// Spewed a lot of words on this one so I’m skipping Weekly Meanderings this week (sorry Tom!), but if you want one hit reply and I’ll send you something :)
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I am disturbingly bad at art.
As far back as I remember I’ve never been able to draw anything that wasn’t a stick figure.
I’ve tried so many times on so many different mediums and failed.
Is there an art gene? Am I missing it?
And yet I keep trying. I’ve taken drawing classes. I once tried to make my own comic based on tracing Calvin and Hobbes. LITERALLY TRACING. I am bad at… tracing? How is that possible?
“ngmi” c. 2016 CE
Since I’m more of a nerd guy than a paper and pen guy, I learned Processing and P5.js to make generative art. Still bad.
bad generative art by a bad artist, Apr 2019
When I got my Apple Pencil I learned procreate and started playing with it.
Perhaps an Apple Pencil can erase the bad art gene?
my first ipad sketch, Jul 2019
I brought the pencil with me when Abraham and I went to Seattle… I’m trying to remember what we were there for… I think we were just hanging out and thinking together. We always come up with fun ideas when we hang out. (That trip, he also made me throw away my hat.)
The Worst Museum Idea Yet
This trip it was the Bad Art Museum.
We wanted to buy the worst art we found and put it in a museum. The joke was the art that I liked, Abraham hated, and art that he liked, I hated.
So in the end, the museum would be filled with things we both like, but only half.
This eventually morphed into the Museum of Tax Deductible Art, which I still think is funny, because as far as I can tell art collecting is basically a bunch of rich people buying pictures to save money on taxes.
Back to Seattle. We were staying in this fun Victorian-like Airbnb on the outskirts of Queen Anne and I was showing Abraham Procreate and we were taking turns passing the iPad back-and-forth at 11pm while sipping some kind of nasty peaty scotch that he likes and I abhor.
I was getting frustrated at how bad I was, and Abraham kept saying “Don’t worry about it, just put down some strokes, then paint over it, see what it develops into.”
That has stuck with me over the years, because I’m a perfectionist and the concept of just putting things there until something emerges isn’t in my psyche. I want first time perfection. Of course that’s ridiculous, even these words I know I will need to revise.
I long for a concept — perfection — that doesn’t exist and is super unhealthy for creativity.
It’s like what is said about Western vs Eastern art. In Western Art, you start with a blank page. In Eastern art, you start with a block of marble and chip away.
A blank page is tyrannical.
But now something finally exists that may override my bad art gene.
AI art:
DALL-E, Midjourney, Dreamstudio, there are many emerging.
I spent the last week playing with some of these tools and… it awoke something in me. (Am I moving from the Suck to… Machine?)
The ability to type a thought and have an image emerge — and not just an image but a remarkable one — is amazing.
We’re on a huge tipping point.
Not just in art, but in everything, because AI is ALMOST there.
My Tesla can drive itself… Almost.
Siri can understand what I say… Almost.
An image can be created from text… Almost.
We are swimming in almosts.
Almosts can be awkward. My car pilots itself down the interstate at 70 miles an hour, yet the wipers can’t figure out if it’s raining.
DALL-E can produce incredible images… but also some terrifying ones like this and this and this.
It’s fun to point out all the errors.
But the truth is, our world is about to change.
A tool like DALL-E is an infinite ideas machine.
Right now — even with the current betas — it takes about 5 minutes to generate 100 new ideas from a text prompt.
That’s faster than most creatives — and I say this as someone who has been in or led hundreds of brainstorming meetings. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one person create 100 ideas in 5 minutes, except maybe Abraham, and even he can’t do it 24/7.
~75 post-it notes from a Brainjolt brainstorming meeting with 7 smart people, Jul 2019. AI is gonna eat this for dinner, that’s a mere average of 10 ideas per person per hour.
With this tool, the average creative can generate more ideas in 5 minutes than even the most exceptional creatives. And they can keep doing it, generating 1,200 new ideas hour after hour. At some point even geniuses would run out of stamina.
AI is going to win here.
And in a year or two from now, it’ll be 100 ideas in 30 seconds.
This isn’t limited to just art. Anything can now be redesigned by uploading a photo and typing some words. It could be your living room. A new garden. A theme park. A pocket watch. Ideas on how to finish the top half of your painting. New car designs. A music album cover.
This will revolutionize human creativity.
All someone needs is a phone and imagination and they can create anything in seconds.
Steve Jobs once described a computer as a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
AI image generation is a bicycle for human creativity.
Not using it will be like not using Photoshop. I mean, everyone could just do things with MS Paint… and that might be fun for niche art, but no one uses it for day to day graphic design.
This tech will be built into all the creative tools we use.
It’s already starting. I saw in Photoshop they have a waiting list for something called “Latent Visions” with the description “generate abstract artistic concepts based on text strings.” Since this is Adobe, I’m guessing this is years behind the current tech.
My point is that it will be built into Photoshop, TikTok, your phone… everything.
The change is coming.
New Frontiers
I love new frontiers. My businesses have always depended on them.
I never want to be the guy who can’t figure out the latest gadgets.
So here I am, late at night, obsessed with figuring out how in the world to make a mural with DALL-E.
my first attempt at a DALL-E mural — stitched together from ~100 generations from the phrase “a painting of white chalk blackboard with computer icons, cats, desktop computer, headphones, in the style of Cy Twombly, detailed, black background”
Why a mural? Because one image is pretty basic and anyone can do it. But stitching a bunch of cool images that match together… it’s more of a challenge, and feels more inventive to me.
It’s frustrating, though. I haven’t used Photoshop in at least a decade. But back when I did, I used it every day, designing websites and posters for a graphic design agency I ran for many years.
I first tried to hack it using free online photo editors like Photopea but eventually I caved after losing two hours worth of work. Installing Photoshop locked up my computer, which felt like I was transported back in time.
Once I got it open, it felt so clunky. I forgot what tools do what. I clicked on random things and started screaming. I mean, googling.
Then it started coming back, hotkey by hotkey. Ah, that’s right, holding spacebar down lets me move around. Pressing v lets me select layers. Okay, I got this. It’s basically the same as ten years ago.
me trying to remember how to use photoshop, working on my second mural, about ~300 generations in
At first I was manually editing my creations, using the lasso tool to move things around, and then I realized I had it all backwards. I was editing. The AI can edit. This is not a useful thing for a human to do any longer. I am stuck in the past, and that’s what needs to change.
My first image creation:
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Someone asked about good prompts to use, so I made a TikTok about prompt design too.
Now I’m working on a mural of a city, which I’m about 400 image generations deep on. I’m quite happy with how it’s coming together and excited to share it soon.
I’m also cooking up an idea that will combine these images with a guess-to-win game in Discord. Reply if you want an invite :)
I feel some excitement rising within me and I haven’t felt this in quite a while.
Maybe this will stick.
// Josh