A Photo with Paint FX is Not a Painting, But It Could Be Something Else
I’m on the lookout for tools which help usher in new art forms—not badly approximate the ones which came before.
In a recent episode of Fresh Fusion, I talked about the difference between “generative art” and “generative AI”.
One lets you dial in an array of parameters of a specialized, deterministic computer program and watch/hear the math unfold in surprising and delightful ways. The other is a fuzzy digital fever dream remix based on the lifeblood of real creators who likely had never consented to the experiment.
Building on that thought, let’s approach the difference between applying “art styles” to digital mediums and believing you’re actually approximating those aspirational mediums.
Filters > Painting…
When I was but a wee lad in the very early days of digital photography, I—like so many at the time—stumbled across “painterly” effects in the Photoshop-adjacent world of the time. There were so many options available to “turn a photograph into a painting”. Some options were even available in the printing phase—i.e., you could get a canvas made of a digital print which had a handful of realistic brush strokes added.
For the most part, all of my experiments in this arena looked like trash, and in hindsight I very much doubt that any “I Can’t Believe It’s Not a Painting!” artifacts from that era made it into any legitimate art galleries for fame and posterity.
However, it’s safe to say that further evolutions of these sorts of techniques eventually ended up in the hands of talented 3D animators and visual FX artists, and eventually we ended up in a world where facets of painting and illustration get applied in adjacent visual mediums to the wonderment of all. And I suppose a person with great technique and careful skill could today blend a source photograph with painterly effects in order to create a true mixed-media work of art. (I say “suppose” because I rarely see any such examples posted on social media. Send me links if you have any!)
But here’s the bottom line: a photograph which has been altered with hand-inspired effects is never going to be a painting. And that’s fine! I not implying it can’t be good. It simply is…something else.
This is why I continually scratch my head when I see people make claims that generative AI will let people create “the thing” they’re trying to create. AI will help you shoot “the film”. AI will help you write “the poem”. AI will help you develop “the app”.
No it won’t.
Eventually, when we have more precise, more controllable, and more ethical tools in this space which aren’t an alarming source of epistemological degradation and don’t simply churn out uncanny valley slop, it’s possible we’ll find ways to utilize them to establish new art forms. Not simply (badly) approximate the ones which have come before.
Maybe a future (not bad) AI tool can help craft a movie showing a style & subject we’ve never even seen or dreamt of before. Maybe a future tool can help output sounds that usher in a new musical genre, just like the synthesizers and tape recorders and theremins of recent memory. Maybe a future tool can help assemble an entirely new format of human-computer interaction, offering a UI radically different from the computer desktops and smartphones of today.
Maybe.
But that day is not today. Today, corporations salivate at crappy chatbots replacing trained support humans, students ask broken search engines to give them wrong answers to reports instead of doing real research, and asshats in Hollywood think they can somehow route around the pesky whims and demands of “the talent”…in some cases even resurrecting the dead. Gross!
Envisioning a Better Age
The so-called AI is not your friend, and the tools real artists need to create real art by and large are not being provided by the AI-driven hype cycle (leaving aside certain automation-related features like text-to-speech, transcription, translation, tagging, etc. which are genuinely useful). In fact the opposite is often true: artists all over the Internet are being shat upon by the men with dollar signs in their eyes running Big Tech firms along with the gauche startups which aspire to become them (or be bought by them).
Increasingly, I find that the songs which move me, the films which wow me, the writings which inspire me, and the apps which delight me are intentionally and proudly being marketed by indie creators with disclaimers such as “no generative AI was used in the making of this [fill in the blank]”. These are the creative endeavors I want to support and encourage.
Be a humanist. Stand up for the humans.
And if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll listen to Jessie Gender—one of the most creative online creators I’ve ever come across:
Art isn’t a product. It’s a conversation to be shared.
Technology helps us dream it. It did not do it for us.
What more is there to say?
Photo credit: Layers on Pixabay
