The Future of Visual Art May Be Physical, and Other Art Blogger’s Recent Physical Art

This might be a tad odd and unexpected coming from an artist who primarily works digitally and has been a champion of the medium over the last decade. Not so much now. In my own digital art, I’ve moved about as close to using physical mediums as possible. My most recent digital drawing is 100% drawn by hand using a stylus and tablet, requires the same skills as making a physical drawing, and is also based on my own past charcoal drawing technique.

Part 1: The Future of Visual Art May be Physical

AI is killing digital art. AI is better at it, and being the super-genius mimic that it is, even I have to question whether a lot of the images I see are AI, digital, or physical.

At present, I have very little interest in AI art and quite a lot of aversion toward it. I maintain that it is great for exploring visual possibilities, and sometimes I feel like most artists would benefit from spending weeks playing around with it. I speak from experience. I also insist that it is possible to do wholly original work only using AI. Of course it is. You can make art out of rocks on the beach, milk cartons, a piece of fruit taped to a wall, having yourself shot in the arm by a sharpshooter, and using any possible means of creative expression.

But for the broad spectrum of visual artists who love drawing and painting, such as myself—at heart, I’ve always been a drawer and painter—AI and even things like Beeple uploading other people’s digital models and arranging them in Cinema 4D just allow for a level of cheating that serves to invalidate not only itself but unfairly anything that remotely looks like it. 

Below, an artist on Twitter shared his “non-artist” wife’s third effort at using the popular AI art-bot, MidJourney:

He is a high-level professional digital artist. Read what he had to say in his tweet. The result of his wife’s fledgling minutes of effort looks like someone modeled it in Blender, Zbrush, or another digital sculpting program. Note that I would also recommend that many artists dedicate a month or more to learning the basics of Blender, a free powerhouse of a digital sculpting program, even if AI can kick their butts at it, just to develop their 3D spatial awareness. I speak again from experience.

Compare the rendering above to something one of my favorite Blender tutorial creators recently shared:

I highly recommend Ryan’s Blender tutorials. They are very easy to follow along with compared to others. He’s been making Blender tutorials for over 3 years, and his dedication to learning the software, acquiring essential art skills, and churning out tutorials is remarkable. However, his results for modeling figures cannot compete with Paul Massey’s wife’s several minutes of playing around with MidJourney for the first time. Incidentally, AI is also learning to use Blender, so in the future, you can type something in a prompt, and AI will create the result by going through all the stages using software.

I have a lot more practice at drawing than Ryan, because, among other things, I have an MFA in art, so when I do one of his organic sculpting tutorials, I get a bit more elaborate results. Here’s a tutorial of his that I did in February 2021:

And here are my results:

My sculpt is more refined [compare the eyelids], even if Ryan is much better at Blender, because I have decades of drawing practice. But I also can’t compete with AI.

Below is one of many people who have started to explore using ChatGPT to write promts to dump into MJ [MidJourney 5]. MJ is now so sophisticated that it can create realistic photographs in seconds.

The results are incredible. And I absolutely think it is worth exploring AI creatively. What AI can do with photographs, it can also do with paintings, prints, and so on, though that is getting less attention right now for somewhat obvious reasons.

What is abundantly clear is that you don’t need to be any good at art or photography at all and don’t need any experience to get superior results that most artists and photographers can’t hope to compete with. That is already the case, but it will be much more so with the coming rollouts. Not just MidJourney, but Open AI, Google, Adobe, and Microsoft are all throwing their energies into creating AI art bots that will trounce humans once and for all. New versions are coming out weekly. Just imagine, if our civilization hasn’t collapsed, joining every prior civilization, what AI art will look like a decade from now.

Should kids bother to study art? Or anything? You are better off doing anything that requires physical presence, such as plumbing, than intellectual pursuits that AI can mimic passably well for an infinitesimal cost to an employer. That is, until robots replace those jobs as well.

People are now using AI, by the way, to write scripts for art history videos, and then they use computer voices to narrate them. They outperform my art videos. AI can write art criticism. AI can be used to read all of my posts and write future articles in my voice. Jordan Peterson used AI to assimilate his book “Twelve Rules for Life”, then had it write a 13th chapter. After AI churned out the result in several seconds, Jordon concluded, “It isn’t obvious to me, for better or worse, that I would be able to tell that I didn’t write it”.

