to be a creator in an AI world

pt. 1 - a story of encountering AI for the first time

I remember when DALL-E first came out in 2022 and suddenly you could generate art with mere words. With the realization of AI art, my years as an artist, spent laboring over proportion, color, line, form…was seemingly rendered useless. In that moment of 2022, I felt such a despair thinking that I had indeed been replaced by machine.

An algorithm that need not sleep nor eat, that could restlessly and quickly envisage entire worlds into existence, clearly outperformed me on all fronts.

However, four years later, where AI has advanced beyond what my high-school-aged self could’ve imagined, the identity of being a creative remains.

While AI is able to generate, automate, and assist, it:

• cannot tell your story for you.

• cannot make the decision to create for you.

Specificity, imperfection, vulnerability, and unlike-ness in a world of same-ness are the true boundaries separating human from AI-generated creation.

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pt. 2 - to be human in a sea of slop

• specificity - only you can recall the sensation of a first snow on your fingertips, or the flavor of a favorite fruit on your tongue. Only you define individual items specifically in the way you do. A stuffed animal is specific in the way it has become sentimentally yours.

• imperfection - among too-smooth, high-contrast, overly-polished AI images - imperfection is refreshing. The unique lilt of one’s voice, where a spoken word is never spoken again exactly the same way. The messy background of a home, filled with trinkets, cluttered and colorful. Imperfection = reality.

• vulnerability - AI cannot feel. It doesn’t have the lived experience. Only you can engrain the lessons learned and feelings felt into your creations, as you make from the heart and the soul.

• unlike-ness - AI outputs often look the same. Even in modern culture without the advent of AI: minimalism and concrete blandness. So, dare to be different: colorful, retro, spontaneous, funky, fun.

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pt. 3 - predictions, confessions, ideas

I used to be anti-AI everything; to support AI felt like a betrayal to the art world that I come from.

However, I confess that AI has become interwoven into my life in many, many ways.

I recognize that AI has made it possible to 100x your productivity and to completely stretch the frontiers of possibility. AI has democratized knowledge skills that once took years to learn and pioneered new mediums to harmonize and create with.

And AI is the inevitable future. It will only ever get smarter, faster, and better, from here.

I believe it is a matter of balance. To use AI to advance, multiply, and systemize.

But at the root of it all, it’s you and me. Humans, with a story :)

until next week~
Sulan :)
@sulansart

P.S. Some of my favorite AI tools: Vyra [collaborative video editing], Flora [intentional generation], Granola [AI note-taking], and Claude. Check them out!