Tag: art Page 1 of 2

The Gun That Shoots Images

On 8 August 2024

This one has been on the docket for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to post it. First, I had to figure out who the hell Ai Weiwei is. Apparently he is a big deal:

A lot of the artwork actually does look pretty interesting, which makes me look at this quote I have been sitting on with new eyes. It’s from this Guardian article:

Ai Weiwei said: “I’m sure if Picasso or Matisse were still alive they will quit their job. It’d be just impossible for them to still think [the same way].”

He is talking about the automatism (automaticism?) of easily reproduced images, set up in the preceding quote as his reaction to being asked about the issues around copyrighted works being used to train AI:

“That’s not a problem. I think that kind of art should [have died] a long time ago,” before he criticised art teaching that focuses on creating “realistic” images. “It takes AI a second to do it. So that only means what they have learned very often is meaningless.”

I’m still learning about his art, but I think I can see where he is coming from, even if I don’t agree with all of the assertions. It seems like his art is very rooted in the physicality of objects, artifacts actual places, the processes that got us there. It’s very true that this type of art is not within the reach or realm of the possible for generative AI right now. Eventually it will be. And I think that his point is that artists are chasing that edge beyond the edge. Artists are by nature nomadic in that respect, going to the next fertile place, and the next. Where they pioneer AI will inevitably follow.

I’ve been thinking more of AI lately as collective intelligence rather than “artificial.” I think we have not got a good collective understanding of what artificial even means in the first place. Instead, I think of AI more as collective intelligence, programmatically reified. It is, essentially, humans looking at humans looking at humans looking at humans.

There is actually an Ai Weiwei piece that is I think a marble carving of a surveillance camera. (Here’s some commentary on that, I haven’t gone deeply into it and am doing research on the fly.) Whatever his point in that piece was, my point feels like… we’ve spent the last decades surrounding ourselves with these digital eyes, watching, looking, recording, streaming, tweeting. Of course now, all those watching eyes have learned how we are, what we want. And they’re doing more than just watching: they’re talking back. They’re directing. They’re molding.

I almost forgot to respond to the original quote, at least more directly than the above rambling. I agree that if Matisse and Picasso had generative AI at their disposal, they would have had to rethink their approach to image making. But that’s what it forces every artist to do.

Generative AI is like a machine gun that shoots images.

Here’s that as an image in Ideogram AI:

Like he said, it takes AI a second to do it. I didn’t even have to pay for it on the free plan. Does that make it meaningless? Both yes and no at the same time. The sheer fact that *is* meaningless on the one hand is what gives it meaning on the other. But the act of writing & reading become married when working with generative AI: to look and explore is to create, to leave a trail.

The truth is we’re a culture (mega-culture?), a planet, awash in meaningless images. Constantly swimming in a sea of information trash. It’s why I block images by default in my web browsing, unless there’s a specific exception when I need or want them.

I don’t like being always shot at with image guns either (des armes iconographiques)- especially ones whose quality, source, ownership, agenda, etc. are opaque and outside my agency. But you cannot sit here and tell me that if Picasso had access to generative AI, he would not have stayed up all night going nuts with it? I’m absolutely sure he would have.

I saw a quote recently that said he made upwards of 20,000 artworks over the course of his life. Then, looking for confirmation, I found other sources suggesting more like 50,000. Then another estimate that pushed it upwards to like 147,000. I believe it, but who knows. But no way he wouldn’t have used gen AI, and of course absolutely it would have made him re-orient himself to his art and thinking about everything. It’s obviously what he did throughout his career, continually changing, reacting.

Incidentally, check out this absolutely insane 1949 Life magazine photo series of Picasso painting with light. It is literally the most futuristic looking shit I have ever seen – full on 75 years later. Incredible. I’m just saying, dude would have devoured and destroyed generative AI.

There is an aptly titled and cool-sounding exhibit at the Musee Picasso in Paris, “Iconophage” – image eater. Here’s a French podcast recording I listened to about it the other day. This article on Lens Culture touches a little bit on Picasso’s relationship with photography:

The most famous visual artist of the 20th century, Picasso was also the most photographed. Thanks to the camera, his striking features became iconic, recognized the world over. Yet this phenomenon was not a mere by-product of celebrity; his own photographic practice set the precedent. Picasso engaged with photography and photographers in myriad ways, starting from his early days in Paris and continuing through the last years of his life. He used the camera to capture life in the studio and at home, to try out new ideas, to study his works and document their creation, and to shape his own image as an artist at work.

