AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

Yes it’s trivial to train a model on a particular style, I’ve done it many times, including on my own art. It can make things that look pretty good!

But it can’t make anything great, not without a lot of luck or creative input from the user.

It can make something that looks similar to a style, but it can’t explain what makes that style good, why it should be chosen over another and the thinking behind it. An artist would have no problem answering that.

As I understand it, generative AI is a sort of average machine, in that if you ask it for a picture of a dog, it’ll give you the most average result for the prompt, model and whatever randomness there is in the system.

Therefore, the lowest common denominators - stock photos, Corporate Memphis, clipart etc are in big trouble. AI images don’t need to be great to displace them, just good enough. Average.

However, for creatives, AI tools are a wonderful opportunity. It’s not everyday a brand-new medium comes along.

When photography arrived, it was possible to make a perfect representation of something at the click of a button. Instead of killing art, it unleashed a wave of creativity. Art no longer needed to be about drawing pictures of things or people and could get more abstract and experimental.

So with AI. It won’t kill creativity, it’s just another creative tool. I’ve had a lot of fun over the last few years exploring what it can do, and it’ll be exciting to see how art changes with its arrival.

As a demonstration I trained some models on their styles. They were worried right up until they saw the output. Yes, it looked superficially like their work, but the slightest glance showed it to be absolute crap. Anyone who would consider using the AI version of their work over commissioning the actual artist would absolutely get what they paid for.

However, they have found the models to be very useful in exploring concepts and compositions, becoming an essential part of their creative process.

>As I’m contemplating this Cronenberg-like transformation of the image, I can’t help to be struck by the triviality of my own work. There’s something confronting in facing a computational doppelgänger, something akin to the uncanny valley. I’m surprised at how much this affects me, even though my whole schtick is to be reflexive and critical about style, what surprises me the most is that even though the output if “objectively” a failure1, I see myself in it. But maybe what I see in the generation, what I find actually disturbing, is the part of my work that has already been objectified and commodified, the parts of my style I spent years making digestible for clients, consistent for social media, and reproducible for easy production.

This feeling is not present in artists who are not commercial artists or otherwise produce VOLUMES of similar work - because it is functionally impossible

Why?

Again, as with picasso et al... they are performing the work of an artist. Namely it is a lifetime oeuvre - not a single period - that defines an artist.

This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial artists are not producing art, they are designing propaganda for corporations. It takes artistic skill, but it's not what I would consider relevant for the author

The author sits at the intersection of capitalism and art - that you can produce designs for money repeatedly and so predictably as to be identically imitated is proof enough for me

Nobody can reproduce or copy my art because it's PHYSICAL and hanging on my (and many others' including our own jacquesm) wall. They can try, but forgeries are very hard to do.