hi I wanted to get on here and talk a little bit more about my art process and my choice for using generative AI as references in these paintings um this is gonna be pretty long so if I am not talking quick enough uh you can speed it up just wanted to talk through and let everybody know that I don’t wanna show down any of the um conversations that have been brought up in my comments a lot of valid points have been made that I don’t wanna come off like I’m being snarky to any of these or that I’m like dissuading a certain side this is a very great area topic that is kind of the reason I’m making art this way so thank you to everybody that’s been open to having a discussion about this just wanna preface by saying that I do not do this full time um I’m here working from my home in a small town in a very rural area the reception I’ve gotten online is more than I would have ever assumed I would get my full time job is a corporate graphic designer so when it comes to the conversations about the potential for generative AI to take some of these positions from artists um like I’m right there with you um this is just me trying to be absolutely as transparent as possible about my reasoning for this process I use AI because my work is about AI um I’m very focused on nostalgia and memory but mostly machine intelligence visually interpreting descriptions of memories um I’m also very focused about how AI is coming into our digital space and warping the human narrative from here on out I wanna make work that feels very nostalgic but is physically entering our space with some of the uh attachments I add and I want this to be somewhat of a bridge of this grey area between the digital and physical very interested in mirroring the way AI works and exploring what this means for the creative process I think creativity has always been about taking fragments of your influences and fragments of the past and creating something that’s a new story that’s authentic and unique to you trying to recreate my memories and vague recollections through this creative process and almost hyper stealing um all of these are thrifted materials that I found all of the items attached are taken from other people and the image references are made from a combination of my family film photos pictures I might have taken on a walk pictures I found in a thrift store and then they’re put into the AI program to form the sort of amalgamation of a place that doesn’t exist still crafting the image together I’m still collaging it in Photoshop and I’m still trying to keep my heavy hand on the creative process but generative AI is a piece of it AI is working in a very similar way and obviously this is a very gray area the difference being the AI is taking fragments of pieces that artist did not consent to it being trained on I think this is something that we need to hold the corporations that have trained these models responsible for I hate being this cynical about it but unfortunately that’s already happened it continues to happen and we’re kind of at a place of where do we go from here hope that by incorporating my own reference images the these locations are the majority and amalgamation of my reference images made into a place that casts lighting a certain way or has aspects that I’ve asked of it but there is a chance that some of what’s in my locations could be taken from a photographer could have been taken from somebody else’s family photo um I wanna get a little bit more into how this was already wrapped into the creative process this gray area comes from the line of stealing and being influenced by and um I think there are two ways you can look at some of these platforms obviously see these systems as a massive threat to artists and their livelihood moving forward I’m equally as grossed out as you are at seeing really bad AI done in a lot of advertisements I think we’re about to see a lot more of that I’m also very disheartened and grossed out at corporations um willingness to drop an artist in the humanity they provide for such soulless generated art I’m getting a bit more in a perfect world here but another side to this coin could be looking at these systems as just a massive amalgamation of the inspiration of all the creative people that came before you and I think there’s something about that that this could be an incredible tool to inspire and assist artists moving forward this is how I personally feel and I cannot speak for every artist when it comes to this but if you’ve seen my work and it’s inspired you to try painting on fabric or using mixed media for yourself that is the exact goal I hope to attain with creating art I think that as a creative person you wanna push things into the world that hopefully inspire others and cause that creative chain reaction of how connected we are how we take pieces from each other how we evolve it and move forward with it so if you’re gonna copy every single part of my process down to a t to do literally exactly what I’m doing I don’t love that but also I don’t think other people are gonna love it either I think that what connects us to good and impactful art is the story of the person making it we wanna see something very authentic and I truly think we are going to be feeling this way about AI native people wanna have a heavy hand in what they’re making and I think that’s what makes AI so scary but I think that that authentic passion in the process as cheesy as it is is what we wanna see in art that makes us feel something first saw AI images obviously they are incredible at first they’re amazing I this is stupid but I’m gonna equate it to watching Avatar for the first time it was a gorgeous movie and you’re like wow I’ve never seen CGI like this before and then it quickly gets boring it quickly gets a little bit old and I really think that we are going to be reaching this with AI I just want my work to come back to this human connection idea and the fact that our stories have all influenced each other but I also want to tie this into AI and the idea of looking at spaces that were never connected to a human we’re never real so I’m trying to make a little bit of a conundrum with places that are very very real and someone has experienced paired with the idea that in general this place doesn’t exist it’s never existed the concept put together specific to no one you don’t wish to support me because AI is a step in my process I want to be very transparent about that so that you’re aware I could be painting on fabric the exact same way I am now and I have done that before I was a photographer for years and I would take images of locations around me and paint them the problem lied and I felt like I was pushing narratives onto a place that was very specific to one person and I really like the broader concepts that the introduction of AI adds up um to me it feels very much the difference between I just painted a family home and a very broad introspective conversation about a place not existing but being constructive of fragments of many people I know the AI is always gonna be involved in my process this is just a new thing with very broad concepts that I wanted to jump on at this point in time thank you to everybody that’s open up the discussion on this there’s very valid points that I don’t take lightly and I think we always need a good reflection on why we choose to work the way we do thank you so much for all the support I’ve received it’s more than I could have literally ever imagined would have happened and if you choose to follow my art process and the evolution of it moving forward I it means the world and thank you so much