Let’s RE:THINK This

If you are a creative artist you probably make most of your money doing other things, besides your art. Certainly, if you are a poet, you are doing it for the thrill of calling yourself a poet, right. I would guess poetry sales are about as trendy as vintage software manuals.

Creatives Are Losing the Digital Transformation

As Napster and then Spotify killed income from recorded music, we creatives have been under fire from the digital world. Music was the first collapse. (Although the industry was actually already pretty dysfunctional. Not as bad as it is today, but it was bad.)

The Writer’s Strike in Hollywood was an attempt to stem the bleeding of creative work away from humans and to robots that are fast, relentless, and **wait for 8t** not very creative. I’m betting ChatGPT could churn out 3 solid MARVEL screenplays in an hour, with some good prompting and an experienced screenwriter. But then what would we have, three more movies of explosions, jarring rip-cut editing, and bad writing. (Sorry, if you’re a fan, but they lost me after Avengers. The first Ironman being my favorite title of all.)

Image creators are now also under extreme pressure from generative ai. Need a graphic piece for this article, 4-minutes with Dall-e and I’m good. That eliminates a huge chunk of creative work for illustrators and painters. Not to mention old advertising firm titles like Creative Director, Graphic Designer. Even the UX/UI disciplines are getting edged out by “assistants” and AI-addons to Figma, Photoshop, and even Miro (one of my favorites).

What’s left for a creative to do?

Fight the Power

Here’s my plan. Do it by hand. Start a human-crafted movement. As Facebook and other platforms start to ID AI-generated content, we can swing the other edge of the sword as artists. This drawing was done by a human in his living room with a real pen on real paper. Don’t get me wrong, I love digital. I’ve spent 25 years building digital content for marketing. A few you might have heard of. Here’s my visual resume on YT for your viewing pleasure.

I want to get back in the studio with ink, paint, pastels, some Arches papers, and my human mind. While generative prompt art can sample and steal from all the art ever made, it cannot interpret any of the data it’s swizzling. It just takes 10,000 images of a “sad artist in blue” and throws some logic and math at the pile of data and spits out four images. Here, let’s give an example with my prompt above.

Here is the path I traveled to get the image for this post.

On the left, you can see I began with the limited prompt. “sad artist in blue.” I tried several “in the style of” transformations but didn’t like any of them. So, I went back to work on my prompt. Moving through several media types. I always like impressionist and pastel as good modifiers. In the end, I used the VARIATIONS button my favorite image. Let me show you what the entire process looks like.

If I were feeling really ballsy at the moment I would get out my paints or drawing pencils and do the illustration as a human. But, my primary art is not painting, drawing, or illustration. In concept, my role with Dall-e was more like an art director working with an artist. The big problem, or big disconnect for artists: no creative skills were required beyond prompts and my eye and decisions. And the benefit to me, I could get Dall-e to REGENERATE over and over. There is no complaint by Dall-e.

“Bones! I Need Full Power Now!”

There might be more of a complaint by the planet. As we start generating everything, we are going to heat up our data centers to new extreme highs. AI has a lot of problems going forward. Power and Cooling are two of the biggest challenges. I wonder if AI can re:think its way out of the environmental crisis we’re all racing toward.

Question: What do you think “creativity” means? See: CR8V.AI for a preview of my first book on AI.

Go out, and play with the *ai* of your choice. See what you learn. It is an amazing time.

the dall-e prompt for the main image: “primitive style abstract oil painting with vibrant colors of a sad writer, show them writing with a pen and pad of paper at a small cafe table on the streets of paris”

John McElhenney — let’s connect online
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A few of my creative ai motions:

• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration