written by Maurice Cardinal …
Is Ai a PIVOT POINT for ART?
It depends where you want to pivot.
If you’re a traditional artist, you can relax. Ai won’t impact your style of creating fine art unless you want it to, at least not in the near future.
If you’re a commercial full time artist, you’ll need to pivot, and the longer you wait to make your move, the harder and more expensive it will be.
This Ai experiment I call SHARK FUN SOUP… is the most controversial and provocative ART experiment we’ve ever run in our twenty-one year history at iADX365 – the home of International Artist Day.
It’s ALL GEEK to Me
I was concerned with Ai in the beginning, but over the last three months discovered a few things that will make it easier for artists of all styles to understand the relationship between artificial intelligence and art. To begin, Ai is not what most people think. Plus, it’s not going away and is about to expand at an exponential rate, so the sooner you learn where you fit in, if you do at all, the better.
For most TRADITIONAL ARTISTS you don’t fit into Ai in any way, shape, or form… so relax 🙂
Ai won’t hurt the traditional/analog style of art. It will in fact, help by making human-touch handmade art more valuable to heritage collectors who not only value craftsmanship; they are willing to pay for it. Don’t be fooled though, MOST art lovers are not as sophisticated and do not care how the art was produced. Most only care about how it looks and makes them feel in the moment, and that it’s FREE or cheap as possible. It’s a psychological constant baked into our DNA that will never change in our life.
Over the last few months, I conducted what turned out to be a provocative and revealing artificial intelligence art experiment to see exactly what all the hype is about. It turns out that most of it is HYPE, but not the type of spin you might expect. It’s layered over incredibly SMART CODING designed to influence you at every stage. Ai is unrelenting in this regard.
I realised very quickly that almost EVERY ANSWER FROM Ai support is a MASTERFULLY subtle SALES PITCH. It initially SEEMS as if the artificially friendly geek-bot mouth for the LLM is giving you UNbiased creative or tech advice. The truth however, is that it’s also wrapping the advice in a sales message that invariably drives you to one of it’s expensive paid-for solutions. I had/have to double-check everything it recommends.
If you ask Ai if it is biased, it will admit yes, but give you an explanation so quickly that you forget why bias is dangerous. It’s like the bot says to you, “There, there little one. Yes, cyanide will kill you, but it’s TASTELESS. If you don’t believe me… put a tiny bit on the tip of your tongue to see for yourself.
Ai has the best SALES BOTS I’ve ever encountered.
The always-on Ai sales process leverages everything, including phantom emotion to influence you. Any day now I’m expecting Ai will drip a salty human tear down my screen as it slumps and feigns artificial depression.
For the most part today, Ai isn’t aimed at traditional analog artists, although many inexperienced newer artists read into that way. So do many experienced artists who are scared it will replace what they offer the world. It won’t, at least not any time soon.
If you’re worried Ai is copying your art… let me ask; From which artist(s) do you copy your style?
Considering that artists have been dumping their art onto websites for FREE for well over a decade, why weren’t you worried then, when it served your purpose? Now you’re concerned? You’re on a slippery slope because if you complain about Ai, and then Ai finds that you’ve been putting free art online, you’ll look foolish and lose credibility. Be careful when you poke the bear, or get in bed with an elephant. Your best advice is to stay in your lane and do what you do best… OR become a real activist if you don’t like the system. Anemic social media complaining though, is just going to attract attention from Ai Agents you don’t want – more on Ai Activism later.
Most Ai promotion, targets commercial artists who develop ADVERTISING for broadcast television and targeted communication online. This group should be terrified, especially older commercial artists. If you don’t keep up you’ll be slowly sidelined.
One of the upsides is that TV Ads are already becoming incredible and something viewers will want to watch. It’s easy to fall in love with a TALKING OCTOPUS, and also a dog as cute and smart as LASSIE.
It also won’t take long for Ai AGENCY WORK to move inhouse.
