This Is an AI Generation

After all these years, I still keep handwritten journals. Some ideas and stories are best typed out though. If I can't get them down fast enough, they fade away. When I don't have the time or energy to spend hours writing by hand, it's nice to have a place where I can type my thoughts out. Then I remember: oh yeah, I have a 25 year old website with a blog!

Sadly, my ability to write eloquently has waned significantly in recent years. And now that AI has flooded nearly every sector of humanity, trying to write well feels somewhat futile. If I fed everything I write through the filter of AI, I could appear to be a very talented writer. That feels lame, though I believe a huge percentage of people are doing that now. While I won't promise to never use AI to improve my writing, for now it is not my plan. Since honesty is an attribute I highly prize, if I were to use AI to enhance the quality and clarity of my writing, I would feel compelled to put some small print on each post where that happens.

Like many people, I have very mixed feelings about artificial intelligence. Now that Pandora the Cat is out of the Box, I don't think she will ever agree to get packed up and buried again. Unless some sort of cataclysmic, apocalyptic events unfold I think AI will increase voraciously and be a gigantic part of everyone's future. Hopefully not like Terminator or Matrix sort of human-dominating or exterminating future. Some results of this new technological disruption might be neutral or good, while other aspects of AI will most likely lead to much suffering and evil - especially toward the poor. Generally only rich, educated people can improve their lives significantly using innovation, riding the wake of the AI revolution. For the record, I am classified as dirt poor, not rich. So I won't be the one to betray the world and a thousand children's children to fill my own pockets with wealth.

It would be a lie for me to say I have never dabbled with artificial intelligence. Like many nerdy, tech-oriented people, I have played a bit with image generation. It is fun and amazing to see what kind of art can be produced with virtually no effort. Generative art is already far beyond what 95% of artists can produce. Sure, it still makes occasional mistakes - especially with hands and distant faces - but overall it is capable of creating shockingly high quality imagery. I hesitate to fully embrace artificial intelligence for creative things. For example, it would feel very disingenuous to use it to rewrite all my blog posts and fill my art galleries with incredible artwork. The lowest quality AI image is probably better than my best hand-drawn artwork. I understand how people with very little artistic skill find AI very liberating and exciting. You can type lazy sentences to make beyond-professional quality art in seconds. However, since I grew up as an artist and have many artist friends, to frequently use AI instead of engaging my own creative abilities feels like a proverbial slap in the face.

Making art from one's experience, story, skill, imagination and vision... is incredibly difficult and respectable. Claiming AI generations as my own - as if I was capable of creating such images with my own skill - is not a line I can cross. Seems super dishonest to me. If I show AI images on my website I'll try to remember to mark them as such, or make it clear I'm talking about AI. I don't want to deceive anyone into thinking I'm more talented than I actually am (I'm not that good). I can TOTALLY see myself or others using AI-generated images to add a little flair here and there though. Rather than drawing a cover image for a blog post, I might at least occasionally (or often, don't know) use an AI image for something like that. When I write, I'm not necessarily free to spend 10 hours to create a cool image for a thumbnail. In fact, part of the reason I'm blogging again today is to get ideas out faster than I'm able to do writing by hand in my journals. If I don't express myself, those ideas are lost to history. While I'd rather write them by hand, time is often the enemy to that goal.

A week ago I prompted AI to generate about 800 images of animals on adventures. I'll share some of them in this post. These images are by no means a reflection of the current state of the art. While they might look pretty decent, I regularly see AI artwork online that is far more refined, detailed and imaginative coming from platforms like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL E and many more. If you are unfamiliar with AI art, and this post is the first you've seen (not likely, it's everywhere), just know these images are the lower end of what is possible. Since I hate paying for subscription services of any kind, I'm unwilling to pay for "credits" to generate images. So I look for free websites. Usually the free services generate images of a lesser quality. They most likely have weaker GPUs and constraints on the back end. It takes very powerful computers to produce the best results, and that costs money.

Though I don't feel right using AI for creative ventures without being advised by conscience, there are tasks that I'm not ashamed to use AI for. For example, years ago I enjoyed hand-coding web projects. Web development and design was my career for about 15 years, but that was almost 10 years ago that I stepped away from it! I might write more about that story sometime, but for now just know I'm VERY burnt out with it. I don't enjoy coding nearly as much as before. In fact, I couldn't touch code of any sort for numerous years afterward. I struggle with it to this day. I made the website you see now one character at a time with HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Javascript and other technologies. These days I'm willing to allow AI to aid me in writing code, as I don't enjoy it like I once did. I won't be switching to Wordpress or another CMS, but I might rewrite sections of my site with the help of AI to speed up the process and produce more maintainable code. Years from now, if the versions of PHP or MySQL I use cease to function, I might switch to a CMS. I won't likely want to continue to write code into my old age. But then, I might not still have a website at that point either. And who knows if I'll reach "old age." I'm pretty old already.

