10/05/2024
AI or RI?
Much of the world is embracing AI, artificial intelligence. The art world has an ever growing number of digital artists, painting with virtual paint brushes. Numerous companies market their subscription software, like Adobe Photoshop, where hundreds of oil, watercolor, and drawing stroke types are available with a drawing tablet, using software, connected to a computer and a screen. Digital work is abundant, displayed on screens, though can be printed out using still more technology. AI programming can be used to "create" the very art. This however is based on preexisting resources, existing images. I find that AI writing programs cannot count and keep track using many specific and important instructions, integrate essential things. Tell it to write a murder mystery story including twenty five words, using each word only once or all words once except proper names, indicating those that are people and places. It just can't do it. AI lacks the creativity and intellect of a human.
Back to art. There is nothing like seeing a painting in its three dimensional form and that experience. Take any by V. van Gogh. No print in a book or on paper can every compare. This is what makes original hand crafted art in a league by itself. The digital mass reproduced IPad artwork, such as those by David Hockney, one of the first to explore its place in art, is curious.
On to RI, real intelligence. AI can only follow the instructions it is given. Human creativity is unlimited, the imagination. Given more data, AI in art starts to do some very strange things that lack aesthetic appeal. While we have 3D printing, will we have 3D painting? Technology that creates an oil painting or watercolor much the same way a person does? An enormous set of instructions it would take to "master" watercolor painting, create an aesthetic that a majority of people find attractive. Some "rules" of composition, color palette, technique, and other facets of the craft could be written into the code. Will it rise to the quality of human made, hand crafted art? I think for the time being there is no replacement for RI, the human hand in much of art. I wonder where a healthy balance exists in using technology along side creativity that doesn't give the technology more value than it may deserve.
I recently developed programming in Python that creates a mosaic design of any digital image it is provided seeking to capture the old world opus vermiculatum method you many have see in Pompeii mosaics based on an pattern edge detection. It certainly makes the laying of 45,000 colored tiles for a mosaic version of one of the cards, Sabino or the Sun, in the earliest completely extant example of a 78-card tarot deck, the Sola Busca from the 15th century easier. Would you be interested in a discussion, demonstration and workshop at Verdigris Gallery on the mosaic in art and AI?
In what ways do you use or combine AI in your artistic pursuits? Your thoughts welcomed. - E.A. Kirslis
