-
In my own experience as an artist, experimenting with AI has mixed results. I’ve used several “songwriting” AIs and similar “picture-making” AIs. I’m intrigued and bored at the same time: I find it quickly becomes quite tedious. I have a sort of inner dissatisfaction when I play with it, a little like the feeling I get from eating a lot of confectionery when I’m hungry. I suspect this is because the joy of art isn’t only the pleasure of an end result but also the experience of going through the process of having made it. When you go out for a walk it isn’t just (or even primarily) for the pleasure of reaching a destination, but for the process of doing the walking. For me, using AI all too often feels like I’m engaging in a socially useless process, in which I learn almost nothing and then pass on my non-learning to others. It’s like getting the postcard instead of the holiday. […] All that said, I do believe that AI tools can be very useful to an artist in making it possible to devise systems that see patterns in what you are making and drawing them to your attention, being able to nudge you into territory that is unfamiliar and yet interestingly connected. I say this having had some good experiences in my own (pre-AI) experiments with Markov chain generators and various crude randomizing procedures. […] To make anything surprising and beautiful using AI you need to prepare your prompts extremely carefully, studiously closing off all the yawning, magnetic chasms of Hallmark mediocrity. If you don’t want to get moon rhyming with June, you have to give explicit instructions like, “Don’t rhyme moon with June!” And then, at the other end of the process, you need to rigorously filter the results. Now and again, something unexpected emerges. But even with that effort, why would a system whose primary programming is telling it to take the next most probable step produce surprising results? The surprise is primarily the speed and the volume, not the content.
Tags: play process technology culture future art music ai brian-eno creation