“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
That sentence was initially composed by linguist Noam Chomsky and included in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. The words are all there in the right order, but together they mean absolutely nothing.
And anyway, that’s kind of how I feel about AI right now, it’s a colorless green idea that sleeps furiously. So out of sheer curiosity, I’ve started playing around with it I uploaded a handful of images to a site (images that are already online somewhere in some fashion or other, since I realize AI is building itself off of the backs of artists and “free work” and I’m trying not to feed the beast anything it couldn’t have easily acquired on its own). And then it asks for prompts. These are random words: give it a description of a direction to go with it, elements to combine, and a look to achieve.
These are also “training words” where you’re teaching the AI machine how to be.
Things like: woman, punk rock, mohawk, cinematic lighting, highly detailed
Or: woman, Twin Peaks movie poster art, pop culture, clean, simple, nostalgic
Or: woman, cyberpunk, android, intricate wiring, circuit board, Blade Runner
Or: woman, realistic portrait, dramatic lighting, clean, powerful, boss lady
Wild, huh?! And totally scary. I see pieces and parts of me and then an amalgamation of other things. They range from fun to weird to frighteningly realistic to completely stupid to completely f*cked with things going sideways as if there was a glitch in the matrix. In the latter, I ended up with extra rows of teeth, crossed eyes, a few extra legs, or where some inbreeding had happened.
Curious. What would I look like as cartoon art in a neon noodle shop? Or cheering on a World Cup game? Or as royalty? Or in a Kehinde Wiley painting? Or in low-fi pop art? Or as manga? Or holding a beer? Or in leather pants?
The possibilities are endless.
I get a lot of things from art: a feeling, connection, inspiration, beauty, a sense of wonder and awe, and perhaps even an understanding of the world or an issue or the person’s mental state. I don’t get any of those feelings from this stuff, just a weird sense of dread and a bit of an “oh shit” feeling. What’s the why?
Artist and illustrator Jackie Ferrentino makes a great point in this thread: “One of the wildest things about AI art is that it's a "solution" to a total non-problem.” And I tend to agree on some level, especially when she says “It is a human technology fulfilling a uniquely human need.”
But recently, AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. And artists were rightfully pissed and frightened.
And some great photographers, like Jonas Bendiksen, have started broaching the subject of AI. In his most recent work The Book of Veles he uses it as a solution to a much bigger problem. In this case, the why now feels like a hamster wheel that you can’t get out of. By doing a deep dive into fake news he created fake images to make a point about fake news, thus making us question what is real by faking fake news. And ultimately making us question everything.
“I started to ask myself the question – how long will it take before we start seeing “documentary photojournalism” that has no other basis in reality than the photographer’s fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card? Will we be able to tell the difference? How hard is it to do? How skilled will our own community of photographers and editors be in sniffing out what are deep fakes and what is real?
I was so frightened by what the answers would be that I decided to try to do this myself.”
In writing about The Book of Veles for the Washington Post, Kenneth Dickerman gets at the crux of the issue and raises some tough questions. At its most basic level, it asks us to contemplate how we know when something is real or fake.
“The question of veracity that underpins the book is a multifaceted one. Bendiksen has worked in journalism his whole career. In many ways, his reputation is tied to the sense that the work he presents is anchored in reality.
In “Veles,” Bendiksen has used that reputation to turn all of the tables in the photojournalism world upside down and inside out. Bendiksen’s new book is a fabrication. It’s fake. Interestingly enough, this is fully intentional — to prove a point that has become incredibly urgent right now.”
Bendiksen left some digital breadcrumbs, hoping some astute observers would spot them and call him out, but eventually, he outed himself after some growing discomfort once the work was accepted and a screening was going to take place at the famed photojournalism festival, Perpignan. The director of which later issued a public statement.
Ultimately this is what good art does though, right?! It asks more questions than it answers. It makes you think and feel and examine those thoughts and feelings.
So, while it also goes without saying that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It also goes without saying that the floodgates are already open, folks. Question everything, but especially your response to those things.
I’ll give Bendiksen the last word on this here.
My hypothesis all along was that if one averagely nerdy freelance photographer can put this together in his basement office, then we’re all in for a heck of a ride.
The AI thing is absolutely wild. On the word side of AI, there's a recent podcast you should listen to from 'The Daily:' https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/podcasts/the-daily/chatgpt-openai-artificial-intelligence.html
And just about every major motion picture uses CGI. If it enhances the story I guess it’s ok. If it is the story, hard pass.