Over at Substack Andy Williams shared this beautiful piece of stop-motion animation by the artist Victor Haegelin, for a short film called An Urban Allegory, directed by Alice Rohrwacher, and street artist JR.
And this is what he had to say about it:
“This is a stop-motion animation. It must have taken the creators hours and hours to meticulously and laboriously produce this animated street art. Why didn’t they just use AI? You know why, it would have been cheating. Show your workings, as your old school teacher told you.”
While Andy is alluding to the ethical debate around the use of AI (one we certainly need to have), his post got me thinking about how AI is viewed in the creative workflow.
In my experience, there are three broad aspects to most creative projects and the writers/artists/directors who work on them.
- Developing a taste
- Conceptualisation or imagination
- Execution
Taste is the most under appreciated aspect of any creative product. It develops over several years and is the accumulation and slow composting of life experience and the art forms you expose yourself to.
The conceptualisation of a creative project emerges from the marriage:
(A desire to make some sort of impact) x (the artist’s tastes).
And finally there’s the execution. That is putting the brush to canvas, hands on the guitar, fingers on the keyboard – you get the idea.
Now, where does or can AI come into all of this?
I think the use of AI in creative projects falls somewhere on a scale. On one end, AI is used purely as a tool, and on the other it is used as an artist – in other words to replace the artist.
For instance, using AI, Photoshop can select subjects or remove objects in a photo on the click of a button. That’s using AI as a tool. But when you use Adobe Firefly or Midjourney to generate an illustration you are replacing the artist.
So, what does it mean to replace an artist.
- You need to replicate the artist’s ability to execute. This is something that AI tools are able to do.
- You need to replicate the artist’s ability to conceptualise to create some kind of an impact.
Here’s the thing. An AI tool has no taste because it has no limitations – it has been trained on pretty much everything under the sun and has no likes, dislikes, or quirks. After all one can argue that Quentin Tarantino’s sensibilities were shaped not just by the films he watched while working at a video rental store but also by all the films he missed watching because he was a limited human being.
There is a reason why Leonardo Di Caprio or Matt Damon might choose to react in a scene in a specific way – this is shaped not just by what the director’s asking them to do, but how they choose to interpret it based on their unique, and hence limited, experience.
All this hasn’t deterred “clients” from reducing the creative work they commission. But what I find is that the more they use AI to replace an artist, the weaker the emotional impact. Or rather the only emotions such creative work evokes is “How cool!” or “How pretty!”
However, when you use AI as a tool – and this means a human with his/her limited experience shaping the final creative – you unlock all the efficiencies of a powerful machine without sacrificing the impact you want the creative work to have.
I would like to close this rather long post with an interesting observation made by the fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson. Science Fiction and Fantasy as a genre takes the reader into fantastical settings that fill us with wonder – whether that’s Tatooine, Middle Earth, or the USS Enterprise. And yet, Sanderson observes that setting is the least important factor in what makes a fantasy story great. “A story that has a great setting but terrible characters is generally still a bad book,” he says, “But a story with a cliched and/or not that great setting with great characters still generally a fantastic book.”
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