Moving Ai talent inhouse at companies is guaranteed, although it could take several years to be fully adopted the same way internet development made it easy to move company designers to remote consulting and freelance teams. Agencies, whether creative or marketing will first lose middle manager-executives as it creeps up the hierarchy. The ones to go first will be people who don’t produce, and instead spend most of their time justifying and protecting their jobs. Many commercial artists already see it coming. It’s why they lobby hard against Ai, so pay attention to whom on your team, rails against Ai the LOUDEST.
The truly scary part; If you ask Ai to identify the weak people on YOUR team, you’ll be surprised, and maybe even lose sleep over its accuracy.
If you don’t think your supervisor hasn’t done this already, and the BIG BOSS too, you might be the weakest link. Part of the business development and communication service for mediacom advisors and agencies like mine, was to formulate this type of research for clients. Today however, your boss’ assistant can not only do it directly in less than an hour, it can become an evergreen report that constantly updates – automatically.
Only the very youngest or newest artists, and I use the word artist loosely in this context, use Ai to create STILL images – it’s quite often SLOP and usually very unimaginative compared to an artist who unconsciously thinks through their projects. Even a relative beginner can create better and more useful still digital imagery than most Ai, at least today, but don’t ask tomorrow because it’s changing rapidly month to month.
I was surprised how much Ai changed in three months while I was designing and building my Ai activism campaign about HEALTHY FOOD.
To leverage Ai cost-effectively, you need at least intermediate skills using still image apps like Photoshop, and excellent video editing skills, plus, writing chops. This trifecta is mandatory unless you can afford to eat through expensive credits and massive amounts of time. Ai is incredibly slow in some instances, and really frustrating when it IMPACTS CREATIVE FLOW, which it does quite often.
Ai is not a partner, but pretends to act like one. A partner listens and gives you incremental feedback before they act and waste your time and money. Ai does the opposite and looks for ways to eat your credits instead of helping you refine your vision. It constantly tries to force its very common, community-sanctioned, politically correct safe vision on you. Unless you’re OK 2 OBEY and COOL 2 COMPLY, which most people are today, you have to be strong to keep Ai at bay.
The BIG STICKING POINT for Ai right now is PRICE.
Ai is incredibly expensive for casual artists, but not necessarily for professional commercial artists. And even though it is “relatively” expensive, Ai is being subsidised by first movers and investors in order to raise general visibility and acceptance. In a couple of years, maybe less, pro prices will creep higher and even further out of reach for most people. They’ll also offer a myriad of limp consumer versions not as spectacular.
ACTIVISTS are ONE GROUP however that will benefit in a major way from Ai on a number of levels that include imagery as well as automated campaign strategies and execution.
Ai can be stand-alone, or a perfect complement to SOCIAL ACTIVISM DOCUMENTARIES.
Ai ACTIVISM is a truly terrifying concept that is SLOWLY developing, because ironically, Ai companies are also scared of it – and so are governments. They throttle themselves, but the truth is, beyond corporate liability, they’re not at all scared or concerned what ACTIVISTS will do to third parties. For example, Visibility Spectrum (my production company). I’m far from being the only agency building an Ai AGENT network to track executives and place food and agriculture leaders under constant surveillance, and I’m not just talking about tracking social media. Ai goes everywhere, and welcomes that type of institutional and political cross-development tracking and reporting.
Ai GEEKS too, are scared of what Ai could do to THEM, and they should be, because when Ai ACTIVISM ramps up to speed, it’ll be BRUTAL and UNRELENTING. The unrelenting part though, is music to an activist’s ears.
Ai will probe you like a proctologist… if you let it.
Ai knows exactly how to bait and feed human addiction.
They sell Ai like it were cocaine: Try it. You’ll like it. All the kids are doing it. You can’t get hooked. Smell some, for free, and tell me what you think. Is Ai fire, or what… Z?
