Are you using an algorithmic camera? Creating synthetic media? Dabbling in intelligent text-to-image creation software? Is your artwork artificially generated or are you calling it AI enhanced?

Whatever the new jargon, AI images are multiplying on the internet, so much so that we can no longer trust our own eyes. On Facebook, people are sharing images as if they are really, extolling the wonder of a pool clinging precariously to a cliffside or a group of lion cubs looking at the camera as if selfie obsessed. Irritated comments are often along the lines of the issue of trust and transparency - people lose trust in a sight if they pass off images that are AI generated and do not declare it as so. I feel similiarly, feeling manipulated if I'm emotionally responding to a photo that is not real in the sense I could go out into the world and touch the scene and the objects within it.

Go to Adobe Stock Images and type in any image you'd like to search for, and go to the parameters and click 'generative art'. When I did this for 'bees', there is something like 34,055 results - 80,000 for 'brain', the same brain that is finding it harder and harder to tell what is human generated and what isn't. Adobe has set guidelines for submitting AI art, such as making sure people aren't using other people's styles, but their concession is vested, since they are launching an AI art generator of their own. Other sites have banned it, concerned that easily generated AI content will overwhelm the content photographers, illustrators, artists and graphic designers have painstakingly created. If I was relying on competively selling my images as stock, I'd be upset and concerned.

By the way, I can't, or perhaps won't, include an Adobe Stock photo here as I'm not paying the licence, so here is a Midjourney generated image of a bee in a field of white poppies. I have never seen a field of white poppies, nor a bee within them, but I bet if I shared this people would believe it existed. Is it that they aren't looking hard enough or is it they trust me to share something real?

This makes me despair, even though I like creating Midjourney images. If we are so easily influenced, how else might we be manipulated by AI generated photographs and videos? The concern about deep fakes seems to have faded as we all accept generative art into our lives. We're not questioning, interrogating, finding sources. Is it because we just don't care, or have given up trying to wade our way through the murk of politics, advertising and news media, knowing it's futile? Yesterday I saw a friend post a long comment about how 'The Voice' isn't good for Australia. When I asked him where he got that from (knowing it wasn't his words, though he didn't declare it), he said 'from another site' and couldn't name where. I knew full well people that trusted him would trust this argument - but that's not good enough. We need to know exactly where the vested interests lie.

But I digress. Let's get back to the 'art'.

The biggest argument about AI art that we all know is an ethical one. It undoubtedly takes jobs away from human artists and takes away the many years of education, training, individual visions, creative processes, skill, experience and bloody hard labour that deserves compensation. There's simply no argument that prompt engineers are the same - if I can generate a reasonable image within a few tries, I'm not going to even pretend my image is 'art' or should be paid for. Similarly, if I'm using an image for a blog post, I'm not going to pay for one when I can generate it. I'll feel kinda guilty about it, but I'll keep making images because it benefits me. And besides, I like bringing the things in my head to life because I don't have the skill to do it in any other way, nor the time or money to learn.

However, what bothers me the most is that by interacting with AI at all, I'm contributing to something bigger than we can understand, and that may not be good for us. One thing that comes to mind immediately is the standardisation of beauty. Type `/imagine: prompt: beautiful woman in a field of white poppies' into Midjourney and you might get something like this:

And it happens over and over again. 'Beautiful woman sleepwalking in a field of white poppies' is always white, unless you tell it otherwise. Worse, here she's a seductive, half dressed, virginal white seductress. When I change the colour of the poppies or some other parameters, I still get the same half dressed femme fatale.

Midjourney seems to default to unrealistically, incredibly beautiful - there's not a scar or flaw to be seen. Thin, white, long haired, intimidatingly beautiful woman. From what I understand, it's the same on all the image generators, which have created their own biases around beauty in much the same mainstream media has. We've been working for years to bring to light how damaging these images are for woman and yet here they are, reflecting our biases back at ourselves. It appears the same in every country - check out this post for AI generated beautiful men and woman from Syria to the Phillipines.

Art has always traditionally being used to convey a message. Here we have images just for the sake of an image - and to me I worry about how bland and banal a world we'll live in without art that speaks to us, that emotionally affects us, that moves us to the core. Perhaps the prompt engineer could have this in mind, but if these artistic messages can be so easily produced, what is the point? How can something be profound when it's just another image in a million other generated images? Have we reached the point in humanity where we are image overloaded and what does that mean for us? Are we heading toward a point where artists are devalued because 'art' has becomes so unmyserious and easy to produce? And if so, how does humanity express it's soul?

This is much, much more concerning than the arrival of the printing press and the camera.

I feel more and more uneasy about my own interaction with AI images. It is feeling more and more unethical. Perhaps I'm just being swept away with the tide and cannot resist. Would my refusal to interact make any different at all? The Luddites didn't stop the machines that threatened to take away their jobs in the mills. Yet I can't help but admire the Luddites - they interrogated not only the machine, but the social inequality behind it, and resisting the capitalist drivers that pushed darkly behind it for their own profit. Luddite is thus not a dirty word - it's approach that's needed because we can't see these new tools as entertaining apps and pretty gadgets, but as political and economic forces that need to be interrogated and regulated.

But damn. White poppies. I can't help but think of the sedative quality of poppy derivatives like heroin and morphine. Here we are, sleepwalking to a strange future, interwined with the machine and hopelessly addicted.

Post Script - An Odd Thing:

After finishing this piece at lunchtime on my break, I entered the classroom and a girl asked if she could go to the toilet. Needing to mark her on the roll, I asked for her name. 'Poppy' she said. Sometimes I feel like I'm in an AI reality, dreaming.

Post Post Script: Yep, all the images are by me and Midjourney, centred around the white poppy and the idea of sleepwalking and illusion. Text divider of green poppies made in Canva. Words are my own, as much as anything of is our own.

With Love,

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