I’m minddeep in ai conversations with Claude.ai and Dall-e. Today I’m going back to Dall-e to generate an image for a book I am writing about Jack Kerouac. Let me take you down the rabbit hole for a moment.

Here is the famous photo of Jack and his cat.

I started out with a prompt to generate a similar image.

image one – unedited

image one – lightened and duotoned

image two

image three is a variation of two – the winner

image four – what the hell is wrong with you

Here’s the art direction conversation I had with Dall-e.

• Idea: me
• Initial impulse: photo of Jack Kerouac with his cat
• Prompt: me
• Images: dall-e (is this art? is this graphic design?)
• Selection and photoshop manipulation: me

I like thinking of *ai art* more as *ai design* or *ai graphic design*

In this example, I am not an artist any more than I’m a person with hand skills to draw a detailed image of Jack Kerouac. So I ask my graphic design co-pilot dall-e to supply the art graphics. What is this that we have created? Do I owe any royalties to OpenAI for the use of my dall-e image on a book cover? What’s the copyright law around #generativeart?

As we continue to push into the uses of our “artificial” copilots, what is owned by us and what goes into and feeds the LLMs data set? And get this, the owners of TikTok (you know the app that governments are shutting down because of privacy violations) are using ChatGPT against the legal “terms and regulations” instructions, to train their own ai. An ai using your/my/everyone’s TikTok data. All those dances, images, songs, poems, pictures, funny reels, everything, is OWNED by Bytedance the minute you let your finger off the TikTok button and hit PUBLISH.

Where will the war for copyright be waged? Who owns the complete sum of your output on TikTok? I’m guessing you already know the answer. If you don’t: if you publish anything on a social media platform you are releasing your rights to ownership of that image/video/music for inclusion in future ADS, REMIXES, and DERIVATIVE WORKS. Remember back in the day when Facebook turned on the “Your Friend John Likes Lululemon” tagging to push more ads to your friends and somehow making the ads look like YOU pushed the AD to your feed? (I hope you go into Facebook and turn that off.) But you can’t turn off their right to republish, remix, and recontextualize your content. All of it.

Oh, and those quizzes? The ones that sound like this, “See who’s going to be your FRIEND and your ENEMY in the coming year, 2024!” When you accept those terms and conditions within the legalese you didn’t read, you’re giving access to not only your data but a lot of your “friends” data. I’ve unfriended people who were quiz-happy. You don’t know where and how that data will be used.

This story is my own work. Those images above are not “art” in my opinion. They are graphics created by an ai. This is going to severely hurt editorial artists and illustrators. Art directors for magazines and online products will say, “Just get the *ai* to do it.” And that will be enough. Actual human artists will lose. And the prompt engineer employee will rise and have a miserable full-time job with health benefits.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to get out my real colored pencils and remember what a good rough piece of art paper feels like. The smell of the paper, the inks, the pencils, the markers, the paints. Get messing around offline. Digital art is cool. Ai art isn’t art. And humans currently have an advantage over *ai* when it comes to art. The imaginative breadth of our hyper-connected mind, instant sorting and recall, chemical hormones for mood and altitude, and a large living language model that began self-training at birth. A wonder we are.

l³m

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave…”

Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field is a historical romance in verse of 16th-century Scotland and England by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1808. Often misrepresented as Shakespeare, this poem’s line continues thus

“..when at first we start to deceive.”

Parting Thought: Find the poetry in your life and work. Return to hand skills, pen and paper, and learn to play an actual instrument and not a software robot. It is the poetic, the unmatchable, the larger-than-ourselves human connection, that makes us human. The Replicants in Blade Runner were as close as we are likely to get in our future *ai* developments. What will connect the first ai to a soul, the mystery of artificial general intelligence? The ghost in the machine or spirit in the material world?

I dream of a poətic filter. Today *ai* is a long way from composing a tangled web of emotional language.

READ: Part One: *ai* Art Direction or Generative *art*?

More here: uber.la on ai

John McElhenney —  LinkedIn

Please check out a few of my books on AMAZON. 

Especially this one, about living a creative and human life of intention and joy. 100% human generated – with the exception of ai-assisted spelling, which gets almost everything about grammar and syntax wrong.