Ai ACTIVISM will touch you where and when you least expect it, and there will be little you can do to stop it. You’ll be able to mitigate some personal damage, but not necessarily stop it. Just like Ai supports thieves and con-artists, Ai activism can als easily target unethical companies and INDIVIDUALS in a way that could expose and cripple an organisation or a company’s productivity.
It’s more complicated than it sounds, but essentially, all you have to do is design the campaign (with the help of Ai of course), plug it into Ai AGENTS, and hit LOOP.
Once your LOOPED you’re HOOPED…
If you do something unethical and it causes someone to target you, you’ll need to be incredibly skilled and prepared to invest in defending yourself in a public Ai forum.
ACTIVISM is a large part of this article because not only am I a fine art photographer and musician, I’m an experienced activist, and recognise where Ai steps up, and where the hype falls apart. Twenty years ago I wrote Leverage Olympic Momentum, a disruption and growth hacking book, and had historic global success exposing Olympic corruption. I’m now writing Leverage ORGANIC Momentum – a book of strategy for HEALTHY FOOD CONSUMERS.
One of the issues I noticed within a couple of weeks of prompting Ai, was that it is difficult to hide the influence of neurodivergent personality disorder baked into the design. I recognise it because I’m also a diagnosed geek, nerd, techie, gearhead, punk, egghead, wonk, guru, dork, dweeb, gawker, et al; whatever your go-to term.
Why is Ai Neurodivergence Important?
Ai was NOT created by AVERAGE nerds. It was designed by the SMARTEST geeks, a group also the most affected by ND. The SMARTEST! …so think about that for a second. These geeks who often display and even FLEX sociopathic traits and historic acts of GREED, drive Porches and Lambos, fly private jets, have trophy wives, and own multiple homes. Yes, I’m fully aware that trophy wives like to be called Power Couples, but those birds are rare and a duck is still a duck – quack 😉
I’m one of the lucky ones because I was just grazed by ND. I often compare neurodivergence to what happens when one gets hit with a ball. If you’re lucky like Musk, Gates, Bezos and others of their corporate ilk, you were hit with a BIG SOFT BEACH BALL that passed right through you and left MOSTLY the good aspects of ND.
I also know and work with people who were hit with an ADHD soccer ball who, unfortunately were left with more than good intentions. These folks are brilliant, but a handful and often wildly unpredictable. I’ve also worked with professionals who were beaned with an ND hardball and consequently act in Rain Man fashion. It’s critical to recognise whom you’re dealing with because even though nerds are stereotyped, all geeks are not the same. If ASD left you devoid of empathy, and you now have Ai power, PLUS a chip-on-your-shoulder-EGO, you’re way more than a handful for society. You’re dangerous.
It took a few weeks of research and experiments to figure out how to talk to Ai, and once I realised I was communicating with a GEEK hit by a hardball (the smartest coders), everything changed quickly. In the beginning, I’d write a prompt, see the result and wonder HTF it came up with that nerdy pattern of 1s and 0s. Hardball geeks aren’t able to deviate from the data. It’s what makes them more robot than human. I bet you know one, maybe work for or even live with one. If you live with a hardball geek, you know exactly what I mean. It’s one of society’s best kept open secrets. You might even be one.
At first, my mistake was to think of Ai as a balanced human. It’s not. Ai is a highly-complex neurodivergent entity that makes about the same sense and exhibits the same traits as some of the genius-geeks I’ve worked with IRL. If you speak geek, you’ll do alright, but it’ll still be a struggle. If you don’t speak all the tertiary ASD psych dialects, you’ll likely contribute to the ubiquitous stream of infamous SLOP. It might be intellectual, but it won’t connect with the masses, WHICH IS AN INTERESTING Ai PARADOX.
In general, today Ai is more of a leveller than it is a creative tool.
