Artificial Intelligence Art and Cooking
Comparing the processing of cooking food with making digital images using AI
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Unless you live under a rock, you must have picked up on the fact that we currently live at the beginning of an artificial intelligence revolution. In many ways, this is like the beginning of the internet revolution. It swept across the world in the mid-90s and later accelerated with the smartphone revolution of the 2010s. It didn’t necessarily feel dramatic right there and then. Except suddenly you realize that you are ordering your plane tickets online, paying all your bills through a computer and ordering books and other items through Amazon rather than walking into a physical store.
Artificial Intelligence, like the internet, is transforming every possible aspect of our life, but in this story I want to discuss the creation of digital art specifically through the use of artificial intelligence. While you may not care about that subtopic in particular, it does say a lot about both the opportunities and limitations of artificial intelligence in general.
For the last two months, I have gone down the rabbit hole of AI Art. Having spent much time making images and using different tools, I feel I have obtained a good sense of what this process is like. Before going down this path, I had pondered several questions in relation to AI Art:
- Will this make artists obsolete?
- How difficult are these tools to use?
- What kind of skill and talent is involved?
- What are the limitations?
What is Talent?
I can say that after countless hours, I am now able to produce significantly better images than I did when I started. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a complex process with many moving parts I have to master. A lot of it is about knowing what to do and not do. I am reminded of a story about a man who opened car doors for a living. He would get called upon when people had gotten locked out of their cars.
