AI enhancers must learn to edit

I feel a little crazy writing this because it’s so incredibly obvious, but I guess it needs to be said: part of creativity is knowing when to stop.

Time and again, from AI art advocates, I’ve heard that we can simply extend a beloved work of art, whether it’s the Mona Lisa or the cover of abbey road endlessly. And in a way, I’m sympathetic! One of the first ways we locate our creativity is by extending a work we used to love; I wrote my very first short story in the Ursula K. Le Guins universe Cat wings around six years old. Maybe she’s still hanging around in my father’s attic somewhere.

Derivative work is valuable and a long-standing tradition. Shakespeare didn’t invent the plot for Hamlet; is based on a 12th-century work called Danic history. The absolute classic for teenage girls In the dark is based on Jane Austens Emma. The wind has disappeared AND Wide Sargasso Sea they are based on Gone With the Wind AND Jane Eyre, respectively. Probably all literary criticism is a derivative work, since it requires the existence of some other work to interpret.

Lately, there have been a ton of tweets about people doing this kind of AI work. I’m not entirely surprised to see people sprawling the landscape against the backdrop of the Mona Lisa either the famous cover of abbey road using artificial intelligence tools. Some of the excitement around this kind of AI art is even commendable. Creativity is a fuck rush! If this is your first time meeting him, I bet he seems to change the world. I work as a writer for a reason, you know?

And so, in that spirit, for those of you who are thinking creatively for the first time, I’d like to introduce you to the idea of ​​modification.

When you create something, you draw boundaries. Most of the stuff I post on this site has clipped words, sometimes thousands of words. Sometimes it’s because I’m trying to reflect on my readers’ time as much as I love a sentence, it doesn’t serve the piece in general and sometimes it’s because I have something to do.

The most famous example of Up To Something is Henry James The turn of the screw. There is an absence at the heart of the work which produces the horror needed for the ghost story, the reader’s mind filling the void with what scares them most. (Calvin and Hobbes Noodle Incident (much mentioned but never explained) also works this way.) It’s a deliberate artistic choice to leave things unfinished or to do a specific harvest.

Let’s take the Mona Lisa as an example. Consider the original for a moment: one of the words most associated with it is mysterious. There’s the half-smile, the fact that the art was commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo but for some reason never delivered, and a famous robbery, where the painting disappeared for about two years. There are no outlines on her figure, which makes her look more realistic, and the detail work around her mouth and eyes, as well as the lack of eyebrows, make her expression ambiguous. There has been a long-running battle over whether the landscape behind her is a real place. The way it’s painted, sadly, certainly means that the fight will go on for quite some time.

Now let’s consider Kody Young’s version, made with Adobe Firefly. The background has been expanded significantly, drawing attention to the detail work that makes the Mona Lisa famous. The figure, the woman whose portrait was made, is a legless torso, emerging from a dark, cloud-like spot. The additional landscape, if anything, takes away from the vision that has fascinated art lovers for years. Sure, there is Moreover, but it’s not doing anything useful. This is bad art.

And there’s something odd about Young’s post, where he frames his derivative work as the rest of the Mona Lisa instead of being honest: He’s making fan art. Much like fanfic, Kody Young Mona Lisa is about filling in the things an original creator chooses to leave out. Many derivative works depend on this including Wide Sargasso Sea but they don’t pretend to be the rest of a work of art. Besides being confused about the purpose of a background, Young also seems confused about what art is.

The Mona Lisa doesn’t need any other background because the purpose of the work is in the first floor. Shit, the paintings that bear his name! And despite what Marvel movie fans might prefer, the stories don’t have to go on forever. There are many stories out there; you can just enjoy another. I think it’s possible to make interesting AI art, even interesting derivative AI art, but to do that, creators have to think about what to leave out and where to stop. Computers provide no purpose. People do.

The artist has made it a point of stopping for a reason. Maybe that reason was bad, or maybe that checkpoint didn’t go wrong. Art is a side effect of trying to make art but there’s no extended Mona Lisa. The full version of the original is the original. But if you want a meaningful derivative to work, there should be a reason it exists.