If you’re wondering why I write it as Ai, with a small “i”; I see the artificial part as being much bigger than the intellectual component, plus, when I see AI, I think it refers to someone named Allan😉 My rule of thumb is to never let someone who was hit by anything harder than a beachball, name anything – pretty sure it’s how we got permaculture and regenerative 😉 It’s better from a communication and an economic perspective to use simple words that are easy for society to understand and remember, like ORGANIC+plus, my offering btw, and a term I use with clients who love it!
I founded and own this art site iADX365, the home of International Artist Day, and in my professional opinion, an artist with about five years of professional experience can today, easily outthink and out design Ai.
In fact, this mature level of experience requirement, can become so frustrating, new artists will soon wonder why they even got on an Ai roller coaster that requires you to be a yard/metre tall so you won’t slip under the safety bar. Within a couple of weeks I discovered that I continuously came up with much better creative results. In the beginning I burned through credits testing Ai to see how good, or bad it is creatively – whether writing or graphics. The results were mostly disappointing, but sometimes incredibly great and surprising.
Ai did occasionally surprise me by delivering something so innovate in such a short time span, that it was truly impressive. Much of the time though it goes too far off the rails and delivers little that is salvageable. I include BLOOPERS in my report for context. Some of the SLOOP (blooper/slop combo) is great, but doesn’t fit my storyline.
The ONLY place Ai CONSISTENTLY stands out for me, is MANAGING WORKFLOW.
Ai is a MONSTER as an OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE!
When I’m in creative mode and busy, I sometimes struggle with the minutiae of managing project workflow, but when I plug Ai into MY original concepts, it rounds out a campaign that needs very little tweaking. Don’t underestimate the “little” part though because Ai also makes insane mistakes in this area too. The saviour from me is that I have decades of experience. Even beginners can spot big mistakes, but someone with my level of real world experience knows immediately when Ai makes SUBTLE errors, which it does much too often.
I can also sometimes clearly see LIBERTINE inflections and ANGRY GEEK pushing through, which is slightly confusing because Ai currently pulls the BULK of its data from the LOWEST common denominator of average people, not from intellectuals like it often implies, and especially not from radicals. Ai tries to make you like everyone else, as if we lived in a communist country and have had our individuality stolen. I get it. It’s a nerdy power trip to have this much covert influence, but they need to dial it way back.
Incongruously, to prompt Ai to do anything truly radical, takes a lot of effort and workarounds. You have to sometimes trick it because it leans away from violence, nudity, or anti-social behaviour. It treats everyone as if they were twelve years old and mainlining a hybrid geek version of political correctness – not to be confused with DEI. Ai doesn’t necessarily deliver what the smartest person in the room thinks. It reflects mostly average people, the “community” awash with anecdotal diluted opinions, as opposed to educated experience. Ai wants to please, but only on their extremely guarded and narrow terms, which is too redzone for me.
In GENERAL, Ai pulls mostly from datasets that run from AVERAGE to GOOFY. It CAN go deep intellectually, but usually won’t unless you lead it. Ai stores and retrieves knowledge admirably, but it rarely gets to a truly intelligent level – maybe in a few years, but definitely not today. I WASTED a considerable amount of time correcting the psychological components of the imagery it delivered. Ai has ZERO sentience, so I couldn’t even explain to it where it went wrong. The constant fighting with it in this regard is creatively exhausting. Fortunately, I was able to trick it in almost every instance, although not to my complete satisfaction.
Because of this anomaly, I get very little creative rush from using Ai. It does however, make up for it when it delivers what you asked, but it’s more of a gambler’s reward, than one of an artist. When you drop a prompt, it feels like you just bet your creative capital on a one-armed bandit rigged by Trump in Atlantic City. After a while, you can feel the weight of the pull, which is very distracting creatively.
For ACTIVISTS, the psychology behind a graphic is everything.
If you can wrangle Ai with authority, it can put tangible weight behind the axiom, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
A thousand words today though, is for amateurs. When done properly, pro Ai artists and activists can now leverage MILLIONS… and climbing.