Later in that original Guardian article I quoted at top, they get into more of Ai Weiwei’s concerns around AI, which I frankly agree with, and much of the AI Lore books series is centered around thematically.

But he did signal a warning about the future if artificial intelligence becomes too powerful and relied upon by countries around the world.

He is fearful AI could create a society similar to the Third Reich, where there is only one “right” answer to the big questions. “For me it is very much like what happened in the 1930s in Germany, or 1960s in China with the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “You all have one ideology, one past, and the one so-called ‘correctness’. This is dangerous.”

That same sentiment is echoed here in yet another Guardian interview with him:

But he is highly sceptical about artificial intelligence and where it might be leading us: “What you get is all the mediocre ideas mixed into something like a fusion, where there is no character and you avoid all mistakes. That is really dangerous to humanity, because we are all equal but we are all created differently. The difference is the beauty. Art, literature, poetry design – they are rooted in human mistakes, misjudgments, or character differences if you prefer. They should be dangerous and sexy and unpredictable. That’s totally against the AI world.”

In fact, in the course of making just that one iconographic machine gun image above, I had my prompt blocked on one site, Leonardo AI. I asked for something like a person whose head is a machine gun that is shooting out images. For that model, those words are apparently just too dangerous. Therefore, the end user is not allowed to imagine them. The gun that shoots images cannot be used to create images of guns that shoot images. There’s some deep and dangerous irony in there…

Transformation not Reproduction

By Tim B.

On 7 August 2024

In Other

I’ve been following along with the comments viewers left on my full-length interview with Milo Rossi. A few people are into it, but by and large the comments are highly negative. I get it. But at the same time, I’ve heard it all before a thousand times. I’ve literally gotten so many negative responses to my work over the past year that I have programmatically analyzed them for trends, and extracted actionable feedback.

None of the people who comment on the video have actually engaged with the content of the work that I do, only these artifacts of its outward form. None of those people, consequently, have understood that my art is actually by and large against AI – or, moreover, the risks of what happens when we willingly hand over our agency to large companies and their tantalizing products. (I even have a book about how “AI is theft” – even if I don’t completely agree with that perspective.)

But I don’t expect people to dive deep in these circumstances. The interview, if nothing else, is a springboard, a jumping off point for people to go down the many rabbit-holes of what the work actually consists of, its structure, and my thinking around it. I welcome hearing other people’s feedback; I’m just looking for those kernels within it which I haven’t already heard before. That’s what drives me to new places, and pushes the exploration forward.

I just wanted to settle here once and for all, though, one point which seems to consistently get challenged in comments. AI art is transformation not reproduction of its source training data. That’s part of what makes it Fair Use under US law. (I recognize that other jurisdictions have other conceptions around this – in France for example.)

And even if it were reproduction, reproduction and very close study and analysis is a critical part of art and the education of an artist. Doing my own master copy of a Matisse painting recently really drove this home for me. Artists *need* to be able to copy. That includes copying using technologies other than the technology of a paintbrush on canvas, which is just one of many available to artists today.

Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the job of artists is to make art, not seek permission or approval of others. Our job is to listen, to be attentive, to study, to watch, to ask questions, to search for answers, to share our search, to share our questions, to share what we find to have conversations, ask better questions, make better discoveries, and on and on and on. Our job is to do, to make mistakes, to make “bad” art among the good, and trust that somewhere along the line throughout the process, the rest will get sorted out if we’re authentic about the chase.

Full Length Interview With Milo Rossi on AI Art, Conspiracies, Etc.

By Tim B.

On 6 August 2024

In Other

Super excited this full-length version of my interview with Milo Rossi came out finally. It is so far the only long format video interview with me that goes deeply into my artwork using AI.

You can also watch his much much longer debunk video here, which part of the above interview plays a small element in a much bigger saga.

Matisse Copy: Harmony in Red

By Tim B.

