Is this art? — Matt Hastings

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Is this art?

A scroll along, thinking out loud about<br>what art means now that a machine can make it.

A small figure looking up at a large question mark.<br>A simple line-drawn person stands and gazes upward at an oversized question mark floating above them.

Scroll

There's this conversation happening around whether or not using AI to create art is legitimate.

The question to document is: what is art? Why might somebody think that using AI disqualifies the artifacts produced as art, or perhaps doesn't?

I think that is, broadly, the question we're grappling with.

This is a drawing I made of my dog. I did that drawing this morning. I love drawing my dog. It makes me think about my dog, connects me to my dog.

Although interestingly, because my dog wasn't around this morning, I drew this from a photo reference. There's already a stabilizing effect that a technology is providing for me, where I took a picture of my dog.

This is one of the first pictures I took of my dog, actually like ten years ago. Today I pulled that up on my phone, I looked at it, and I drew my dog how it looked in that picture.

Already a digital tool is allowing me to do something that I couldn't have done otherwise. I would have had to have done it from memory.

What does my dog look like from memory? I don't think I could have done that very successfully. That is not how I practice drawing, that is not how I practice art.

Anyway, here's a first example of something that might be considered art.

Here's another image of my dog. This is a painting I did, and it's one I really like. Again, I really like drawing and painting pictures of my dog, Goose.

There's a lot to consider here. I think, broadly, whether or not any of this so far is art. Is that sketch of my dog art? Is this image, this painting of my dog, art? What's the qualifying criteria?

Anyway, let's describe what they are. The image is something I drew by hand, looking at a photo of my dog. This painting is a painting I made with ink, pencil, and watercolor, again with a photo image of my dog.

They were both things I did. They took different amounts of time. The sketch was like 5 minutes; this painting was probably 40 minutes, and I liked doing both of them.

I did them both for myself. I don't make images and sell them, so I'm not selling my artifacts. This is just a practice I have, and I keep a lot of them in my house, and sometimes I look at them.

These are just some descriptive qualities of what's going on.

1The source image

2Rounded corners in Canva

3Rounded corners + a warm color filter

4A heavier, fully stylized transformation

I think the reflection here is a progression of using a digital tool to manipulate an image that I drew by hand to change how it looks. What does that descriptively work or look like?

I uploaded an image, drew an image, took a picture, uploaded it to Canva. Now Canva has given me this UI to interact with to do lots of different transformations of that image. Mostly what I'm doing is moving buttons around on a UI set of toggles and hitting options, and then the software is manipulating the image accordingly.

This is a quick drawing I did. I think the point to make is that when you're using a digital drawing tool, it's already making decisions for you in a lot of ways.

You can set some of the parameters going into the drawing:

You can pick a color.

You can adjust the line weight.

Create a textured background.

As you are moving your mouse around the screen, the software is interpreting that movement, rendering pixels in a way that is co-creating an image. You're not the one creating those pixels on the screen; the program is, and you are directing the program to create those pixels.

You also get a new experience:

You get to iterate much more quickly.

You can hit undo.

You can erase certain sections.

You can come back and use different tools.

If we were in a fancier tool like Photoshop to adjust the pixels, adjust color, you could layer on different layers and masks. You really get a lot of power using this piece of software to create an image.

This time I went to Gemini, even more powerful of an image creation tool than photoshop, and I uploaded my image of my dog. I gave it a prompt to manipulate it in a particular way and in a particular style.

I knew certain things about impressionism and swirling and oil paint, and I had some taste. I like how that looks, so I asked it to re-render the image in that style.

Next, I didn't upload an image at all to Gemini, I just described the...