AI ARTWORK

There is no escaping the fact AI-generated artwork is here to stay, and like all new technologies, we can either embrace it or run away. While it is still finding its place in the world, I feel it will become best-used as an assistive creative tool for artists; compositional ideas or a means of approaching a project in a surprising way that the human brain may not have thought of (which is a polite way of stating that AI art never gives you what you want!). For me, AI art will never replace the enjoyment or creative process of digital painting by hand, but, like any other digital art tool within Photoshop or beyond, is is another medium at my disposal.

While the copyright of a purely AI-generated image (and its sources) is currently a much-disputed can of worms, I maintain that one of the keys to the success of using AI art, will be honesty about its use.

Following on from my older experiments with synaesthesia art, the pieces of artwork on this page were again inspired by Peter Gabriel’s music.

“Panopticom”

I wanted to interpret Peter Gabriel’s recent song Panopticom. I generated over twenty different AI images based on various key phrases and descriptions, then brought the best bits together in Photoshop and worked over them, adding digitally-painted finishing touches to make them my own. I ended up creating three different versions.

Peter’s concept for the Panopticom is a constantly changing satellite fed globe, which allows people to upload and monitor appropriate and meaningful, personal, social, economic and political data along with all manner of scientific and environmental information. I love the science fiction imagery this concept brings to mind, and that’s what I was hoping to achieve with these pieces.

“Red Rain”

One of my first experiments in AI art was again based around some of the lyrics from a Peter Gabriel song – this time it was Red Rain from his classic 1986 album So. I soon realised that using an abstract song lyric as a text promo produced some very interesting results, if nothing like I was hoping or expecting. After trying a dozen iterations of the prompt, there was one image I found the most compelling, which I then took into Photoshop to edit and refine.