The HORROR of AI

An ironic Halloween-themed post on my complex, evolving relationship with generative-AI.

As a creative professional, gen-AI both intrigues and terrifies me. How it could impact my career and my industry as a whole has been as much of an existential threat as climate change, geopolitics and US elections.

Not being able to do much on national or global issues, I felt I could at least try to better understand how AI could impact me directly. This after all was just one more technological innovation I've spent my career adapting to (though at a far more frightening scale).

I started tinkering with Midjourney 3 back in mid-2022. It was messy and hard to direct but I started to see some potential in it--not in the direct outputs themselves, which are pure novelty in my mind--but as a part of my creative process.

I was initially curious to generate inspirational material for my Automaton concepts (see my last Automaton post). Though I was getting some interesting results from a compositional standpoint I found its output limited.

I decided to tackle a fresh project, which is where the unironic horror comes in. As a fan of horror movies and vintage art I had an idea for a series of contemporary horror movies I wanted to reimagine as vintage 1930s movie posters.

To my surprise I started getting some interesting results that benefited from the weird, dreamy, painterly outputs stemming from the simple prompts "X movie in a 1930s style"

I found something compelling about the moody, expressionistic nature of the images. I even started proposing fictional movie titles for Midjourney to dream up. But as conceptually cool and evocative as they were, it was all still just novelty. Anyone could generate these images. I found myself generating hundreds of these images, all of which had some interesting, some potential for something. But what elevates novelty to art?

To be meaningful they needed to be refined, completed to serve some larger purpose. Even slapping text on one of the posters didn't seem enough. So I started playing with other concepts to see if I could leverage the tool's aesthetics and limits into something more comprehensive and 'intentionally authored' by a creatives' hand.

In continuation of this week's Halloween-themed posts I'll give sneak-peeks into some of my early creative 'Dark Arts' experiments in effort to find how AI could help extend my creative reach, and not replace my artistic hand.

I will close this out by saying that these posts reflect my own personal/professional relationship with AI as a creative tool. By no means am I taking a stance to diminish the severity of negative impact this technology can have on creators and creative industries. The fear it evokes and the discourse it is forcing are both healthy and necessary.