On 31 July 2024

In Other

I guess the official title of the original Matisse I copied this from by hand* is, according to Wikipedia, The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room).

I put an asterisk after “by hand” above, because I used a projector to trace the drawing from. Some weird purists might argue something or other, but I still traced it “by hand” and then painted it by hand. So I think there’s no shame in tracing something. Make art however which way you gotta do it, just do it.

I wrote a while back, and a couple paintings ago, about how some theories exist trying to prove some Old Masters at a certain time started using projectors, lenses, optical technologies in order to get suddenly much more realistically rendered human figures. It’s a theory that seems to hold a lot of apparently truthful elements, whether or not it can be conclusively proven as having been historically the case. It should have been so, if it was not so.

Likewise, working with AI image generators especially has renewed my interest in this process and physical technology of how do you create and transmit, copy and modify images. Especially where the computer is not the end-all-be-all point of production and consumption, but where digital technologies can meaningfully and most fruitfully intersect with physical ones, in whatever form they take.

I didn’t do this Matisse copy as a forgery, but doing reproductions is a time-honored way of becoming a better artist. It causes you to look extremely closely, line by line, section by section, color by color, even brush stroke by brush stroke. I haven’t done a ‘master copy’ since I had to for my first year of art school, when I did a pencil rendering of Duchamp’s cubist piece, Nude Descending A Staircase. (No. 2, apparently).

I think my final result is “pretty good” but much of what I see when I look at it are the areas I sort of lied or flubbed what was going on in the original painting. For example, I added some black border drawings where Matisse appears to have used other colors. I didn’t have a great large image of the original, and also relied over-much on the colors as projected by the projector to sort of set the tops and bottoms for white and grey. But after a while I realized my end result was much darker, for example, in the dark blue shapes on wall and table.

I could go on and on about all that, but I won’t cause the end result is “fine” and the process was “very good” and “quite informative” as I had hoped. I guess I was ultimately inspired by this series I’d recently watched on YouTube with convicted forger John Myatt, called Forger’s Masterclass. This should be a playlist of the 10 episodes in this British series. I enjoyed all ten, some more than others.

But watching it gave me a lot of great perspective on how to look at styles from other painters, and how to try to recreate them technically, but also imbuing them with the creative spirit of the original or model.

I haven’t even gotten to fully sort out how I think this all relates to questions around art + creativity + AI + evolution of technology + copyright etc stuff… but looking at a number of videos on semi-famous (known) art forgers was a pretty interesting diversion a few nights ago, so I’ll drop them here below for interested parties.

Hebborn is interesting among these because his drawings tend to adhere much more closely to the originals and their styles than some of the others do. As I like to think of it, a con artist is still an artist though…

I’m really interested in this line of real vs. fake around forgeries particularly. And how a reproduction becomes a forgery only when it is placed in a certain light – where it is represented as the original work, instead of authentically as a reproduction. And then largely how much of the forging becomes of documentation, chains of custody, false witness in order to create a saleable quantity. And then how as those items get passed through hands of many collectors, this may give them undeserved status as being genuine originals.

It’s all quite convoluted and messy, and it’s mentioned in the Beltracchi video that he may be under some kind of non-disclosure agreement regarding owners or dealers, etc. It’s also interesting to me how some of these painters were able to pass off their work as authentic, when a lot of times the fakes don’t really look all that much like the art of the original artists… it’s weird.

One of the narrative conceits I see in a number of the videos I watched on this subject is that the artists who did these reproductions which were sold as forgeries were or are somehow themselves “not real artists.” They might have been forgers and copyists, but to my mind, they are absolutely “real artists” (even the ones whose works don’t look quite right relative to the models), because what art is is looking closely and working hard to master something. Even imperfect copies have a great deal of value, whether or not we try to pass them off as real fakes or fake fakes.

Anyway, running out of time & steam. That’s all for now.

Quoting Sir Joshua Reynolds on Borrowing in Art

By Tim B.

On 16 July 2024

In Other

This 250 year old quote seems entirely relevant to today’s debates around AI art, via Wikipedia page on Eclecticism in Art:

In the 18th century, Sir Joshua Reynolds, head of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, was one of the most influential advocates of eclecticism. In the sixth of his famous academical Discourses (1774), he wrote that the painter may use the work of the ancients as a “magazine of common property, always open to the public, whence every man has a right to take what materials he pleases” (Reynolds 1775, 26).

