The AI revolution is surging like water through a pinhole crack in a dam, promising only to rush and gush and break through in a deluge of change. Ethical consideration aside, the philosophical frontier is burgeoning as quickly as the technology.
Even as I write this, a lightning bolt jiggles, tempting me to use the Squarespace AI. I resist its sultry dance and instead prefer the convoluted thoughts of my own brain. I hope this makes more sense to you than the AI could convey it, but we’ll never know. This isn’t to say I’m immune from using AI, in fact, I quite enjoy the absurdity that it currently brings. Which got me thinking…
Plaza Midwood, Charlotte, NC sometime in December 2022
The image above, a photograph taken with a toy camera using black and white film, colorized using AI software, and then sculpted by an imaging program is not reality. Sure, it represents a physical moment in a time where a cellphone can easily capture the image, but the colors have gone through two different metamorphoses, evolving it into a liminal time space. A modern suburban scape transformed by artificial intelligence into something anachronistic.
One would think that the database used to train the AI model would use thousands and thousands of images that more or less represent colors seen in the real world. Why then did it choose to evoke tones of a bygone era? Perhaps I could pass this off as a photo I found, taken by someone in the 1960’s, but that would only serve to further compound the lie that the AI started (encouraged by me of course). And so here we meet at a moral and ethical crossroads, looking for a street sign for how to guide us. It is real while simultaneously being unreal.
Where do we go? Obviously, any image purely generated by AI should be claimed as such. But what about images enhanced or corrected? Do artists caveat every photo that is corrected or touched up in Photoshop? “Hey, everyone, I used Photoshop to remove a foot from the corner of this photo, FYI.” No, this doesn’t happen, or at least not frequently. This means anything altered in Photoshop is fundamentally no more real than an image altered with AI. To further this line of thinking, what is the difference between lines of code doing something in 15 minutes that could be done manually in an hour or two? Again, there is a line in the sand when it comes to AI and art, but I wonder if the energy used to lambast those utilizing AI for their work will be directed equally among all artists who modify their images.
I’m sure this has all been discussed and written about in the great think tanks and academic journals, but this is how I rationalize what’s happening, by rambling. I enjoy using the tool because it lets me explore that space between real and fiction. Like one’s thoughts adrift standing in a grocery line - you’re simultaneously present while being absent.