Barrett, Alexis. is your refrigerator running. 2022. NightCafe image generation.
AI has a PR problem.
It’s an unavoidable fact — when the everyday person hears AI art, the first thing they think is stolen art styles, job loss, and anime girls in bikini armor with swords. The optics are bad, and the tone around it — even sometimes from people in favor of AI — is bleak, tinged with capitalism above all else.
I like to make monsters. I always have — I have fondness for horror movies that verges on concerning and a fixation in the works of Francis Bacon, I love a good amorphous blob of flesh with bad vibes. And AI is incredibly good for that.
Barrett, Alexis. Hell yes! Flesh Time!. 2022. NightCafe image generation.
AI is problematic when it’s an instrument of theft, when it is fed art styles and used to regurgitate them. When I go to NightCafe and so delicately type out “Capricious Roomba,” whatever the machine is pulling from, it isn’t from artists. Or, at least, not in a way that hurts their income flow.
Barrett, Alexis. Capricious Roomba. 2022. NightCafe image generation.
Sometimes the machine doesn’t get it — how could it, when given such an impossible prompt? That’s okay. I don’t have an image I’m looking for, that I’m trying to beat the machine into replicating. I’m seeing what it thinks, the same way I would a human were I to ask them to draw such a thing. When it draws me an atrocity, or something that isn’t an atrocity but should be, it’s a learning experience for the both of us. I am challenging myself to think of oddities, and challenging it to make them. The fun is in the process, not the result. I’m not monetizing my monsters, I’m just delighting in their very existence. They are numerous and they are horrifying and they are so impossibly beautiful in how effortlessly and unexpectedly they are rendered.
Barrett, Alexis. Put a shirt on that beast. 2022. NightCafe image generation.
Exhale. Enjoy the process as well as the result. Be weird with AI. Give that machine trust issues. Get yourself on a watch list, because what the fuck is "put a shirt on that beast" even supposed to mean? Stop trying solely to make “art,” however you may define it, and remember that this is a tool of infinite possibility. Abuse it as such.
And most importantly, have fun with it.
Barrett, Alexis. Jingles the Fool. 2022. NightCafe image generation.
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