Referenced by Authors Alliance

By Tim B.

On 11 June 2024

In Other

Somehow this October 2023 reference to my work by Authors Alliance (who I spoke with once by Zoom and liked!) slipped through the cracks until today, so saving for the archives here:

Tim Boucher, a science fiction writer and artist, has used generative AI to create a series of nearly 100 science fiction books. He has experimented with different forms of “collaboration” with generative AI systems—from using them for ideation to using them to produce first drafts, to using them for late-stage editing. He has also used generative AI systems to produce text he uses as speech for characters in his works which are themselves AI entities. Boucher does not see his works as prototypical novels with a conventional narrative arc, but as nonlinear works with “interlocking pieces,” or “slice of life stories,” which lend themselves to the sometimes fragmented and dreamlike nature of generative AI systems’ outputs.

That’s a very stylistically accurate description of my work, I think.

And later:

Tim Boucher also uses generative AI systems to produce images that accompany his stories. While Boucher is a graphic artist himself, he has said that the time and cost involved in creating these illustrations by hand would severely limit the amount of time he could spend writing, and would make his project too cost-prohibitive.

The document overall is an interesting read and appears to have been submitted in response to the US Copyright Office public inquiry regarding Artificial Intelligence, which I also separately submitted my own response to.

Art Books

By Tim B.

On 13 March 2024

In Other

In honor of my attempts to summon the Painting Angel (which seem to have been successful), I have splurged and bought myself a few different volumes of glossy full color art books, especially from Taschen, and also Flammarion publishers. For the most part I am looking at a few French and Spanish painters working about 100 years ago, because I am very into that time period lately. There seem to be so many parallels, and 100 years ago is not very long, especially generationally speaking.

Anyway, one thing I’ve pleasantly rediscovered after lapsing in my painting practice for a few years (apart from the occasional random project), is that when you look through art books in this exploratory kind of fashion, you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for. You have an intuition, a feeling, a kind of line work, a color mood, a way of treating painted subjects. You follow it, but then the artists show you more of the latent space, more of the hypercanvas than you knew existed before. And it broadens you. So much so, that when you get back to the canvas the next time, you’ve learned things you don’t know that you learned, and that you didn’t even really know consciously you were looking at, or looking for.

It’s a really pleasant process, and making a routine of it all makes my heart happy. It gives a new focus and intent to how I spend my time, what I look for, and the types of things I explore. Instead of just being ricocheted back and forth between stupid things on the internet that will most assuredly be gone in a hundred years.

Painting Again

By Tim B.

On 29 February 2024

In Other

I started painting again and am having a lot of fun getting back into it.

The colors look a little weird on screen as this isn’t the best photo ever, but it will do for now. This is all done with a liner brush because I lover those. I forget the size, maybe 16″ x 20″ or thereabouts. I’ve done a number of other ones since then.

I actually feel like I learned a lot about “regular” art making by using AI so much. Something about using the painting tools in this case to sort of systematically explore a certain neighborhood and adjacent areas in latent space. These paintings are also very algorithmic in the decision-making process as I go, but applied through a sort of highly organic filtering. (I don’t know if anyone else can see it, but there’s a very subtle nod to the Sorcerer in the Trois Freres cave in France.)

I tried uploading this to Dalle3 and asking it to make similar images but it really choked. It was like it fundamentally failed to see what makes this unique and interesting and turned it into just AI “churt” is a non-word that springs to mind to describe the kind of non-art that it churned out in response. It’s interesting especially because to me the line-making is very algorithmically (rules) driven, but obviously the system doesn’t think through generating images in a procedural line-by-line build up around preceding forms on a canvas. That’s not how it works at all.

Here’s a sample of what it came up with in response:

It’s not that it’s so terrible to even so terribly far off, but it missed kind of the key point of the entire method I applied: none of the lines ever intersect.

Anyway, I don’t care that much what AI thinks or doesn’t think about this work, because it’s just fun to do it, and it’s helping me to have this to concentrate on, this very practical embodied activity, drawing lines out on canvas. It doesn’t really matter if AI can do it better or faster or more, because the fun is in the sheer act of it, and having nothing and no one interpolating between me and it.

