As an independent artist and huge supporter of art in all forms, this AI “revolution” has me unbalanced as I’m sure many of you are. (I will be speaking specifically about generative AI form, such as ChatGPT, Midjourney etc. used to create AI “art”) and right of the bat this will be a very basic and over simplified form of all my thoughts and internal and personal policy otherwise this would be a super long paper that would probably make no sense.

First thing’s first, my personal policy is I don’t use AI in any creative, generating ideas or even inspiration kind of way, I don’t use it to write any of my scripts, I don’t use it for any part of the creative process. If anything, I use it for organizational purposes, calculations, check after effects expressions and script codes. In other words, as a tool, and I know this gets thrown around a lot, but you do have to consciously not fall into the trap of AI laziness when feeling a bit stuck creatively. All creativity comes from me or humans around me. This is valid for both my personal work as well as client paid work. So, it will be (sometimes even on purpose) sloppy and time-consuming. The rest of this unnecessary paper explains my whys if you are interested then you can keep reading.

The name AI, it is such a marketing scheme, this is not intelligence it is a sophisticated pattern matching prediction tool. A very complicated and fancy algorithm. It is not conscious, it does not think, it does not have intellectual abilities. Built over STOLEN data and real art asking no one’s opinion or permission.

In times of very violent capitalism like the ones we live in today, where the only thing that matters is generating profit to hoard wealth for a very few, these types of technologies are not neutral, they’re designed to follow that same logic. The result takes the form of making what should be our most valued resource, human labor, cheaper and more efficient, while at the same time exploiting the only thing we have left: our attention. Make no mistake: if an AI can do your job cheaper and faster, it will replace you. And that would be fine(-ish) if we could actually get hold of all that excess wealth and use our time as we pleased. But at this point, I really don’t think that’s the plan.

We need stories, we need art, it is the way we explain the world to ourselves, it is how we make sense of things. Stories contribute to a collective Imaginarium that has the power to mold future societies, re interpret ourselves. At least that is my deep belief. If we stop here. If we recycle what has already been made over and over again, without any new input (input being our own subjective interpretation, our decisions) we are left with just derivative slop.

There is no such thing as AI art, that’s it, I’m not even going to elaborate on that. Also, AI is not copyrightable, so add that to the list of things you lose in your work, let alone client work.

But most importantly, I like the process, as frustrating time consuming messy as it is, it is the whole point of it. I WANT to do it…

I think that the best way we can handle this from our very tiny spaces is with our choices, consciously giving support to artists we like, do not give away your attention without meaning to. Claim the process back and respect other people’s process as well.

Listen this is a really deep rabbit hole I am certainly not qualified enough to speak about it in depth, this is my personal opinion and personal policy, so of course I recommend people form their own opinions, and of course I might change my mind in the future, who knows… 

The AI dilema Tristan Harris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ

This is a cool conference to start that rabbit hole.