Changing my Banner

The world moves so quickly, doesn’t it?

When I started this site, AI image generation was brand new, a curiosity, a fun little toy. I played around in Photoshop with an image I had taken of a small country road and added some AI elements to turn it into a mysterious pathway into an enchanted forest. I thought it was neat that I could do that.

What I didn’t fully appreciate was the vast harm that AI-generated images would soon bring to the artistic community. AI learned from human artists, without the artists’ permission. Everyone knows that. But AI is also poised to replace the artists it learned from.

Because people – ordinary people – can’t tell the difference.

I participated in a T-shirt design contest for a local organization. My design was based on a photograph I had taken and was a drawing I had done. I came in second in the contest, which I thought was respectable; and I was proud of myself.

Then the organization communications director came to me (because I had provided print-ready vector files and apparently knew what I was doing) and asked me to help convert the winning design to something print-ready. I was happy to help. The winning design was pretty cool, but the artist had provided a low-resolution .jpg that was not suitable for printing. After horsing around with it a bit (trying to avoid paying for Adobe Illustrator again), I asked the communications director to ask the artist what the original had been created with because I couldn’t tell; but almost any way of creating, I could explain to the artist how to produce a print-ready version.

The answer? “ChatGPT.”

Well crud. Not only were we not going to get a full-resolution version or decent-looking vector art, this meant that I, an actual, human artist, lost out to AI because someone with no artistic talent had an idea and asked a computer to draw suitable art for it. And while I suppose it’s sort of good that someone can realize their ideas even if their lives have not taken them in an artistic direction, I felt that was incredibly inappropriate for a contest.

Which brings me to my neat-looking banner. It’s the product of AI. But I’m incredibly unhappy with AI right now. Today’s project will be to make a new banner for this site. I will probably start with the original banner. I believe AI images can be a useful tool in an artist’s toolbox. But the AI art should be a jumping-off point, not an end product.

Art has, until now, been the ultimate expression of humanity. I don’t want us to lose that.