AI is a misnomer. There is nothing of intelligence in it. It is a high-tech mimic, a digital parrot. IA is better label - Information Aggregation. By giving it huge volumes of data to 'learn' from, it does a great job of faking it.
Much like the Luddites of the 19th century, we can recognize this as a useful tool to aid artists or device to replace them.
As did the Luddites, we must fight to eliminate the threat. There are ways of 'poisoning' data to reduce AI results to garbage.
And we must boycott those that offer AI as a'better' product.
It is interesting to note that there is no generally accepted definition in the scientific community for the term AI or even for what constitutes intelligence. The plain vanilla AI most of us see is a probability based. Hence a tool subject to error .
Absolutely. AI is a facile marketing label. I can make images with a Spirograph, but I wouldn't particularly describe them as 'ART'. AI is a vastly augmented Spirograph.
Similarly I enjoy using ChatGPT for story inspirations. These are for my own amusement and I make no claims as to their artistic value.
That being said, I have seen people take Spirograph works and turn them into actual ART.
I find myself thinking of the 'Dancing Shoes' tale. A young girl with no talent wished to be a great dancer. She managed to obtain magical shoes to achieve her dream. However, there was a hidden curse - once she began to dance she couldn't stop and inevitably danced herself to death.
Hopefully, we do not allow AI to take us down a similar path.
I dont remember the name of the astro-physicist, but he said that back in the day, AI meant the same thing we now call AGI, ie it is a really cheap marketing trick to make new tech products sound "futuristic"
Most artists I know see a difference between using AI as a tool and pretending it makes you an artist. Some will use it to kick around composition ideas, kind of like rough sketches before the real work. That’s brainstorming, not finished art.
Where it hits harder is with comics and cartoons. Those styles are easier for machines to copy, and that puts the people working in those fields at risk of being undercut.
Talk to anyone who’s studied anatomy, light, or color for years and they’ll tell you the same thing. AI can imitate surfaces, but it doesn’t have the depth that comes from actually seeing.
For blogs or casual posts, using DALL·E feels closer to stock photos than theft, as long as you’re not passing it off as your own painting or illustration.
What do you think about using Firefly in photoshop?
Why bother using AI at all, though? Why use it to "kick around ideas" instead of your own brain? What's "better" about not using your brain for that? Why let AI give you something OTHER PEOPLE have come up with to influence your own art? Why let that in? Why contaminate your originality with the work of other people? Remember that AI is literally an amalgamation of other people's ideas and art. It's not YOURS. It's not from your mind.
Is AI art inspiration, though? It's theft at the core because none of the artists who contributed to it did so from their own free will nor were compensated for their time and effort.
It is also destroying our water and energy supplies. Going to a gallery isn't going to do that, but prompting an AI over and over will. You don't worry about it now because it isn't directly affecting you yet, but it's happening.
I actually don't produce art at any professional level, I'm an art hobbyist only. I wouldn't want to buy art made by an AI, anyway. People using an AI are not artists themselves at all, they're wanna be's. They don't "wanna" put in the work, they don't have the talent, and they don't have the skill to create art themselves. But they desperately want to call themselves "artists".
I liked how you assumed I was an artist though. Yay, go me, I'm an artist now lol.
A lot of AI stuff really was built on scraped art without consent, and that’s a real issue. Some companies are trying to figure out ways to pay contributors, but most of the industry hasn’t.
Still, I think there’s a difference between people who just hit “generate” and call themselves artists, and pros who use it like they’d use a model shoot or a quick sketch, just for mock-ups. It doesn’t fix the bigger problems, but it isn’t the same thing as faking the whole process either.
When artists do mock-ups, it’s often about bringing in a model, running through dozens of poses, or scheduling extra shoots. That takes time and money. AI can stand in at that stage, giving quick variations on pose, light, and composition so you know what’s worth developing. It’s not the art itself—it’s just a tool to streamline the prep.
Picasso said "Good artists borrow ; great artists steal". Taking inspiration from another source--human or non-human has always been part of the creative process. You created the logo as a final product. I would keep it.
Because it's a product of slop that's destroying our water and energy supplies, I wouldn't use it at all. It's best not to pay homage to the "gods" who are destroying us behind the scenes. In this case it wasn't the great artists who stole, it was the tech bros since no one who contributed to the AI itself was compensated for their time, expertise, effort, etc.
Do you agree that artists should be compensated for their art? (Especially since it's copyrighted upon creation and the artist owns it and it is intellectual property? Or do you think it's ok to literally steal other people's work?)
All you say is fundamentally true. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether AI is a potential source of inspiration. I vote for Jessica to keep her logo until she creates one she likes better!