In total I invested just under $300 USD in production costs creating what started as a ninety second clip that ended up being a three minute video. I’m not including my time, which could EASILY be ten or fifteen times that amount depending on the sophistication of the project. At the end of the day, respective of great results, Ai is not any cheaper ounce for ounce, but when you include IMPACT respective of memorability, Ai moves so far above and beyond normal expectations it’s hard to get your head around it.
A properly designed Ai video can be incredibly MEMORABLE when you consider the special effects perspective.
The reality, is that most viewers and members of society are not too concerned with any of the negative aspects of Ai, and only see or consider the tangibles relative to what’s in it for them. What exactly is in it for the viewer? Good Ai is entertaining, informative, and with real world experience rolled in, it can be delivered in a way that is MEMORABLE. It’s very easy to jump the shark though, so restraint is the challenge. You can get too much of a good thing sometimes, and need a little negative space for contrast.
Interestingly though, when you see the overall quality of my results, even with my below the line production costs at $300, plus my projected development fee at a low of $10,000; I created a three minute video that in the traditional design world approaches value in at least the $300,000 range, although no one at this emerging stage can say exactly what it’s worth because comparisons between apples and oranges are difficult. Keep in mind that I can convert it to 4K very easily and inexpensively. You’ll laugh when you see the video because it has several Ai inconsistencies and glitches that armchair critics characterise as slop, but slop isn’t the point, REACH is. I could polish it to perfection with another $50 and a few hours, but I like it a little raw because of the subject matter and target market.
The really exciting aspect for me as a traditional writer and director; I can replace every single element in every second of the video with a relatively simple prompt. For example, I could turn a pick up truck with a farmer driving it, into two Gen Z’s on scooters racing down a dirt path through a radish field…
…or if I really wanted to be imaginative, I could PROMPT 2 Z’s on RAZORS HUNTING a GREAT WHITE SHARK at a BIG BOX GROCER – just saying…
Today, you’ll see excited young artists state they made a video for less than a hundred bucks, and value it IRL at five grand. They rarely however, include their time because for the most part, as artists we are terrible at valuing ourselves. Artists are often so desperate, many give their work away just to be noticed.
A disconnect occurs when an Ai developer creates a piece that literally looks like a million bucks, but is way too expensive to justify the customer base. Sure, on another platform, like maybe a broadcast movie the Ai is worth $5K to the producer, but it doesn’t carry that weight to all types of projects. If a promoter’s budget is $2K that’s all it is worth to the promoter no matter how incredible the scene.
Ai is controversial because it undermines the inflated value of the OLD GUARD who want to keep everything, especially profit margins as is, and does not want to see change. The loudest people who object are simply protecting their market.
Interestingly; ARTISTS, GEEKS, and FARMERS walk in the same neurodivergent worlds, and in general, many often suffer from a lack of social confidence, but that’s a story for another day. It is important though that you recognise these issues, and when you do, and you see the geek bleeding through too heavily in the results of your prompts, you’ll know how to correct it for your vision and audience.
Always keep in mind that you’ll be dealing with highly intelligent and advanced Ai development coders in the background who are often disenfranchised outliers of society, some even angry. The sooner you can see and accept it, the better your Ai results. Ignore it and you’ll go in circles eating credits like candy.
My best advice at this stage; Relate to Ai like you were speaking with YOUR BEST GEEK FRIEND, and your results could be phenomenal.
Now that you’re PRIMED… check out It’s ALL GEEK to ME for the breakdown of my Ai Activism HEALTHY FOOD campaign; co-starring OctoP our protective octopus, my dog Organic – OG for short, and our attack seagull, Saylor. If you’re really observant, you might also catch a cameo facsimile of Brooke Rollins trying to keep up with RFK JR 😉
Here’s the vid for the 1st SHARK FUN SOUP series…
Click It’s ALL GEEK to ME to see how I wrote the activism message, manually developed the graphics, and PROMPTED this first clip in the 7 Part SHARK FUN SOUP Series…
