AI, I'm here.
Learning a new way to imagine.
In the early stages of AI development, many people understandably were, and still are, apprehensive about the potential impact of AI on the world of art and design or any creative field for that matter. Fears of creative stagnation, job displacement, and loss of human touch loomed large.
However, as AI evolves at unprecedented speed, an entirely new era of creative tools is emerging. Initially, I was skeptical and also apprehensive. Imagining a world where the human touch in art, such as painting, could become outsourced to a machine seemed a sad world to me. Yet, when I looked back in history, I found other similar instances. For example, the writing of letters and the telegram. Or even with portrait painting and the photograph.
The takeaway? The human touch evolves within the constraints of any new medium.
As I experiment more with AI, a new wave of optimism has silenced my trepidations. These advanced systems are proving already to be invaluable collaborators, amplifying my own creative abilities and expanding the horizons of what is possible in the field.
Here I am experimenting with Midjourney. I’ve included the prompt in the caption so you may try it yourself.
After generating the image, I copied it physically with a pencil to try and gauge how this could fit into my workflow. Midjourney keeps getting better and better.
By now it is clear AI will impact every creative process. It’s expanding the creativity space by opening up mediums previously only accessible to those with skill. So then is having a skill, such as drawing, now irrelevant?
By no means.
Here is where human ingenuity still plays a critical part. Taste too. AI will take you where you want to go at hyper speed but you still have to know how to drive it. You have to train yourself to speak to it. That is where skill comes into play. If you don’t have the skill, AI may or may not make up for not having any technique yourself.
If we look at historical patterns, there will always be those who resist the latest and those who not only embrace it but know how to push the technology forward in a tasteful way. They will do this by having a vision, the skill to extract the work from the machine, and the taste to know what to keep.
By combining human ingenuity with the speed of AI, our species now finds itself amid a metamorphosis. We have arrived in uncharted territory. Our programmers have figured out how to summon creativity out of our machine’s silicon. This is the natural progress of things. Exciting new opportunities await both the beginner and the advanced alike. All you have to do is /imagine.