Sloth, Maybe?

  Here are two new experiments: - JJB

  Let’s see if this works… - JJB

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, al...

It is odd that, after years of training as an artist and a painter, I find more satifaction out of creating art by feeding some keywords into an AI art program called MidJourney.  I was rewarded with fantastic images like the one you see above. Sometimes I feel like a cheat and a fraud.  Other times, I feel nothing but love for the compostition I created with nothing more than "punch card" information. Do I think AI will surpass the artists who draw on millennia of history and years of experience?  No, I do not.  Will art such as the one I "composed" above appear in a gallery or a museum?  The scales tip towards "doubtful." I love this work just the same. - JJB