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.

The Patch :: Tools & Kitchens

I have an undeserved reputation of being domestically incompetent, which means I’m not given free rein in the kitchen (aka “Your cooking is nice but you are way too messy”). There is one small section of the kitchen I am allowed to work and that is with my kitchen tool of choice, my beloved coffee machine. She may be showing her age, and she does not use pods but she can be coaxed into making a delicious short black (espresso) and rich and creamy cappuccino.

As usual for the patch I had a good play around with different ways of presenting a perfect portrait of my coffee machine. The winter sunshine, has been streaming in the past couple of morning and showed of her gleaming personality so I experimented with some bracketed sets and HDR. Not bad but they didn’t quiet capture her sullen reliability. Time for another coffee.  About then the water ran low and she began softly flashing the little red warning light. Setting a light bulb of in my mind, remembering the fun of .gif animation. This time I used Corel Photo Paint, and just 4 frames. Two with no red light, one with a full flash and a second with just low half red and reflection. Essentially I now have a still portrait with just a touch of action. the perfect portrait of my beloved coffee maker, the ultimate kitchen tool.

Its a small world after all

I am fascinated by just how many interconnecting links my contacts have on flickr. to see this i have been playing with a nifty tool called flickr graph, it is an on-line application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm and builds a graph like the one shown here.

Click on this link if you want to research other [Great] flickr tools, (but some aren't so great!)