AI & mass productivity

Matisse lay in his sickbed cutting out coloured paper shapes to create montages. It was all he was able to do in his weakened state. Some of those works of art are currently exhibited in public national galleries, are considered as examples of high art. 

I lay in my sickbed playing with an AI art generator on my mobile phone and consolidating my attitude toward doing so. 

Good old Matisse. While the images I created here may not be worth anything much at all to anyone financially as far as I am aware, they do follow in the wake of his tradition. 

A transition from painting by hand to what was once a new technology of printing methods enabled more than one of each image to be printed. Traditionalists at that time lamented the death of painting, an event which did not occur. Mass-production simply means more people can enjoy a picture. 

Extra-curricular to academic study of the Fine Arts I was mentored and trained as a photographer before the era of digital-photography. 

I developed photographs in a dark room using negatives, chemicals and dip-trays. Many of that generation lamented the death of their skills and expertise, resenting how ‘computers will take over the world.’ 

Such skills and expertise photographers and visual artists of other traditions must have awareness of, for example composition, continues to be as valid and as important as ever. 

A standard practise when doing a photoshoot was to take a lot of photographs and select only the best few from the shoot to develop. A process of filtering them to determine which ones were worth developing. 

It was not uncommon for a photographer to use a whole reel of film, to use several reels of film, to get that one perfect shot. 

Once established in the habit of working that way it transfers. When making AI art I make batches of dozens of similar images to achieve that one perfect image. 

The technology allows for this. As with everything in life it takes Time, Focus and Effort (energy). I see no reason why not to ‘flood the market’ with what is still a limited number of variants of a theme. 

It is an advantage of the technology which makes it possible to do this.