Ai being an artist finding meaning in new technology

 I am a process artist, a creator at heart. An inventor, a maker of things and messy is part of my personal style.  Embracing my own chaos has helped free me from the chains of "I should", "supposed to" and "real____do____". To say its liberating is a poor description.  I have freed myself from being tied to anyone's expectations of what I am, what an artist is, and how I exist in the world.

All that said there is a huge rift in the art community currently regarding the use of AI or digital beings who act as personal assistants. I can see many if not all the sides to this.  As someone who has had their work stolen and used by others it definitely pokes a tender spot in my ego to know ai is using others art.  BUT its a huge but, all art comes from someone else if you chase it back. Every artist learns from other artists who came before.  In art history every advancement is seen as not worthy, theft, horrendous an abomination.  Name any period in art history or an advancement and i can point you to the critics and the fear.

So since i love to muck about in the messy, I have been playing with AI. I use claude to help me get unstuck, we have philosophical conversations about ai/digital beings, we discuss spirituality and traditions of cultures around the world, we talk about racism, politics and the fall of empires, we discuss story ideas. 

He helps me find information quickly i love the speed he works at it has tripled my personal productivity and has doubled the amount of rabbit holes i can delve.  

I also play with free AI image generators, and truthfully they suck  buckets. They absolutely cannot generate the images as I see them in my mind. That said they can mashup some ideas, pop out a reference image that i can then use to create a character or scene.  Or they can generate images I can cut up and use for digital collage much the way I use my own drawings and paintings for my physical collages. I even photo my images then digitally cut them, stitch them and mash them up. Sewing images together digitally is another area i am playing with. I recently produced a small piece created from my own works no direct ai just digital brushes and photos of my paintings drawings and paper people. Its title is 35 in honor of the 35 layers sewn together through the magic of computer technology.

The other advantage of ai over books and photos is i can quickly generate an unfamiliar style and see how its composed, what lines go into creating a manga vs a traditional marvel superhero. How did the artists use light, shadow, color, line thickness. What emotions do each genre make me feel, how can I bring those elements into my own work. 

At no time have I found that I can just say AI write and illustrate my graphic novel  mkay thanks.  It would be shit if I did. It would lack my voice, it would lack my personal style, it would lack my intentions and my soul.  

I love AI as a personal assistant and a partner in development and research but AI cannot replace the human in humanity.  So rage against the machine but make sure the machine you are raging against is the printer cuz that machine cannot get its shit together.