“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world.”
― Pedro Domingos
Being cooped up at home - sort of got used to being in lockdown - I had started playing more with AI. Already at New Year, after seeing someone else that used DREAM by WOMBO I published a New Years greeting, even though it didn't feel much like a Happy New Year, and events that followed confirmed that.
So while playing around with Wombo, Deep Dream and Night Cafe I began to muse about the Intelligence that is supposedly behind this. At the moment I write this, I thought I had it all written down somewhere, but I guess dreams and reality got mixed up. So now I try to re-think what came to me while watching head-movies, so to speak.
I am a Surrealist painter, and as a surrealist I enter into states of chaotic thinking, and that is where I think AI cannot follow, since computer thinking is rational and linear, while the chaotic process is hyperdimensional and irrational. I don't think any AI program could come up with what for example Dadaist poets and artists produced. Even the randomness of Exquisite Corpses would be out of reach for AI (my thought, correct me if you think this is not so). A computer depends on the input and can only develop variations from that input. So it really depends on, as in the above example, what I feed it, in this case a black and white photo of an old painting of mine, and as a style the image I had created digitally in Photoshop, which was also based on a detail from one painting - so here I show you the painting and beside it the digital work I created from it in Photoshop:
In the above transformation I used filters, distortion filters, color variations and overlays, smudge tools, clone stamps etc. I actually forgot the process and have to admit, I would not be able to redo this again. Anyway, the "Fomorii Universe" image served as the style image in my Deep Dream rendering of ENIGMATIC PRAIRIE. So not really a big whoop what the AI of Deep Dream made of this. But this example illustrates what my chaotic mind can produce as opposed to AI.
Nevertheless, AI is fun, to some extend, and below I give you a variety of versions that Deep Dream produced using various different input style files from my other artworks as well as some preset styles: the first on the left being a Deep Dream Neural Network layer 1, beside it, the original photo of my old painting from 1974.
Since I also played around in NIGHT CAFE a bit, trying it out to see if it works any different, here are four versions I created there, using paintings of mine as styles, but also preset styles:
I think in Night Cafe I have to experiment a bit more, to get used to adjustment for style weights and such. It does work a bit different than Deep Dream, which I had used for many years already before.
Overall, I think if I put my mind to it, I could do a lot better than the AI, albeit painting is much more time consuming, whereas in these programs you can make something with a few mouse clicks. So doing that, I feel like I am sort of cheating ..... nothing actually beats the unplugged experience of developing someting from the recesses of your own mind.
So not completely satisfied (though fun to do), I had posted before a piece where I used AI generated stuff and extensively transformed it in Photoshop:
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click above for available print
should you not be on the blockchain, or have no upvote power, or this post is already older than 7 days, you can always just buy me a coffee.