Quoting Phillip Toledano on AI Art

By Tim B.

On 24 January 2024

In Other

By way of Washington Post, reporting by Yan Wu:

As these examples show, creative professionals might still have an advantage in the world of AI art. Aesthetic taste, culture and skills honed over years can substantially influence the quality of AI-generated images. “If AI is not for you, that’s fine. But shouting about it is like shouting at the sea,” Toledano said. “It’s here. Be curious.”

Press Release on Copyright Office Gen AI Inquiry

By Tim B.

On 28 October 2023

In Other

Just wanted to capture here the text of my latest press release (written with help from Claude 2) regarding my submission to the US Copyright Office and Canadian government’s public consultations on generative AI and copyright.

“AI Is My Paintbrush, I’m Still the Artist” – Copyright Offices Hear from AI Artist Tim Boucher

AI artist Tim Boucher urges US & Canadian Copyright Offices to offer artists the same copyright protections for AI-assisted works as those made in any other medium.

CANADA –

Notable Canadian sci-fi author and generative AI artist Tim Boucher has submitted his perspective as an expert practitioner to both the US Copyright Office and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s public consultations on copyright and Artificial Intelligence. His submission is part of a larger group of Artists Using Generative AI sending in statements about their work with AI.

Boucher, known for using AI tools to create over 100 illustrated viral mini-novels, was one of the artists who recently helped draft an open letter to the US Congress advocating for inclusion of artists in high-level AI policy discussions. He also made headlines for independently proposing a radical “Digital Terms of Service for AI Providers” to the Canadian government, articulating a rights-based framework aimed at proactively protecting Canadians from potential harms of AI systems, which garnered interest from federal ministers and political parties alike.

Boucher is now building on those efforts by submitting his in-depth take on AI and copyright to the US and Canadian copyright offices. In his new submission, Boucher argues that artists play an indispensable role in pioneering innovative uses of new technologies like AI. He believes artists should have the same copyright protections over their AI-assisted creations as they would with any other medium.

“Artists stand at the forefront of technical progress, exploring new tools first, finding their best uses, and pushing the cutting edge even further beyond what their developers imagined,” Boucher stated. “If we deny artists like me protections over our art that incorporates AI, we risk stifling innovation and suppressing a potential AI Art Renaissance before it has had a chance to take flight.”

Boucher proposes the novel concept of an “hypercanvas” where generative art exists in a higher-dimensional space, with each AI prompt and output being a “brushstroke” on this bigger canvas. He suggests thinking in terms of this larger holistic unified creative work unfolding on the hypercanvas, not just the individual fractured outputs of AI generators when evaluating these issues.

The submission identifies the importance of artists being able to analyze and compare past creative works to create new ones, including using AI. It states that using copyrighted works to train AI systems should generally be considered fair use and transformative (as they do not seek to reproduce the original works, but to build something new), and this principle should be clearly affirmed to reduce legal uncertainties for artists and technologists.

Overall, Boucher makes an impassioned case that artists should have the same incentives and protections to create using AI tools as with any other medium. As he puts it, “AI is my paintbrush, I’m still the artist. My AI art comes from my vision, my life as an artist, and is part of my ongoing creative efforts like anything else. AI is simply one tool of many that I use to express myself; AI is not the creator, I am. I want our authorship to be fully recognized and protected.”

Boucher also calls for greater transparency from AI companies regarding the copyright status of generated outputs, which is currently cloudy. He additionally supports the creation of high quality sustainable training data sets for AI, with clear compensation schemes for contributors of all types, not just artists. His balanced proposals aim to maintain artistic freedoms while respecting rights as AI becomes ever more entwined with the Arts.

The full submission document is available on his website at timboucher.ca.

End note:

And here’s a meme I made in Dalle3 in support of this, though I could not get the text to come out correctly, so had to do that in Photoshop.

I don’t necessarily think all art is effectively equal (some is good to my tastes, some is less good), but I do think that all Arts (capital A) and all art forms are at root equal, including those that make use of AI. It’s then up to the artist to determine what to do with it.