With web development, I don't feel like I'm "robbing myself" of a form of creative expression by using AI to help me with programming tasks. More like sparing myself needless stress and grief. Lately I have done many small projects with the help of AI coding assistants (co-pilots). I'll describe some of those projects soon on my blog. Using such tools has enabled me to get back into coding with less barrier to entry. I still have to think a LOT and aid the AI in its code writing. And I've screamed at the scream more times than I care to admit when AI doesn't cooperate. It can't magically produce a good result without my clever prompts and coaching. Often I'm pretty much telling it how to write the code. The cool thing is that I don't have to write much code myself - something I don't really enjoy anymore (and I'm terrible at it, to be honest).

I'm constantly asking AI how to write code or how to do this or that in Linux, but I often look at the code it creates and critique or improve it. AI isn't perfect at solving complex problems with one sentence prompts. It can take dozens of hours of conversation with the AI to get a satisfactory result. However, I would definitely say AI is far better at writing code than me. It is a somewhat synergistic process, where the outcome is beyond what AI or myself could achieve. The machine does the number crunching that my brain can't do, and I feed it the ideas and inspiration that it doesn't have. AI is something like a development genius when given the proper guidelines, but I have lots of experience to throw in. Sometimes it makes weird decisions and needs correction.

Since AI is trained on the best of human activity and knowledge, I believe someday soon it will outperform us all. Even the brightest and best of us humans will be outdone by AI because of its processing power and access to the entire repository of human knowledge. It is already far beyond the capabilities of most sci-fi characters like Data in Star Trek. Data has to pause for a second to think and can't understand humor. The other crew often has to explain basic human concepts to him. AI understands all these things, has a top notch humor chip, and is much faster. The speed is the part that impresses me the most. All the images you see randomly appearing on this post were generated by simple sentence prompts and displayed within 5 to 10 seconds tops. The code that AI writes for me appears on the screen in about the same amount of time - though I often have to spend hours refining it through conversation. Something that would take me days or weeks takes the computer model seconds. This disparity can be both depressing or empowering. For art or writing - creative stuff - I still want to do it myself. I don't get much satisfaction in telling a computer to write or draw for me, other than for funny meme sharing with friends. When it comes to stuff I pretty much hate doing, tedious tasks, I don't feel guilty in saving myself weeks of high blood pressure stress. So I use it for coding.

I am quite concerned that AI will replace humans in many sectors of the professional workforce. Unfortunately no one is putting on the breaks as artificial intelligence marches forward. We could and maybe should pull the plug on AI, realizing the dangers it poses to humanity. Unfortunately, the people with the money to create such technology are too greedy to allow its plug to be pulled. They stand to gain a lot from its propagation. So, consequences and all (perhaps even our eventual doom), we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future. For better or worse remains to be seen.

All the images you see appearing in this blog post are AI-generated. I gave simple prompts like animals on a journey across various fantastical landscapes. Truth be told, I had more imaginative images and scenarios in my mind, but I didn't have the patience to get AI to produce them. So I went for volume over quality. I could have supplied more creative and detailed prompts, but I liked the simple children's book or graphic novel style. I chose to keep them simple and not spend a stupid amount of time perfecting them. To make the 800 or so images, it took long enough as it is! If you are curious, I prompted to always include one breed of dog (not just a generic cartoon dog), using an AI generated list of popular and obscure dog breeds. Then I instructed it to throw in every other type of house pet, including some exotic ones. Then I told it to randomly combine the animals, but with at least one dog at all times, and more heavily weighted toward cats as well. I told it to send them on adventures in various natural environments, as if they were going on a hiking survival to reach an important destination across a whole continent. I gave it several environment samples like desert, jungle, forest, underwater, top of a mountain, and so on. Then I asked it to add some fantastical elements that can't be found in the real world, like what might be experienced in a fantasy novel - magic, quests, adventure, etc. I assigned a random character trait or ability to each animal so they would be more likely to look like a team of friends. I told it to draw in a rough, but hyperrealistic graphic novel style.

P.S. Don't wait around to see all 800 images... I only included a random sampling of 39 in this post.