Multimodal Essay - Trystahn Turner
For this class I had a very general question that was meant to showcase how people are missing the value in AI. In all the other classes I took this year AI was discussed multiple times and more often than not people had a negative outlook on it. Most saw AI as an excuse for large corporations to fire a large number of people and as a tool that robs smaller artists of their work. While I understand their frustration, I think many people are jumping the gun about AI itself. In breaking down this question, the first thing I would like to do is discuss what it means to make art.
Art is a very abstract concept that influences and is influenced by every other aspect of society. The creation of art is usually meant to share thoughts or share something a person finds enjoyable. Art is used for an infinite number of things but generally its created for one of these two reasons. AI functions with these same set of parameters and the works they make are influenced by someone with one of these intentions. Usually, art is created based off personal experience and that individuals’ thoughts, which is the next layer we are going to investigate. The process of creative thought isn’t something that people are born with. It’s a skill that is developed along that person’s life and is something that is influenced by outside sources, such as other artists work, and society. Now when we compare that to what AI does, we realize that these actions are grounded in that same realm of influence. Albeit AI is a more of a physical influence than a conceptual, but there are countless cases of artist who use similar styles or reference other artists by making spoofs of previous artworks. My question is how are these actions different? Is it wrong simply because a computer does it or is it the action itself. If it was the action, then why haven’t we started calling out these many artists who make spoofs or just strait up copy others?
My belief is that the reason people dislike AI is because they have been influenced by society to hate it. So often we hear people talk about the horrible things AI does and how people use it for awful reasons, but you don’t often hear about how AI can be utilized by smaller artists for their benefit. At the end of the day AI is a tool that has no autonomy. Without input from a person, it can’t make art so shouldn’t we be blaming the artists for creating that work instead of the AI itself? Artists have full authority to sculpt the AI however they see fit, they can even alter what pre-existing knowledge those AI have and whether it can access the internet or not. Going back to how it’s a useful tool, AI has incredible capabilities that many people seem to overlook. My project is an attempt to show small artists how useful AI can be for their work and their futures.
This screenshot shows the page where you can edit your custom GPT. The options available make it so you can provide documents to refrence, tell it if you want it to access the internet or not, or you can feed it prompts to alter your AI's general instructions. The last one was something I used frequently to do minor tweaks on my AI until it was doing what I wanted. This page has already offered me so much and I still havent used all of the features available.
My project began as a simple story idea. The story which I wrote myself was then fed to the AI so it could understand the story and make content based off what I wrote more than anything else. I set up strict rules for the AI so it would use the story and other content I provided when generating any type of content. By giving it sample images and more information about the world I was able to make a strong foundation for the AI to start with. This story was something I made at the start of the semester after first learning how I could leverage AI, so I ended up using it for other assignments in the class, including the world building site which I later decided to combine with my final to create an encyclopedia for the world. The site would explore the regions, the creatures, and plants, giving the readers a much more in depth visual of the world they were reading about. In addition to the encyclopedia site, I generated images for the story which would enhance the narrative with visual representation. Getting the image right was not very easy and took quite some time but overall, it improves the experience when reading the story.
This is a screenshot from one of my chats with my custom-made AI. That AI has the information on the creatures, plants, regions, and the story that takes place in the world. I was able to provide the AI with so much knowledge that it was able to generate quality images from simple prompts like this one. Creating a custom AI like this is a very easy way to get more reliable and generally better content. Although it does require a subscription it gives you far more capabilities and tends to work better too. Creating custom AI’s also goes beyond image generation and allows you created tailored AI’s that deal with any set of challenges you can think of.
This image was one I generated to show off the southern region. This image does an amazing job showcasing the region as well as some of its unique plants- the sunburst moss and sunburst vines. Being able to make a visual of the various plants, creatures, and regions, allows me to showcase not only those individual aspects of my world but also how they interact with each other. Although I could explain it in text, part of the appeal to visual media is how it shows you exactly what the creator was thinking at the time, and by using AI you can do this and more.
Something I hear a lot is that AI is going to take over industries, which is true, but it is also going to blow up the number of smaller creators across the globe. AI takes away the time constraint of creating art and allows artists to spend all their time on conceptual thought. For smaller artists it gives them a new opportunity to have the same tools and capabilities as these massive corporations. In the past these large corporations would have massive teams that could still pump out content like this, albeit much slower than AI, but it was still very possible. Throughout history there wasn’t a single time when a solo artists could compete against a team. That all changed with AI and now anyone who has $20 lying around can create an endless number of graphics that are just as good as the one’s massive corporation like Disney or Apple produce. It’s an absolutely insane advancement of society and art, but no one is talking about it like that.
To me AI is the future of content creation, and regardless of whether people like it or not they will have to use it at some point, otherwise they will inevitably fall behind and become obsolete. It’s the harsh reality of the situation but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing. A teacher of mine made the connection between how AI is currently perceived to how graphic design software were perceived after their release. Originally people were against it, saying its going to cause so many people to make horrible things and that it would ruin the jobs of painters and other artists, however, we know that isn’t true. Something else we know is that history has a trend of repeating itself.
AI is the future of art for everyone. For smaller creators it gives them the opportunity to expand their horizons, and you needn’t look further to see an example of it. For my world building project, I used AI to help check my writing and to do slight edits, to generate all the images, to create the framework and end layout for my pages, and to do any minor tweaks along the process. On top of that, the AI was able to elaborate on why it made its choices and explain things to me I didn’t know, like coding. All of this was done within a fairly short period of time and was done by only me. This project is proof that AI is the greatest tool small creators have ever been given. All they need to do is realize it.