Cul-de-sacs and Fairies
Artificial Learning (AI) relies on iteration. Humans expose bias through iteration. Cul-de-sacs grind human desire for shelter and community into neat parcels hemmed by manicured boxwoods, gravesites for inventiveness and creativity.
Ask AI for a dwelling. Required reading: valued attributes plus existing patterns. Content processing, image recognition.
First try, prompt or input language: Balance strength and clarity in a modern house with a rich language between materials and a massive facade solution.* Blueprint for a two-story house on a cul-de-sac.
Prompt Scale: 5
Diffusion Steps: 15
Random Seed: 28
Input thousands of pictures that have built the dead-ends of our culture.
A few words, a few numbers, result: architecture without a garage. Okay, so iterate and add a prompt to include a garage.
A few of you covet creativity.
Or, a commonplace question, How do I find my own artistic style? Answer—lean into your biases. Prejudice suffuses our work, develops into the undercoating of style. All artists have style because all artists incline toward their preferences. Are you asking How do I find my own highly popular artistic style? Shouldn’t you ask AI?
People the world over fear AI in the way painters once feared photographs, and photographers once feared Photoshop. It’s wondrously powerful and efficient. It can iterate thousands of results and will. Results are mind blowing, mind opening, puerile, intriguing, humorous, useful, beautiful, endearing—all those six fingered hands!
Biased.
Investigate the following.
Input: Portrait of a fairy princess with a large nose, fantasy illustration
Prompt Scale: 50
Diffusion Steps: 15
Random Seed: 420
Try different seeds and artistic styles. So many cute button-noses! And breasts! Ah, AI learned to draw fairies from naughty teenagers and Disney. To be fair, AI will draw a large-nosed fairy with enough prompt changes, like witch instead of princess.
Clothing optional.
Lesson
Be willing to split a desire for creativity from a hankering for personal style. The second relies on iteration, developing techniques with surgical precision until you produce a result AI could categorize.
The first relies on courage. Actively change your creative processes, inputs and outputs. Eschew repetition.
Instead of writing a sentence, draw it with hieroglyphs.
Instead of producing an underpainting, paste down a collage.
Instead of choreographing to music, choreograph to the wind.
Every time you define your processes, abandon your methods. The blueprint has just become biased. Reverse this (iterate, iterate) if you seek improved technique and personal style.
*Marketing language found online.
For those of you wanting to generate AI images, my go-tos: DiffusionBee (Mac owners) for rough drafts and Lexica for examples, prompts, and seeds.