I began this post with a very excellent video that you probably will not watch, but I found it fascinating and it, in fact, inspired everything I want to talk about in this post. It is about the AI art programs that are running amok in the art world. I am, after all, an artist. Specifically, I am a storyteller and cartoonist. I know how to draw. I can prove it.
Here’s the proof. This is an original oil painting that I did in the 1980s. The only tools that I used to create this picture are a set of oil colors in tubes, a painter’s pallet, three different sizes of sable brushes, a pencil, and a magazine picture of a Vietnamese boy’s face. This was done at the height of my skills as an artist. But I also have to admit that I was diagnosed with arthritis in 1974 after painting the family home’s exterior. Now, 49 years later, the length of time the disease has been gnawing at my joints, I don’t quite have the same sophistication and ability as an artist, a creator of images. That is why digital art tools have been such a boon to me.
This is a colored pencil drawing I created in the 1990s. It is modeled on a young Hispanic boy who lived in the same apartment complex as I did. He was not green. At least I don’t think my color blindness was that bad back then.
I loaded the original drawing into the Drawing Pad digital art program. I put a layer on top of it in my touchscreen phone. I then basically traced the original drawing using the digital stylus that I bought to use in place of a pencil, pen, or paintbrush. I used it in pen mode first to draw the outline. You can see how much it was simplified. This made it easier to do on the small screen I had available on the phone despite my arthritis. I then used the stylus in watercolor paintbrush mode to color in the face and hair. I changed the eye color so I could do the eyes more consistently with a manga-cartoon style of softening levels of color. It gives it a more liquid and realistic look.
So far, I have shown you proof that I can draw well even now with the arthritis affecting my fingers.
Now let’s talk about the Artificial Intelligence programs that have been released into the internet to eventually take away the rulership of this planet and keep us monkey-people in zoos for the amusement of the computerized mega minds that will replace us as the dominant force of civilization on this planet.
AI art programs like the infamous Dall-E programs allow you to write a short description of the artwork you want to see, and the program generates something randomly to fit your descriptors. It pulls from a database scraped from the internet at large, including all the artwork I have posted here on my blog, Instagram, and Pinterest, and adds it all to a dataset that allows it to recognize, interpret, and produce something that conforms to what you have asked for even though it pays no artist any royalties or user fees for drawing from other artists’ artworks.
I promise I will never use an AI program to do that. If you see my name on any artwork like that, then I am dead and being impersonated by an AI entity.
Here is the only way I use AI to aid me in the making of artwork. It is a program called AI Mirror. You give it a photo or a png of an artwork and it redraws it in a specified style.
This is an artwork that I did earlier this year in colored pencil. I was not satisfied with my arthritis-impaired ability on this project. The eyes were too owlish and dark. The lips are too dark and thick. But you can’t erase colored pencils and ink on paper and fix things as easily as you can digitally on a touch screen. So, I used the AI Mirror to correct it.
I used the AI Mirror to fix it in stages like this, simplifying and redrawing it like this first. And then advancing it to this.
This is the finished project, simplified and made more elegant with digital tools.
You can argue that my final product is not better than the colored pencil original. But I like the fact that the AI and the digital tools allowed me to correct what I didn’t like.
The problem with AI art programs, which probably won’t be the ones that outsmart and replace humanity, is that they do so much for you that you are no longer an artist if you use them. So, I guess that I am saying I think that I am an artist, however wrongly, while using these programs because I put the work in both before and after using the AI application. My fear is since nobody sees me as an artist or hears me as a writer anyway, that my art and my stories will be snowed under a mountain of AI generated schlock that is certainly no better than my schlock, and inferior to my best stuff.
Catch a Falling Star 