As more and more artists embrace the power of artificial intelligence, I’ve been noticing some patterns.
Check the #AIart hashtag on Instagram and you’ll see a lot of sci-fi, fantasy and anime-inspired imagery of cars, robots and “cyber pin-ups”.
There’s nothing wrong with these trends, of course.
But works like these rarely surprise me.
Some of us creative types have been expecting a little more from our new Robot Overlords. Given what these machines are capable of, some of us were expecting a bit more shock and awe on a daily basis…
From the time I was a tween, I’ve played creatively with digital technologies. From hand-coding my own adventure games and animated cartoons on PCs, to making generative art with 3D game engines, I’m happiest when I’m exploring how I can be creative when I’m using unfamiliar tech.
Over the past year or so, my favourite creative hobby has become “testing the boundaries” of AI-based image generation systems, like DALL-E 2.
Rather than approaching AI with a subject (car, robot) and a visual style (cyberpunk, pixel art) in mind, I tend to leave those to chance and focus on visualizing a concept.
By asking an AI to render ideas, I often reveal biases in the image data, or in our culture — and even in myself. (The failures are often the most fun and instructive.)
Also, when I challenge an AI system to render an image of something that I’ve never seen before (or that it has never seen before), the results often provide a peek inside its “latent space” — the hyper-connected web of semantics that links an AI’s understanding of various concepts.
I’m been a creative director and teacher for many years, and I love sharing what I learn during my personal creative explorations. Think of Silicon Castles as a sketchbook from a laboratory where I conduct micro-experiments with AI.
I hope to give you a lots of eye candy, a little inspiration, a dash of provocation and a pinch of process. I’ll also share the occasional random internet find that piques my own weird interest in AI.
If you’re looking for an uncommon approach to creatively using artificial intelligence, subscribe!