I make my paintings with AI and I wanna talk about why they start with a memory I have or a vague place that feels very familiar I use AI to piece the location together but I wanna explain why I do this I start with my own reference images either something I found in a thrift store I’ve taken myself or something from a collection of family film photos I feed these photos into the AI Image Generator mid journey if you’ve used mid journey you know you’re allowed to incorporate your own reference images into your prompts the program will take aspects of my photos but blend them with the billions of images and descriptions it’s been trained on the result is an image that kind of looks like my original reference but through my descriptions and blending of photos it’s more the memory I had in mind it’s not tied to a specific place or person it’s a blend of real and imagined images this means its become more than just my memory it’s a blend of many different memories I take the image to Photoshop to fine tune it some more and sometimes add objects from real life I use blankets curtains and crafts that once belong to someone to add a connection to their past but made into a new narrative then I incorporate thrifted material into the painting blending the digital and physical so basically I’m trying to recreate my past but I’m stealing from everyone else to do it I’m taking images materials and items from countless strangers I’m mirroring the way AI works and trying to find that uncanny bridge between the real and imagined creativity has always been about taking fragments of the past and evolving them to something new but we’re starting to enter a time where we can’t be sure if the images we’re seeing are real or if they were ever a human experience AI has an enormous potential to enhance human creativity that we need to remember that impactful art comes from a human connection to either the artist ourselves or each other