Friends, Should You Let Friends do AI Art?

It all began with a post-it.

Yeah, I'm particularly fond of this doodle.  I consider it my last attempt at creating true art.  If you see the date, I sketched it out on April 1, 2004.  The date means nothing.  I was nobody's fool, unless I was fooling myself into thinking I could make fine art.

Usually, a preliminary sketch such as the one above is used for a final composition - be it water color, tempera, or oil paint.

But twenty years later, something entered my life that I did not anticipate.

A company called OpenAI created an online program called Chat GPT.  With this, you could ask for food recipes, fun facts about the Roman Empire, or some random character like the superhero Sharky, the toothbrush using Shark that encourages kids to brush their teeth.  Something like that.

It can also be used to write outlines to screenplays, among other features.

I'm an amateur screenwriter.  I pride myself on banging out a scene in the space of five minutes, all without the assistance of some meshugganeh AI program.  That's not to say I didn't fiddle with it, but the end result is often like in David Cronenberg's The Fly, when Jeff Goldblum teleports a slice of steak from one pod to another.  He tasted it.  He said it looks like a steak, but it doesn't have the "zing" of a steak.

That's how a ChatGPT script is.  It looks like a script, but it doesn't have the "zing" of a human presence.

That's not to say it doesn't have its uses.  From the bare bones of what it generates, you dear reader, can add the flesh, blood, bone, and sinew of a proper script from the AI's DNA.

I could teach you the ropes of how to do such a thing, but a good magician doesn't share his secrets.

Suffice to say, I don't use it for my real writing.  I like my steak to have that "zing."

But I do have uses for the program.  There is a feature in Chat GPT called DALL•E.  (Dalí.  You get it)?

You see, when it comes to visual art, I like to cheat.

My first experiment with the post-it image above was to render it as a sepia-toned photograph.  So, with a few prompts supplied by yours truly, the end result was this:

Nifty, huh?  Even awe inspiring.

For my next trick, I decided to make the post-it look like an ancient mural slowly wearing away on a wall of a dilapidated Roman temple.  The end result?

Wow, man.

Then I tried to make it look like an antique mode of photography called a daguerrotype...

And I went on...

And on...

Inspired by Giotto

And on!

I like this one because I went from Giotto to a 16-bit video game graphic.

I went berserk with this program!

Here are some random doodles...

Hanna Barbera's Top Cat.

Starship Repair Shop.

A gym rat passes gas.

My grand political statement.

I have amassed about a hundred of these doodles.  They range from the sacred to the profane.

So, yes, I am having fun with this program.

Is it art?  I leave that question to be answered by critics and intellectuals far more thoughtful than I am.

In the meantime, here's a doodle of a hobbit farting.

Oop!  Mister Frodo, it seems I've laid a squeaky stinker!

- JJB