I’m not that pleased with Peterson lately, as he’s gone from a more independent thinker to a card-carrying member of the conservative party. I find his anti-vegan rants particularly troubling and ignorant on the topic. But he is an expert in psychiatry, and his attestation that AI could write his own material well enough to fool him is well worth taking seriously.

I’ve been struggling with AI art bots and AI in general for years, but especially in the last year since AI started getting phenomenally good at art knockoffs. I used to think we human artists could beat it. But I underestimated the pace of technological advancement, which is exponentially increasing. New developments come faster and faster. And so, within a number of months, AI went from not being able to do eyes or hands and completely butchering faces to making images that are nearly indistinguishable from photographs. If I project into the future based on the last six months, humans don’t have a chance against AI.

That can be very depressing, though I never really got depressed about it. I would say it unnerved and upset me, but I’m not Jordan Peterson, and perhaps I can’t really evaluate my own psychology. In just the last few days, however, hopelessness has been replaced by acceptance. Of course, AI is smarter than us. We can’t compete with machines at speed, power, repetitive physical tasks, math, chess, and all sorts of other things we already accept. At least we can take credit for creating the damned machines and neural networks.

Art, like everything else, becomes something that ultimately we can’t compete at against machines, computers, or AI power. When AI is as powerful as physical chips and whatnot can contain, we already plan on moving to some sort of subatomic processing. Don’t ask me how it works. Just ask ChatGPT-4. And so we are pitting ourselves against unimaginable power. In the near future, driverless cars will be able to defeat any human driver at the Daytona 500. Top Gun won’t have a pilot remotely resembling Tom Cruise, but an invisible algorithm.

Nobody tries to compete with a crane at lifting heavy objects. AI wins all spelling bees and chess tournaments. And soon, nobody will try to beat it at visual art because it’s hopeless. If you did beat it, someone would upload your result and create a series of a dozen variations within minutes. You have to be able to beat not just AI but AI plus yourself, which is impossible. I’ve known this and wrote about it at least six months ago.

You might say that AI can’t beat us at art because it doesn’t have a “soul”, is not conscious, doesn’t care one way or another, has zero compassion or empathy, and doesn’t even know that it itself exists. It’s a good argument and something I firmly believed in and argued for myself a decade ago. Back then, I taught my English students in a Chinese university that AI could beat us at chess but never at art because AI was not alive, had no mortal vulnerabilities, had no feelings, and hence had nothing to communicate about what it feels like to be alive and struggling to survive and find meaning. Well, I hadn’t anticipated how well AI could fake it.

Right now—and this is just an observation, not an attack on artists trying to use AI—I find myself looking away when I recognize something as art created by AI. It seems like a subconscious defense against being seduced by fraud, deceived, or fed a false reality. I don’t want a computer to dictate to me what it means to be alive. It hasn’t a clue. I don’t want to accept the matrix as reality.

Note here that being an “AI artist”, who produces “AI-assisted art” (which might be much more accurately dubbed “human-assisted AI art”) might be a short-lived artistic path. All one needs to do is steal your prompt and then ask ChatGPT-4 to improve upon it. Copy paste results, voila. You’re out of business unless you have the resources to promote yourself above others. AI may also be trained to reverse engineer AI images to recreate the prompt, if that is even necessary.

“It used to be that we would say that a work of art was pretty good for AI. From now on we will say that it is pretty good for a human.”

~ Eric Wayne, January 28th 2023

We’re going to be fascinated by the hyper-reality of AI, especially as we get into immersive spaces. But I believe there will be a simultaneous hunger for the authentic article, sometimes in the same individual and in the same afternoon. 

I already have a greater appreciation for the old masters or the recent masters—people who made things with their own hands and vision. And, no, my detractors, who have attacked me for years for making art with pixels instead of pigment, that doesn’t mean my own art doesn’t count. Most of my work uses far more skill, imagination, and marks made by hand using a stylus and tablet than does that of my critics. I’m not anti-tech. I’m anti-fraud.

There’s still a place to work digitally that is honest and requires a great level of skill. Those that don’t think so, well, I invite you to learn Blender to the point where you can make the Enterprise from scratch (as I did in my first weeks of using Blender, without any help or tutorial] and get back to me about how easy it was.

Also a lot of fun to do. Again, I highly recommend learning the basics of Blender.

It’s possible I will change my mind and go full-on AI, but if anything, I think I will do that in conjunction with hard-earned digital art styles and hopefully physical works. For those of you who don’t know, I got my MFA before I got my first computer, and all of my art up through my MFA was physical.

