EVENSTAR ✨@chelseaevenstar
To assume that artists exploring ai in their creative process are not hard working artists is wild.
My husband, who you’ve “quoted” in this post, is one of the hardest working digital artists out there, constantly busting his ass to care for our family, and is well respected in his industry for his work ethic and dedication to his craft.
If there are ai tools that can streamline his process and reduce the number of hours spent behind his desk —that is a huge win for our family, because we will have more time to spend together pursuing other irl things that we’re passionate about.
Ai is giving digital artists the ability to streamline workflows- not replace their innate artistry, but free up time & creativity that previously got chewed up by trouble shooting busted software or dealing with technical bullshit that is part of the process ONLY because of the software’s limitations, not because troubleshooting is fun, creative, or productive.
With Ai, artists are able to code agents that can remove the frustrating technical crap that has nothing to do with artistry so that they can put more of their energy into being freely creative vs being bogged down by slow, time wasting fuckery that exists in every known digital software. Awesome.
But also- Pandora’s Box of ai has been opened. There’s no closing it now, whether we like it or not. Ai is already integrated into nearly every area of our digital lives and it’s only going to intensify as time marches on.
My husband exploring these tools does not equate to him being a bad or unethical person, nor does it mean he’s betraying any other artists, including himself.
There is a tremendous amount of nuance in a subject this vast, and everyone has an Opinion. But Opinions serve no purpose without actions.
The truth is, humanity does not often consider the consequences of new technology until it’s too late. We put photos of our kids online before we knew better, thinking we were just sharing them with our families. Some of those ended up on sickening child porn sites. We put our art online to find clients on the other side of the world without considering that one day ai (& any human with internet service) would have unlimited access to our work.
Perhaps ai will have the capacity we lack to calculate potential outcomes of future Pandora’s Boxes we might want to open *before* we stupidly open them, which could be an extremely valuable use of ai.
So this is where we are, the box has been opened, and the result is predictably: mass confusion, mass fear, mass moral & ethical quandaries & intense polarized opinions that we’re all grappling with.
Some people are choosing to look at the exciting possibilities ai makes possible, and are already doing some spectacular things with it.
Any time new technology enters the picture, people lose jobs, industries change/die, but also, new innovations spring up from the ashes because human ingenuity is awesome. There are always renegade minds who see possibilities where others see destruction & who invent new stuff that moves humanity forward.
The topic of Ai is super complex and cannot be reduced to a simple love it or hate it black & white issue. The scope of disruption ai will bring to the world is huge, and we need the most creative minds to be involved in directing this wild thing towards a future we want to envision.
Ai will touch every industry eventually. Way sooner than we would like. We can’t stop it. How we respond to it, how we harness it, how we teach it and interact with it will shape our future and the future of ai. Our collective moral values as a species will guide it, or we’ll stay mad and leave it to corporations to decide.
Responding with hate toward one another is the least effective use of our energy.
Which actions can you take to change what you don’t like about ai? Because demonizing fellow artists who embrace these tools is not going to change anything.
