AI-1 Artificial Intelligence Art

Playing with 'Cecil Touchon' prompts

People online have been freaking out about AI most of this year and I have listened in on a lot of these discussions. It has been a hot topic. There is a lot of speculation about what kinds of radical changes we are in for as this technology develops.

The above image is an apparently AI generated image using my name and a few other prompts to see what kind of image I could get. I like this image but it is nothing like any image that I recognize as being particularly related to my artwork. Still, if I don’t include my name as a prompt, radically different images are generated. So my name as a prompt does seem to have an effect.

I was thinking that it could be interesting to see if the use of AI image generation could lead to some interesting new images that I might actually consider painting. As a collage artist, I am always open to the possibilities of found material and an AI generated image is definitely found material.

I have been playing around all day with generating these kinds of images and while I did find about 5% of them interesting, they had little or no relationship to the kind of images I was hoping to generate regardless of how many different word combinations I used.

Additionally, after I downloaded some of the images and analyzed them and turned them around, upside down or mirrored and trimmed them up, I found - after a few moderations - a few keepers such as the one above. I might consider trying that image out as maybe a 48 x 48 inch painting. But it won’t be a variation on one of my own works but more of a possible new series. I will know better when I try it out as a painting and scrutinize all of the elements in the composition and bend them more toward my own sensibility. It could be a fun exercise and maybe lead to something new or maybe not. But I am sure I will learn something from it.

It seems to be quite difficult to get a machine to generate interesting images just through verbal prompts even if the database contains images that it could draw from such as a ‘Cecil Touchon collage’ or ‘Cecil Touchon asemic writing’ or combinations of including art style names like cubism or constructivism or other artist names to get some sort of synthesized image. Word prompts depend on commonly used words and whatever images happen to be in the database. Most words describe things that I would not want to use. So I am going to have to think about that…

In the meantime, I will occasionally post some of these experiments as I think about it.

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What are you thinking about artificial intelligence? Comment below.