I have studied jazz (and now flamenco) guitar for decades. More recently Spanish. learning art, the nuances of language, learning anything, achieving something physical, athletic achievements, or just learning something, involves the willingness to accept always feeling like a beginner in some sense. I recall Wes Montgomery once saying he wouldn't listen to classical guitar because it made him feel like he couldn't play. Learning is a slow, sometimes painful process that can feel like a groping, confusing reaching forward, with moments of joy, defeat, success, slow gains. Appreciating a great musician, for example, means -- at least in part -- appreciating their achievement. The apotheosis of art speaks to the power of a "human" achievement. I have found myself astonished by "superhuman" visual works by AI executed purely as an aesthetic demonstration. They can be incredible, hypnotizing, but ultimately they feel hollow. A robot summiting Everest in thirty minutes? Deep Blue mastering chess in twenty minutes? LLM writing a novel in five seconds. What an astonishing achievement for technology. Perfect, superhuman. Not human.
I dont know what current attitudes to the sublime are.. some modernist and post modernist writers berate it, and post- and trans-humanists can also be contrary.
Artists are rarely happy with a lot of their output. It is said that if you are happy with 10% of what you create then you're doing well. Mistakes-drawing over something several times to try to get "it", errors of shade, shape, line, relationship, perspective, colour, light etc - are all part of the process. They make it challenging and enjoyable, and sometimes result in good work.
Art has been compared to gardening - a lot of thankless hard work & effort, which, when it goes well, is immensely satisfying. It takes time, training, practice to become technically proficient, and endless thought about how best to achieve results.
To me, great art either makes you think and/or inspires awe. The "Awesome" (and I mean that in the true sense of the word, not the BS way its been used over the last 30 or so years) is that sense of overwhelm in the presence of something that truly moves you: perhaps weak in the knees, heart pounding, your brain feeling it can explode with a weird euphoria that isn't pleasant but isn't unpleasant either - but you don't care, it also feels weirdly joyous.
Not all creative output can do that, but when it happens, it is one of those things that is uniquely ennervating and enlivening. Amazing scenery can have the same effect, ditto great conversation, blinding realisations and great sex. All simple enough but momentary and unique things that make life wonderful.
Some human creative output gets there occasionally, but AI generated creativity never can.
AI can't create art that makes you think uniquely, because it can only aggregate from already know inputs without the capacity to speak to you originally, uniquely, significantly and meaningfully.
And AI can't create art that that invokes the sublime, is awesome, no matter how hard it tries. It can't experience the sublime, so can't recreate it.
Jessica, your description of the connection between AI and Fascism is thought-provoking, and I agree with it.
I see AI art, and text-based uses of AI, as voluntarily giving up our creativity. Creativity is one of our superpowers. It should be nurtured and exercised, not abandoned.
I'm glad you did not include an example of AI art in your post that critiques it! There is a ton of AI art on Substack. The authors who use it routinely may be surprised that I sometimes decide not to read their pieces, because it dininishes their credibility with me.
Your logo (seen when searching for Sentinel-Intelligence) is nice. If you drew it but feel you were influenced by AI, I think you could draw one from your own inspiration. Maybe an artist on Substack would create one for you as a donation.
I'm am, I guess, a former professional painter who never really was able to make a living at it. I worked mostly in oil on canvas and leaned toward realism. Did a lot of commissioned portraits.
What AI is doing, to me at least, is allowing me to rethink my approach and focus more on the tactile and gestural aspects of my "conversation" with the paint- my process and not as much on the adherence to a photo-like realism.
You shift your perspective.
When photography was first invented and especially in 1888, when it was first widely in the hands of people who didn't have the ability to develop or print their pictures, everyone declared ART IS DEAD.
It wasn't. It exploded and evolved and left the mundane act of taking a photo and having a small daguerreotype or later the black and white paper image to photography to deal with so artists could branch out into other directions.
We see the crappy, shiny dreck that AI generates and we need to see it for what it is-Derivative nonsense, not art.
We also suffer from the AI version of music; from crazily auto-tuned or robotic voices, canned melody and percussion that anyone can toss together.
But these are just vaguely interesting tools in the hands of actual musicians or actual painters and artists. Maybe they can springboard ideas. But they can't really replace doing the actual art because art is essentially a very intimate, personal conversation. Artists are communicating with their audiences through their process as well as their product.
Every conversation isn't deeply profound. But it's not even a conversation if it's a product of a mindless machine.
P.S. somebody famous said the trick to art is knowing which mistakes to keep. Even if you feel that deriving your logo from generated images was a mistake, I'd suggest that it's one worth keeping. Don't let purity tests ruin something you love.
AI is a misnomer. There is nothing of intelligence in it. It is a high-tech mimic, a digital parrot. IA is better label - Information Aggregation. By giving it huge volumes of data to 'learn' from, it does a great job of faking it.
