It's Andy Fish!

Image above, copyright whoever’s work AI ripped off to generate an image showing “long bearded artist looking at a work they just drew with consternation”.

AI is upon us, and like digital drawing equipment that came along a generation ago and many folks decried it the end of creativity it’s likely not going away.

A wiser man than I once said “If Michelangelo had access to a digital camera he would have used it.” and I agree with the sentiments.

Let’s get to the big bad of AI– the image above generated in about 15 seconds– if I’d decided to paint the above, even digitally it would take me several hours.

The image is not manipulated in any way, it’s just what the AI bot created– and to me it lacks soul. It lacks a creative spark. It’s lifeless.

Is this second one any better? I tweaked it with Photoshop in about another eight seconds– and I’d say four of those seconds involved making a color decision. It’s AI+ so at least I put some minimal effort into it.

AI also rips off other people’s work– it doesn’t just come up with this stuff– it scours the internet searching for images someone else took the time to create and puts them together to give you what you asked for in the prompt. That’s not the greatest and it hurts the industry.

But here are the facts;

Like CGI which at one time was so bad we would laugh at the effects we were seeing, AI is only going to get better at what it does. There will be a point where movies are made with actors who passed away long ago– why pay George Clooney $40 million dollars to appear in your movie when you can have Cary Grant for probably about $400,000? Why scout locations when you can digitally create one that looks so real no one can tell?

AI is going to replace a lot of creative jobs, but it will likely always need a creative mind behind its actions– so those of us who make our living coming up with things should last at least another generation before that’s no longer the case.

Sure, there will still be the kind of movies I like, I just watched a movie who’s name escapes me which was 90 minutes of two people having a date at a woman’s apartment– the two seem very mis-matched but through a conversation we find out that the slightly creepy looking guy is actually a heck of a lot more normal than the woman who appears very put together when we first meet them.

And that was it– no car chase, no CGI explosion, 90 minutes of dialogue over some microwave scallops she makes them for dinner.

I gave it a solid A.

Those kinds of movies are so small I doubt a big studio would spend the monies to generate actors for it, at least for now.

So my thoughts on AI? Tread carefully– use it as a tool but take steps to make the image more your own– and I don’t mean the eight second example I gave above, but most of all take the time to learn what you can about AI so you can be on the front of the wave when it comes down, Godzilla like, and crushes all of us poor Japanese who run away screaming like we never saw the 400 foot tall lizard coming at us.

Because it’s coming, and it doesn’t have to be scary.