Art and A.I. — A Vision of Where It’s Going

The Github Archive Program is meant to preserve software, and so it only makes sense that I would use A.I. in the process of creating the artwork for it.

I’ve been playing with A.I. artistically for years now. The following is as best of an account I can give of what the process is like, what’s new about it, and where I think it’s going.

Context, Philosophy, and an Imaginary Helicopter

As a lifelong student of human nature, I also treat the journey (as I do everything) as an invitation to observe the evolution in my own relationships with body, mind, spirit, and machines.

When working on a piece, I often experience little flashes of surrealism — this sort of awareness, that some small code/art decision I’m dealing with on my laptop, viewed through another lens, is a real-life instance of a philosophical flashpoint that humanity has fiercely debated for ages.

Trying to answer the philosophical questions, I usually feel like a monkey trying to fly a helicopter built out of leaves and sticks, for which the operating manual and engineering diagrams are left as an exercise to the pilot.

That is to say, a lot of the popularized philosophy and the actual technology are in completely different languages. The translation is often poor or nonexistent — a lot of the philosophy was born before we had technical knowledge to base it on.