No Fate But What We Make: Artists and Ai

I remember the first time I saw artwork created on a computer. It was the mid 90’s in my high school art class. A friend was showing some logos he made digitally using his parent’s computer.  

I scoffed, “All you’re doing is clicking some buttons. That’s not real art!”  

I couldn’t believe someone trying to pass off something made on a computer as art! Not me! I was going to become a “real” artist – I was going to live in a Manhattan penthouse surrounded by oil paints and canvases. I was going to be rich and everyone would know how talented I am. I just had to graduate and get into art school.  

I was 17, and my ignorance was deafening. 

You can probably guess that the Manhattan penthouse dream never happened. And although I did go to school for fine art – drawing, painting, sculpture, visual communications – it wasn’t until a roommate bought a computer with an early version of PaintShop Pro, that I started to understand what digital art was all about. 

My first real design job was in 2000 with an instructional design company. I was tasked with creating a series of drawings for a CD-based eLearning module. No problem I thought. However, I soon learned that they needed to be created digitally, and vector-based. This was a foreign concept to me, which led to me buying my first graphics tablet and some panicked self-study on Adobe Illustrator, trying to learn exactly what “vector” meant. I somehow managed, which led to more work – this time making simple animated graphics in Macromedia Flash. Graphics and layout design for printed manuals were also requested, requiring me to learn some strange program called PageMaker. I was making a living as an artist, but my days were filled with learning terms like Raster, Vector, CMYK, RGB, paths, intersecting shapes, tweens, and ActionScript.  

I quickly realized that a career in the arts largely depended on working in the digital realm. 

Over the next 20 years, new trends and new technologies emerged, forcing myself and other artists to keep pace to remain competitive. Learning new programs and keeping up with program changes was essential. We watched PageMaker turn into InDesign, we witnessed the death of Flash and its rebirth as Adobe Animate, swf files replaced by HTML5, and web development became synonymous with responsive design. Each advancement in technology necessitated upskilling in new programs, and new trends meant learning new ways to remain relevant and competitive. 

But now Ai is here.  

A technology to create stunning images in any format, any style, simply by typing what you want to see. 

Anyone can use it. And it’s faster than us. It’s better trained than us. It’s more popular than us. And it’s replacing us. 

This isn’t just another software upgrade or fleeting trend as in decades past.  To many artists, generative Ai is stripping away our identity, making us question who we are and where our place is in the world.  

This is because we as artists often entangle our meaning of life and self-worth with our outlet for creativity. We are compelled not by money, but by an urge to feed a beast that can never be satiated. To create and visually problem-solve is to be drunk on a cocktail of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. We pride ourselves on the years of practice and training we’ve endured; hard times and days of poverty worn as badges of honour for the trenches we’ve survived. We’ve grown up with compliments, accolades, and onlookers fawning over our innate talent – the divine gift of creativity bestowed on us upon birth (spoiler: actually, it’s just practice). 

So, it is no secret that Ai has disrupted the world of artists. As generative Ai like Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion exponentially grew with their capabilities with image generation, so too did the fear among artists towards this potential career killer.

Skynet was here, and it was Judgement Day for artists. 

So…  

What do we do? 

Well, let’s take a look at the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day for a solution. 

And no, I don’t mean blowing up a computer lab. 

For those who don’t know the movie (you don’t know??), in T2, an advanced cybernetic robot (the T-1000) is sent back in time from a post-apocalyptic future to kill John Connor, future leader of the resistance who is waging war against Skynet – the self-aware Ai that is bent on the annihilation of humanity. However, future-John sent back a reprogrammed T-800 (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) to protect young John. The movie follows John and the T-800 outrunning the T-1000 and rescuing John’s mom Sarah (who battled an evil version of the T-800 in the first movie) from a mental institution. The three of them team up to outrun the T-1000 as they try to stop the impending apocalypse from happening. 

In the movie, Sarah Connor’s initial distrust of the T-800 evolves into a collaboration born out of necessity. The characters recognize that combining their unique strengths is essential to achieve their shared goal of preventing the annihilation of humanity.  

So, only by working with Ai were humans able to change their fate and avoid Judgement Day.  

Similarly, artists should view generative AI as an ally rather than foe to avoid their descent into obsoletion. We can draw parallels between the collaborative relationship between Sarah Connor, John Connor, and the T-800 and the collaborative potential between artists and generative Ai in the realm of art. 

(Even in subsequent movies in the Terminator franchise, resistance fighters were continually shown using Skynet technology and even enhancing their own bodies with technology to stay in the fight, but I digress. You get the picture.)  

So… I came to the conclusion that it was time for me to fully embrace generative Ai. If I wanted to remain at the intersection of art and technology, to stay in the fight and rage against the machine, I needed to learn as much as I could about it and see what it means for me going forward. 

When generative Ai first started to pick up steam, I played around with some web-based versions (like MidJourney on Discord), quickly exhausting the free credits one is permitted to use before being required to sign-up for a paid subscription. It was fun and interesting, but I wanted to really get beneath the surface, to truly understand the process of creating images and how to use it to enhance my own work. 

So I did some studying, installed Stable Diffusion and a bunch of extensions on my computer, and away I went. It was reminiscent of my initial foray into digital art, but now learning a brand new set of strange terms such as ControlNet, checkpoints, Lora, denoising strength, CFG scale, etc… 

After a ton of experimenting, reading some tutorials, and figuring out how most of the dials and doodads work in A1111 (the GUI for Stable Diffusion), I started creating to see what I could discover. 

And what I found excited me in a way that I had not felt since I first opened up Photoshop 25 years ago. 

One surprising discovery was that it wasn’t as easy as I assumed. I soon discovered that much of the most breathtaking and complex Ai “art” we see online is actually the result of an iterative process of trial and error, producing hundreds of images in the process, and sometimes relying on Photoshop compositing for the final look. Some artwork is even the result of using Ai to produce reference images, digitally painting in Photoshop, sending to Stable Diffusion for upscaling, then back to Photoshop for touch-ups, rinse and repeat. It’s pretty easy to use Ai to quickly bang out some good-looking images of course, which is the bulk of what we see online, but to produce truly great work with the help of Ai still relies on careful planning, time, and creativity. 

This is something I will cover more in a later post, but for now, I would urge all artists to dive into Ai and truly explore the creative potential it can offer. Ai image generation is here to stay, and regardless of how many articles are written, or how much copyright misinformation is thrown around, or how many “No Ai” logos are created, it will never, ever go away. 

In the ever-evolving landscape of art and technology, the theme “No Fate but What We Make” from the Terminator movies rings true. Instead of succumbing to the fear of being replaced, let’s harness the power of generative Ai to amplify our creative voices.

The future of art is not a predetermined outcome but a collaborative masterpiece we create – brushstroke by brushstroke, click by click, and dare I say, prompt by prompt.