Much like the Luddites of the 19th century, we can recognize this as a useful tool to aid artists or device to replace them.
As did the Luddites, we must fight to eliminate the threat. There are ways of 'poisoning' data to reduce AI results to garbage.
And we must boycott those that offer AI as a'better' product.
It is interesting to note that there is no generally accepted definition in the scientific community for the term AI or even for what constitutes intelligence. The plain vanilla AI most of us see is a probability based. Hence a tool subject to error .
Absolutely. AI is a facile marketing label. I can make images with a Spirograph, but I wouldn't particularly describe them as 'ART'. AI is a vastly augmented Spirograph.
Similarly I enjoy using ChatGPT for story inspirations. These are for my own amusement and I make no claims as to their artistic value.
That being said, I have seen people take Spirograph works and turn them into actual ART.
I find myself thinking of the 'Dancing Shoes' tale. A young girl with no talent wished to be a great dancer. She managed to obtain magical shoes to achieve her dream. However, there was a hidden curse - once she began to dance she couldn't stop and inevitably danced herself to death.
Hopefully, we do not allow AI to take us down a similar path.
I dont remember the name of the astro-physicist, but he said that back in the day, AI meant the same thing we now call AGI, ie it is a really cheap marketing trick to make new tech products sound "futuristic"
Most artists I know see a difference between using AI as a tool and pretending it makes you an artist. Some will use it to kick around composition ideas, kind of like rough sketches before the real work. That’s brainstorming, not finished art.
Where it hits harder is with comics and cartoons. Those styles are easier for machines to copy, and that puts the people working in those fields at risk of being undercut.
Talk to anyone who’s studied anatomy, light, or color for years and they’ll tell you the same thing. AI can imitate surfaces, but it doesn’t have the depth that comes from actually seeing.
For blogs or casual posts, using DALL·E feels closer to stock photos than theft, as long as you’re not passing it off as your own painting or illustration.
What do you think about using Firefly in photoshop?
Why bother using AI at all, though? Why use it to "kick around ideas" instead of your own brain? What's "better" about not using your brain for that? Why let AI give you something OTHER PEOPLE have come up with to influence your own art? Why let that in? Why contaminate your originality with the work of other people? Remember that AI is literally an amalgamation of other people's ideas and art. It's not YOURS. It's not from your mind.
I suggest that arguing inspiration from others does not reside in your mind and influence your art is going to be a real slog.
Is AI art inspiration, though? It's theft at the core because none of the artists who contributed to it did so from their own free will nor were compensated for their time and effort.
It is also destroying our water and energy supplies. Going to a gallery isn't going to do that, but prompting an AI over and over will. You don't worry about it now because it isn't directly affecting you yet, but it's happening.
I actually don't produce art at any professional level, I'm an art hobbyist only. I wouldn't want to buy art made by an AI, anyway. People using an AI are not artists themselves at all, they're wanna be's. They don't "wanna" put in the work, they don't have the talent, and they don't have the skill to create art themselves. But they desperately want to call themselves "artists".
I liked how you assumed I was an artist though. Yay, go me, I'm an artist now lol.
A lot of AI stuff really was built on scraped art without consent, and that’s a real issue. Some companies are trying to figure out ways to pay contributors, but most of the industry hasn’t.
Still, I think there’s a difference between people who just hit “generate” and call themselves artists, and pros who use it like they’d use a model shoot or a quick sketch, just for mock-ups. It doesn’t fix the bigger problems, but it isn’t the same thing as faking the whole process either.
When artists do mock-ups, it’s often about bringing in a model, running through dozens of poses, or scheduling extra shoots. That takes time and money. AI can stand in at that stage, giving quick variations on pose, light, and composition so you know what’s worth developing. It’s not the art itself—it’s just a tool to streamline the prep.
I agree with this, exactly.
Picasso said "Good artists borrow ; great artists steal". Taking inspiration from another source--human or non-human has always been part of the creative process. You created the logo as a final product. I would keep it.
Because it's a product of slop that's destroying our water and energy supplies, I wouldn't use it at all. It's best not to pay homage to the "gods" who are destroying us behind the scenes. In this case it wasn't the great artists who stole, it was the tech bros since no one who contributed to the AI itself was compensated for their time, expertise, effort, etc.
Do you agree that artists should be compensated for their art? (Especially since it's copyrighted upon creation and the artist owns it and it is intellectual property? Or do you think it's ok to literally steal other people's work?)
All you say is fundamentally true. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether AI is a potential source of inspiration. I vote for Jessica to keep her logo until she creates one she likes better!
