SILLY DOODLE - SEPTEMBER 2023 EDITION

I enjoyed my first day off in a minute yesterday, and got some time to draw, and it felt good. Creating images, with thousands of little actions feels good. And it’s a welcome change from the images I’ve generated over the past month and a half.

Most of the still imagery for the WHITCH crowdfund was “created” with prompts in Midjourney (AI). The whole business of generating images, music, and movies with AI rings a lot of negative bells for me - in particular with what it does to an American marketplace that’s already unfriendly to artists. That said, I thought the crowdfund could be a good opportunity to familiarize myself with what AI imagery currently does, and doesn’t do. And it provided a speed and scale that would be hard to match myself in the scramble of the crowdfund.

Putting aside the essential and necessary concerns AI raises with regard to training its data set on the work of others, and diluting the market power of artists, it’s also just not a rewarding process to engage in. Drawing, writing, and any creative practice is often hard. It’s work. It’s not always fun. But I always find the process meditative and rewarding.

There’s no way to quantify that feeling of reward in the market. But it’s very real to me.