some loose thoughts on AI
The first time I encountered AI generated images was in the fall of 2022. I was in Rockford when my dad was in the hospital and my brother -n-law was sharing funny images on his phone (I'm pretty sure they were silly cats..lol..) and the tech seemed rife with potential, especially in creative capacities. By mid 2023, there were rumblings about the generators--both good and bad, and their base operations being entirely driven by existing content on the internets, which many artists were bucking against as stolen materials. Others were fearing the sociopolitical ramifications of fraudulent images and video that seemed a real possibility with these platforms. Others were simply using the software and making funny headshots and photos. I even saw a few creators who embraced it wholeheartedly, a couple artists who already worked in digital media, and a handful of horror content creators that I grew to really like making pretty cool and spooky stuff. Horror, I've found is already going for a creepy uncanny effect, to which the generated images lent themselves well.
While most of my collaging up til that point had been analog or digital using existing graphics I found in public domain collections or stock image sites (which I use a lot in the cover designs I do for myself and dgp) I was initially intrigued by the generative technology and its potential for creative things. Not that it was creative on its own as a machine, but that I could involve some of it in my process. I think I plugged my first prompt that summer, a silly one about a maiden and a duck, into the generator built into Canva on a lark. It looked horrible, and the AI was still spitting out six-fingered weirdness, but over the next few months, I'd fiddle with it occasionally. The people around me seemed to be of two sorts, those who were completely against it and its use, and others who saw some potential in it and ways it could be applied to their artmaking. I started playing around more--sometimes creating collage elements that made getting exactly what I wanted more expediently, or messing around with what I like to call "fauxtographs"--which usually involved bizarre prompts that led to strange and eerie results I would then edit to get them how I wanted them (usually this was using filters and frames, or manipulating the images to create new ones.) On the whole, I loved these images and their weirdness (see that masterpiece above) Would I have called them mine? No, not really. It felt more like curation. I hesitate to say "collaboration" since really, can a computer even collab? But they were excellent fodder for poems, and a few poemish projects came from those exploits, both shorter and longer, including EXOTICA, a series of fauxtographs and prose poems that I later published as a special Patreon edition. (as well as a digital zine you can find here.) There were other series that evolved similarly-- the Alice in Wonderland-inspired images of SPILL, for instance, Or the series of haunted dollhouse dioramas I am still figuring out what to do with. One of the things most often said about AI-generated images is their creepiness, so this lent them well to my aesthetic. Would I call them art? Probably not, but were they fun to generate? Absolutely.
Slowly, in that first year, there were many rumblings of generative AI's downsides. Chief amongst them was the way they were created from existing scraped content--content for which no one had been paid for or asked permission to be used. My take, as someone who works much in the way a database creates an image from other images as a collagist, I found this less problematic for the first reason and more problematic for the second. I'd always assumed that what you fed into the computer may one day be spit back at you. The way the tech companies did this without compensating the material (especially when we are talking books and materials that the language models are based on--especially if they were pirated in the first place.) Other people were concerned about this taking work and opportunities from humans, which goes across all industries and jobs, not just creative ones.
There was also the slowly building environmental case against AI in general, which not only included these creative tools, but also how search engines and apps were being pushed toward AI integration at an alarming rate. This is the one that slowed down my embrace of it considerably--the water waste, which actually, if the companies were more responsible with their resource use and not so fucking evil everyday, may be less of a thing than it currently is sadly. What did this mean for my use or disuse of AI? It definitely slowed me down on my enthusiasm. While I have occasionally dipped back in to make things I can't find elsewhere in public domain/stock images/ Canva graphic offerings, I will use the generator, but I hesitate to do it too much and waste all that water (in the same way I try to recycle, not fly on planes, reduce my carbon footprint, etc.)
Of course, this is purely talking images. When people started talking about writing with AI, or suggesting writers use it, I was mostly like WHY? I guess I could see asking AI to write an email to save time, especially for people who aren't writers (but of course, why would writers use it?) This was a separate issue from We already have that skill. But as creatives, the onus of art is more about personal expression, so how is plugging a prompt into a keyboard expressing anything? When it came to poetry, how much could a machine understand and recreate the connective and metaphoric connections that make a poem a poem and not an email or an informational brochure. The answer of course, is that it can't. Or can't well.
I was thinking about how often anti-AI clauses are cropping up in guidelines and was wondering if I should add something to the chapbook guidelines. And I may eventually. I like to think generated work would just not be very good, so I wouldn't be interested in taking it on anyway. I also am not sure what the point of passing of AI work as your own. What's to be gained? Certainly not fame or money (this is poetry after all.)
As for my own AI use as a creative, I am definitely not as on board as the tech bros would hope (and seriously talking to a chatbot is just some weird validation masturbation that does sufficiently give me the ick.) Could it be a useful tool in making art or writing? Maybe, but its heavy with its misbegotten scraped content and toll on resources currently, not so much. At its heart generative AI just a tool we can use or not use, but we have to be careful that it stays that way--that it doesn't end up using US.
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