Okay. So, I don’t personally use AI art, and on my substack posts I usually try to find a decent painting from the public domain or a photograph that I took of some beautiful nature scene.
However, after discussing what kind of art AI art might be over breakfast with Mark, we came up with an idea that making images with AI is kind of like making a collage. AI has images that have been fed to it and with your imagination and prompting puts the images together in the way that you desire. Kind of like cutting up magazines and gluing images together into a new one. When I think of it that way, it feels palatable to me.
Thanks for setting that out. I agree — AI art is very often appropriately illustrative of ideas that one is trying to set out clearly for other people to understand. And, like you say, sometimes it is way off the bat at first, but you can tweak it until it fits. That’s truly liberating, especially for those of us whose primary skill lies in verbal communication. And AI is a good editorial critic too, although its sentence construction is a bit clunky. I never engage with texts that are clearly AI-generated, since if I wanted that, I can write perfectly good prompts of my own.
Since you asked for responses, I'll be honest that I just came across your Substack and am very interested in the titles and previews of many of your pieces, but your use of AI art has made me highly unlikely to continue reading. To me, it is, as you describe the stock imagery, "boring and uninspired," and further displays a lack of respect for the skill and spirit of artists who have given their time and attention to craft. It also seems to me to insult your readers, implying we need an image to draw us into the text, but that image can be made to a template of concepts, rather than being the result of a human engagement with craft, time, thought, and spiritual experience. I realize you want something specific rather than pictures of plants, but I will say that when I see those pictures in a somewhat-unrelated essay, I think of them showing the writer's appreciation for beauty in the real world moments that also contribute to thinking. From your description of creating your substack with your children, I see glimpses of that that I can appreciate. I know I probably won't change your mind, but--partly for myself--I wanted to articulate the sense of disjunctuon I experience from encountering someone whose ideas strike me as valuable and interesting but whom I feel is (unintentionally) insulting the connection between the spiritual and aesthetic that I hold dear.
Okay. So, I don’t personally use AI art, and on my substack posts I usually try to find a decent painting from the public domain or a photograph that I took of some beautiful nature scene.
However, after discussing what kind of art AI art might be over breakfast with Mark, we came up with an idea that making images with AI is kind of like making a collage. AI has images that have been fed to it and with your imagination and prompting puts the images together in the way that you desire. Kind of like cutting up magazines and gluing images together into a new one. When I think of it that way, it feels palatable to me.
That’s a very interesting take, thanks. Mulling it over now.
Thanks for setting that out. I agree — AI art is very often appropriately illustrative of ideas that one is trying to set out clearly for other people to understand. And, like you say, sometimes it is way off the bat at first, but you can tweak it until it fits. That’s truly liberating, especially for those of us whose primary skill lies in verbal communication. And AI is a good editorial critic too, although its sentence construction is a bit clunky. I never engage with texts that are clearly AI-generated, since if I wanted that, I can write perfectly good prompts of my own.
If you're against AI art you're my ideological enemy and probably hate beauty
Since you asked for responses, I'll be honest that I just came across your Substack and am very interested in the titles and previews of many of your pieces, but your use of AI art has made me highly unlikely to continue reading. To me, it is, as you describe the stock imagery, "boring and uninspired," and further displays a lack of respect for the skill and spirit of artists who have given their time and attention to craft. It also seems to me to insult your readers, implying we need an image to draw us into the text, but that image can be made to a template of concepts, rather than being the result of a human engagement with craft, time, thought, and spiritual experience. I realize you want something specific rather than pictures of plants, but I will say that when I see those pictures in a somewhat-unrelated essay, I think of them showing the writer's appreciation for beauty in the real world moments that also contribute to thinking. From your description of creating your substack with your children, I see glimpses of that that I can appreciate. I know I probably won't change your mind, but--partly for myself--I wanted to articulate the sense of disjunctuon I experience from encountering someone whose ideas strike me as valuable and interesting but whom I feel is (unintentionally) insulting the connection between the spiritual and aesthetic that I hold dear.