ai thinks I do. To generate the image below I used the text prompt “Oil on Water”. I decided to give the ai a second attempt. Although the result was better, it was still significantly different from the kind of imagery that I was producing. Below is the second time I ran the prompt ‘oil on water’. Fortunately or unfortunately depending upon a […]
