I understand your concerns, JBC. Because I've spent a significant portion of my working life as a professional driver I view a.i. self-driving vehicles in a similar way. Fortunately, in my case that doesn't matter much as I don't do that job any more (though it's a skill I have in reserve) but if I was just starting out again I'd be worried too.
Furthermore, the a.i. glitch causing figures with too many limbs or distorted faces in art might lead to rather more significant mistakes on a motorway or high street. Driving, just like painting, is at least as much about the human factor as the technology. There is art in everything we do; and a.i. will not be able to simulate that for a long time yet. But it is coming. Indeed, the hundred-years-hence version of you might own a couple of second hand art robots, each one programmed with the unique owner's style, which do jobs for him all over the place while he reserves his own work for customers willing to pay a premium for the human touch. Similarly, that future version of me might own a couple of a.i. vehicles and reserve his own skills for similar higher-paying clients.
For the present, I find this technology to be a great boon to my creativity. Take the image above as an example and compare it to its predecessors. It's still not very good but it's far better than the originals and closer to my initial intent. The a.i. technology helped me to do this in three major ways; firstly as a mood board, secondly for throwing up ideas, and lastly to generate elements.
As I've droned on about before, I have aphantasia. This means that I can't conjure up images in my head. My mind's eye is blind. Now, I obviously don't know how you do it, JBC, but I have gleaned that some artists see the images they want to create in their heads and "copy" those mental images onto paper. In my head, there's nothing to copy - only a concept; in this case, the wreck of a massive war machine rotting away in the noxious atmosphere of Nu-Earth. The first image I see is the first image I draw. The a.i. I use allows me to generate loads of images of futuristic battlefields, for example, allowing me to explore the mood and composition of the piece. It's a time-consuming and enthralling process because few of the generated images are worth saving for reference.
The above process also throws up bits and pieces of interesting ideas - things that would fit into the concept or suggest elements I'd missed or not thought of. It's also good for fleshing out more abstract ideas. Even in the first image I had some vague notion about how the light from the wormhole in the sky would work, scribbling it out with red ink. In the second, I made the light around the wormhole fiercer and experimented with sunbeams. In the third image, I used a.i. to explore different kinds of wormhole and waded through all sorts of generic and mundane sci-fi t.v. clones before hitting on the idea of a rainbow corona. This is when the concept of Nu-Earth lighting crystallised somewhat in my mind; if the wormhole gave off rainbow light, then the surface of Nu-Earth must glisten with rainbows. I haven't been able to properly express that in the above but I think it's close enough to give the gist and I like it, though it's something I could never have envisioned in my own mind.
Finally, I used the a.i. to generate the major elements for my masterpiece; machinery, wormhole, figures, buildings, wreckage, textures, etc., and used them as I would photographs in previous digital work, cutting and pasting and stitching them all together.
Lastly I started painting and smudging over the elements, just as I would with photographs, and drawing it all together with layers and filters and all the Gimpy tricks I've learned over the years. I am fairly pleased with the result.
So, for me a.i. art is like a prosthetic mind's eye - it still can't do everything yours can but for me it opens up a door to worlds of invention - if not for producing pictures of Nu-Earth for my own entertainment then at least as a tool for exploring visual ideas for my writing projects, where the a.i. images are entirely behind the scenes like the rest of the research.
Furthermore, the a.i. glitch causing figures with too many limbs or distorted faces in art might lead to rather more significant mistakes on a motorway or high street. Driving, just like painting, is at least as much about the human factor as the technology. There is art in everything we do; and a.i. will not be able to simulate that for a long time yet. But it is coming. Indeed, the hundred-years-hence version of you might own a couple of second hand art robots, each one programmed with the unique owner's style, which do jobs for him all over the place while he reserves his own work for customers willing to pay a premium for the human touch. Similarly, that future version of me might own a couple of a.i. vehicles and reserve his own skills for similar higher-paying clients.
For the present, I find this technology to be a great boon to my creativity. Take the image above as an example and compare it to its predecessors. It's still not very good but it's far better than the originals and closer to my initial intent. The a.i. technology helped me to do this in three major ways; firstly as a mood board, secondly for throwing up ideas, and lastly to generate elements.
As I've droned on about before, I have aphantasia. This means that I can't conjure up images in my head. My mind's eye is blind. Now, I obviously don't know how you do it, JBC, but I have gleaned that some artists see the images they want to create in their heads and "copy" those mental images onto paper. In my head, there's nothing to copy - only a concept; in this case, the wreck of a massive war machine rotting away in the noxious atmosphere of Nu-Earth. The first image I see is the first image I draw. The a.i. I use allows me to generate loads of images of futuristic battlefields, for example, allowing me to explore the mood and composition of the piece. It's a time-consuming and enthralling process because few of the generated images are worth saving for reference.
The above process also throws up bits and pieces of interesting ideas - things that would fit into the concept or suggest elements I'd missed or not thought of. It's also good for fleshing out more abstract ideas. Even in the first image I had some vague notion about how the light from the wormhole in the sky would work, scribbling it out with red ink. In the second, I made the light around the wormhole fiercer and experimented with sunbeams. In the third image, I used a.i. to explore different kinds of wormhole and waded through all sorts of generic and mundane sci-fi t.v. clones before hitting on the idea of a rainbow corona. This is when the concept of Nu-Earth lighting crystallised somewhat in my mind; if the wormhole gave off rainbow light, then the surface of Nu-Earth must glisten with rainbows. I haven't been able to properly express that in the above but I think it's close enough to give the gist and I like it, though it's something I could never have envisioned in my own mind.
Finally, I used the a.i. to generate the major elements for my masterpiece; machinery, wormhole, figures, buildings, wreckage, textures, etc., and used them as I would photographs in previous digital work, cutting and pasting and stitching them all together.
Lastly I started painting and smudging over the elements, just as I would with photographs, and drawing it all together with layers and filters and all the Gimpy tricks I've learned over the years. I am fairly pleased with the result.
So, for me a.i. art is like a prosthetic mind's eye - it still can't do everything yours can but for me it opens up a door to worlds of invention - if not for producing pictures of Nu-Earth for my own entertainment then at least as a tool for exploring visual ideas for my writing projects, where the a.i. images are entirely behind the scenes like the rest of the research.