My Stance on AI

It’s an interesting time to be an artist!

As an early adopter of digital art with a traditional background, I’ve always felt I have a foot in both worlds. My digital techniques, have a basis in traditional techniques, and indeed many have been drawn to my work because of its unique blend of textures, that look non-digital but also non-traditional. When AI first started to make waves in the art world I was intrigued. I love technology and generally I’m an early adopter of most things.

I explored Midjourney at first (which was the first example of AI technology I came across) I was amazed by what it could do and fascinated. It was fun. It quickly became obvious to me though that its uses were limited. AI can’t make intelligent tweaks or revisions to a composition easily, and I soon found myself thinking - hmm I could paint this faster and get more satisfaction out of it as well, the act of creation and being lost in this process will forever be my happy place, tapping on a keyboard just doesn’t fill that need.

Where I did find the technology useful was creating unique textures or light samples that I otherwise struggled to find whilst trawling through stock image websites. I use all kinds of strange image textures to add glimmers and sparkles to my work and create interesting effects, and I can spend hours parsing together an image to make it work for my needs. AI seemed, for a short while to fit that need. I could finally create a completely circular rainbow for example and stitch it into my artwork with ease. As such a small smattering of my works do show examples of these image textures used in this way.

However, the benefits of this technology quickly wore off as my skills improved. I was more drawn to painting by hand the effects I required and felt less inclined to even reach for my folder of trusty stock images that had served me so well in the past. My skillset had evolved and so had my art - such is the journey of the artist. In the meantime, it had come to light that the people behind programs like Midjourney and other AI generative art machines had stolen the work of artists (including my own) to train their machines with no credit, offer of payment or acknowledgement of the value of the lifetime’s of work they had taken to create their technology.

And therefore my stance not only became a creative technique one, but a moral one which remains to this day.

I do not use AI to generate any portion of my artwork, should there come a day when these tech companies acknowledge the importance of artist’s work to their generative machines and fairly recompense all those who have had their work stolen - then I may change my stance on that.

But for now, and most specifically in my creative journey as an artist with some 30+ years of artistic exploration under my belt, I can quite happily say that AI doesn’t have a place in my art.