Can AIart be considered an artistic tool?

Despite the overwhelming impression you might get from just reading the latest social media post that there are two sides to the current #AIart cognitive dissonance.  The artist Luddites, who are claiming their creativityis being stolen versus the non-artistic utopians who think that text to image prompts lets them make great art in seconds. However, there is a lot of ground between the two camps.

I have worked with and spoken to other artists who have been very interested in what this new text to image tools, like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion can do. Many have been investigating these techniques as legitimate ways to create expressions of their unique creativity. In other words, is there life in these approaches as a tool. In my opinion it's not a simple yes/no answer but there is promise.

I have actually been interested and evaluating AI for a long time. I was even very early using the hashtag #AIart. In particular I have experimented with the idea of using such machine learning to capture the essence of my style of mark-making and “find” that within photos I have taken. This is one of the areas of what I have investigating under the “hand drawn photo”project. This method definitely has merit. Below is an example I created at nighcafe using their style transfer method. 

I starred with a handrawn image of an eagle's head I drew for Inktober. This was then used to “train” a simple neural net. I also supplied a photo, a self-portrait, which I had used as inspiration for myrevised profile on instagram. The training of the personalised network has to be scheduled on to suitable computer somewhere about on the internet and does take a while so the resulting image is not returned immediately. It is worth waiting for because now I have a black and white rendering. In my style of inkwork is closely follows the tones and shapes of the photo. I printed it on a laser printer and then hand-coloured it with my earth-coloured Ecoline Brush pens. I would consider this a work of my own art, but I have used some aspects of #Aiart in its creation.