BLOG/WRITING
Alien
At the beginning of 2023 I posted an 'exhibition' on my website of drypoint prints that had been drawn from Midjourney text-to-image AI prompts and then tinted with tea and watercolour. Using a short sentence to describe how I made my prints I asked ChatGP3 to compose an artists statement for me. It appears to me that the AI made surprising inferences about aesthetic choices. I find the results astonishing and terrifying and here they are in italics:
"As an artist, I am intrigued by the intersection of technology and traditional art forms. In my work, I use text-to-image AI to generate unique imagery, which I then translate into drawings and drypoint intaglio prints on 11x15 inch paper. I use a technique of tinting the prints with watercolour, coffee, and tea to add a sense of depth and texture to the final pieces.
I am particularly interested in the ways in which text-to-image AI can be used to create unexpected and surreal imagery. The algorithm's ability to generate images from written descriptions allows me to explore the relationship between language and visual representation in new and exciting ways.
The use of traditional techniques such as drypoint intaglio printing and hand tinting with watercolour, coffee and tea, adds a sense of warmth and humanity to the pieces, and creates a contrast with the cold and calculated nature of the AI-generated imagery. By blending technology and traditional art forms, I aim to create thought-provoking and visually striking works that challenge the viewer's perception of reality."
To be completely honest, this isn't necessarily what I would write, or say, about my series of prints. In fact, if I wanted to 'say' something I would just say it, and not make an image. I believe it is most sensible to say nothing at all about an image and let that image communicate accordingly...I hold this belief despite the unfortunate fact that my verbal mind is not easy to shut up and will incessantly try to explain an image. When I do suggest something about an image in writing the text assumes far too much meaning and importance relative to the image because the verbal mind has such control over what might be assumed as consciousness. A written statement compresses and simplifies the wider spectrum of interpretation for the viewer. It closes doors in the mind of the viewer. What the AI has done is write something I would write if I wanted to do what most artists want to do when writing about their; write something clever and thoughtful with a few artsy buzzwords to please curators and members of the public who want to have the meaning of what they are viewing distilled into a few paragraphs in what I nevertheless believe is a mistaken assumption of understanding. It has done this incredibly well.
It takes a lot of thought and time for a human artist to come up with a clever and comprehensible artist statement, and most visual artists don't seem particularly good at writing...unless they in fact are good at writing and are deliberately trying to write in an opaque and difficult to understand manner in order to suggest that it is in fact their work is difficult to understand. Which is sort of clever too. So there might poorly written art statements, clever and comprehensible art statements by artists, and clever and incomprehensible art statements by artists. It's often difficult to parse out which is which. The chatbot's statement seems to me of the kind that is clever and comprehensible, and astonishing as such. I presume, if prompted accordingly, it could also produce a clever and incomprehensible statement.
I really can't see why most artists who struggle with writing a clever artist statement (of the comprehensible or incomprehensible kind) would not simply task Chatgpt with the job. And I also can't see why any artist would waste time and effort crafting several paragraphs when, within a few minutes, Chatgpt can generate a series of examples which can be selected from. We might be entering an era when machines speak for artists, and potentially, all of us.