I have studied jazz (and now flamenco) guitar for decades. More recently Spanish. learning art, the nuances of language, learning anything, achieving something physical, athletic achievements, or just learning something, involves the willingness to accept always feeling like a beginner in some sense. I recall Wes Montgomery once saying he wouldn't listen to classical guitar because it made him feel like he couldn't play. Learning is a slow, sometimes painful process that can feel like a groping, confusing reaching forward, with moments of joy, defeat, success, slow gains. Appreciating a great musician, for example, means -- at least in part -- appreciating their achievement. The apotheosis of art speaks to the power of a "human" achievement. I have found myself astonished by "superhuman" visual works by AI executed purely as an aesthetic demonstration. They can be incredible, hypnotizing, but ultimately they feel hollow. A robot summiting Everest in thirty minutes? Deep Blue mastering chess in twenty minutes? LLM writing a novel in five seconds. What an astonishing achievement for technology. Perfect, superhuman. Not human.
I dont know what current attitudes to the sublime are.. some modernist and post modernist writers berate it, and post- and trans-humanists can also be contrary.
Artists are rarely happy with a lot of their output. It is said that if you are happy with 10% of what you create then you're doing well. Mistakes-drawing over something several times to try to get "it", errors of shade, shape, line, relationship, perspective, colour, light etc - are all part of the process. They make it challenging and enjoyable, and sometimes result in good work.
Art has been compared to gardening - a lot of thankless hard work & effort, which, when it goes well, is immensely satisfying. It takes time, training, practice to become technically proficient, and endless thought about how best to achieve results.
To me, great art either makes you think and/or inspires awe. The "Awesome" (and I mean that in the true sense of the word, not the BS way its been used over the last 30 or so years) is that sense of overwhelm in the presence of something that truly moves you: perhaps weak in the knees, heart pounding, your brain feeling it can explode with a weird euphoria that isn't pleasant but isn't unpleasant either - but you don't care, it also feels weirdly joyous.
Not all creative output can do that, but when it happens, it is one of those things that is uniquely ennervating and enlivening. Amazing scenery can have the same effect, ditto great conversation, blinding realisations and great sex. All simple enough but momentary and unique things that make life wonderful.
Some human creative output gets there occasionally, but AI generated creativity never can.
AI can't create art that makes you think uniquely, because it can only aggregate from already know inputs without the capacity to speak to you originally, uniquely, significantly and meaningfully.
And AI can't create art that that invokes the sublime, is awesome, no matter how hard it tries. It can't experience the sublime, so can't recreate it.
Jessica, your description of the connection between AI and Fascism is thought-provoking, and I agree with it.
I see AI art, and text-based uses of AI, as voluntarily giving up our creativity. Creativity is one of our superpowers. It should be nurtured and exercised, not abandoned.
I'm glad you did not include an example of AI art in your post that critiques it! There is a ton of AI art on Substack. The authors who use it routinely may be surprised that I sometimes decide not to read their pieces, because it dininishes their credibility with me.
Your logo (seen when searching for Sentinel-Intelligence) is nice. If you drew it but feel you were influenced by AI, I think you could draw one from your own inspiration. Maybe an artist on Substack would create one for you as a donation.
Thank you again for a valuable post.
I'm am, I guess, a former professional painter who never really was able to make a living at it. I worked mostly in oil on canvas and leaned toward realism. Did a lot of commissioned portraits.
What AI is doing, to me at least, is allowing me to rethink my approach and focus more on the tactile and gestural aspects of my "conversation" with the paint- my process and not as much on the adherence to a photo-like realism.
You shift your perspective.
When photography was first invented and especially in 1888, when it was first widely in the hands of people who didn't have the ability to develop or print their pictures, everyone declared ART IS DEAD.
It wasn't. It exploded and evolved and left the mundane act of taking a photo and having a small daguerreotype or later the black and white paper image to photography to deal with so artists could branch out into other directions.
We see the crappy, shiny dreck that AI generates and we need to see it for what it is-Derivative nonsense, not art.
We also suffer from the AI version of music; from crazily auto-tuned or robotic voices, canned melody and percussion that anyone can toss together.
But these are just vaguely interesting tools in the hands of actual musicians or actual painters and artists. Maybe they can springboard ideas. But they can't really replace doing the actual art because art is essentially a very intimate, personal conversation. Artists are communicating with their audiences through their process as well as their product.
Every conversation isn't deeply profound. But it's not even a conversation if it's a product of a mindless machine.
I was trying (and failing) to express my thoughts here and gave up but then this note showed up:
https://substack.com/@jennmcrae/note/c-149117780
P.S. somebody famous said the trick to art is knowing which mistakes to keep. Even if you feel that deriving your logo from generated images was a mistake, I'd suggest that it's one worth keeping. Don't let purity tests ruin something you love.
It’s brainwashing? Cookie cutter art