When is it my own work?
Been toying around with the idea of incorporating Stable Diffusion into my concept art and illustration workflow.
I mean. I’ve already experimented with it. It’s absolutely undetectable: I generate images for inspiration. I use them as reference. And then I never share those generations with anybody else. Because many people have decided that it’s cheating. Like the critics of digital art and photography before them, it’s not real, it has no soul, etc. Sure.
Art where I’ve used AI as reference is indistinguishable from my “regular” art, really, because whatever I get “out” of Stable Diffusion I edit and tweak to my preferences manually. Sometimes I’ll toss it back in for another round of cooking. But I’m always directing it.
Again, like during the rise of digital art, people think that the computer is auto-magically doing all the work. It’s a very knee-jerk reaction of “back in my day…”
Well, back in my day, I wished there was a machine that could read my brain to make art for me. And here it is. Yes, it’s a bit intimidating. But it’s the same breed of predictive model that meteorologists use. Just trained on scrapings from the internet instead of buoy data, I guess.
It’s Pinterest on steroids. Except that generation can be so bland sometimes, so I don’t really worry about actually plagiarizing anyone.
What a loaded word for art. Plagiarism. Artists do master studies and use reference photos and copy each other all the time. All art is derivative. No one is original.
Can art even belong to one person? Maybe, I guess, if they never share it with anyone. But art is expression. You’re meant to share it. It’s meant to be engaged with. When someone sees your work and interprets your work in their own brain, that interpretation is theirs, i.e., not yours!
Perhaps it is the commodification of art that people truly have a problem with, but cannot fully articulate. People are mad that artists cannot make a living making art. That’s not really AI’s fault. That’s capitalism.
I stand by that whenever I share my art, it is not solely mine. It never was solely mine to begin with. I can’t name all my teachers, all my inspirations, all my references, all my ancestors. Neither can they.
Humans are social. We learn from each other and we copy from each other. We make up new toys to express ourselves with, to torture ourselves with. Since the dawn of humankind.
Is original sin ours, or was it stolen from God?
Does it matter?