While there’s hope for digital art, it’s going to be a lot harder to tell when it was made by a human versus when AI cranked it out in seconds. Physical art is just going to have a huge advantage if it is seen in person or the process is documented when it comes to being registered by other people as authentically made by a human. Even this will be fakable in the near future to some extent. Any picture of a physical piece of art is nearly as vulnerable to being faked as is digital art, but once we know better, we will value art more that we know to be 100%, or at least mostly, the creation of a human being with human abilities and limitations.

I fantasize about making physical pieces, but as a digital nomad with limited space and living overseas in SE Asia, it’s not really practicable at present. However, the digital drawings and paintings I’m working on now use the same essential skills and will transfer well to analog means later on if I choose. Even so, I wouldn’t write off working digitally entirely, which would be about on par with writing an essay with a ballpoint pen on a piece of notebook paper rather than typing it, as I am now, on the computer. One doesn’t need to overreact or overcompensate. Don’t gloat, thinking you’ve been vindicated, if you’re a conservative painter of still-lifes and nudes who’s led a crusade against digital art for your adult life. Truth be told, artists who are proficient in digital, physical, and AI art are covering more territory and using more skills and imagination. Though I will also maintain that the greatest heights can be achieved with the simplest and most direct means. It’s never a question of the medium or the style, but if the artist can infuse something into it so that the whole transcends the sum of its parts and there’s an ineffable sort of presence to it, so to speak. If we look further into the future, it’s going to be a lot more important that we are familiar with the artist behind the work, though generally I don’t like that because we are extremely vulnerable to prejudice when we consider who made a work. We will need to find an authentic balance and be more genuine ourselves, both in our art appreciation and in our daily lives. Some of us will become lazy and corrupt; others of us will have to become more honest and willing to work harder.

Part 2: Other Art Blogger’s Recent Physical Art

These are some gems that were either in my feed today or that I discovered today for the first time.

I love this watercolor/pen/ink painting titled ‘UnBecoming’, by Kevin James Hurtack, over at GUN SMOKE & GHOULS. It’s so refreshingly obviously hand-made. I enjoy how transparent the technique is, the choice of luxurious green hair, the arch of her brows, the red eyes, the generous gray mouth, and the rotting flesh! One of the things we may come to cherish about human art is our limitations and subtle imperfections. There’s nothing I’d want to change about this that wouldn’t alter it as an expression of a particular individual in unique circumstances of time and place.

I was charmed by the painting above by a New Orleans artist who goes by “Gater Girl”. There’s an equally charming story behind it which you can read about on her blog. Without the background, well, my favorite color is green, the crock is adorable, and the whole production makes me smile as wide as the prehistoric reptile following his mistress.

Next up is a consummate portrait by Christopher Marc Ford.

His choice of aqua-green to complement the orange/red hair works perfectly, and what made him decide to paint the wavy bands over most of the figure? That bold and risky decision, which ultimately kicked the painting up a level, intrigues me. Notice how he barely articulated the nose beyond the bridge, but it still works. I can almost imagine the music that goes along with this.

Last up is a fantastic watercolor by Margaret McCarthy Hunt:

It’s an elegantly beautiful rendition that captures the intricate forms of the bikes, as well as the texture of the street and other details, by suggesting them rather than painstakingly illustrating them. She’s documented multiple stages of the piece, as well as her materials. 

and

There’s no question that this ain’t AI!

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It may surprise people that I like hand-drawn or painted art, traditional watercolors, and light-hearted illustrations, given that my art tends to the darkly spiritual/sci-fi/psychedelic/expressionist. Often, I like other people’s art BECAUSE it is NOT what I’d do or have done. When I did work exclusively in analog, my art was not like these examples (my biggest overlap being with the first selection). You can see examples of my early work here if you are curious.

Even though I’m increasingly attracted to art that involves the least technology, once again, the medium is irrelevant, and it’s all what you do with it. For me, it’s ultimately how much of yourself you put into it, and that may be purely your vision rather than time and effort expended on the work. That said, due to AI and people likely reacting against it, and, by extension, being a bit prejudiced against all digital mediums, the tables have flipped, and it may be an advantage to work exclusively by hand and with physical mediums. And there’s not much stopping most digital artists from doing this, too, even if just in addition to their processes that embrace more tech.

~ Ends

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