AI Art Is Here and the World Is Already Different
... When a friend who had been experimenting with DALL-E 2 described the tool as a place to dispose of intrusive thoughts, I nodded, scrolling back in my Midjourney window to a pretty convincing take on “Joe Biden tanning on the beach drawn by R. Crumb.”
I still use Midjourney this way, but the novelty has worn off, in no small part because the renderings have just gotten better — less “strange and beautiful” than “competent and plausible.” The bit has also gotten stale, and I’ve mapped the narrow boundaries of my artistic imagination. A lot of the AI art that has gone viral was generated from prompts that produced just the right kind of result: close enough to be startling but still somehow off, through a misinterpreted word, a strange artifact that turned the image macabre, or a fully haywire conceptual interpolation. Surprising errors are AI imagery’s best approximation of genuine creativity, or at least its most joyful. TikTok’s primitive take on an image generator, which it released last month, embraces this. ...
When AI art fails a little, as it has consistently in this early phase, it’s funny. When it simply succeeds, as it will more and more convincingly in the months and years ahead, it’s just, well, automation. ...
See the full story here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/09/ai-art-is-here-and-the-world-is-already-different.html
