Artificial Intelligence: Creative or Cringe?

 When we think of something being created, it is either by willful purpose, requiring conscious effort, or by nature, like how a seedling "knowing" how to sprout.  So what category would AI fall in? Does AI create with willful purpose? Does it use conscious effort? Of course! It's a software program. It really just creates based on preprogramed responses and algorithms. The information that AI uses comes from a database. And the database from which all that data comes from? Anything on the internet in digital form. Better yet, though, it comes from humans. Humans created the writing, the art, the music--all of it. So anything AI can "think up" really is just a collage of tiny pieces of data pulled from the buffet of digital media.  Last week, I was so excited to play around with image-creating AI. But after playing around with it, I lost my enthusiasm. AI simply cannot replace humans when it comes to writing beautiful stories or poetry, drawing or painting optical illusions, and constructing well-edited and precise informational videos. Their essays lack voice, their art lacks pizazz, and their stories are lackluster. Still, I think there's hope. AI is useful for so many things; it just needs to stay in its lane. Specifically, the robot lane, because it can never replace the multifaced multidimensional people of this Earth. 

All that being said, AI did create some interesting pieces for me this last week. I even had lots of fun doing it. I tested out Microsoft's Copilot generative AI tool. I first tried to see if it could recreate something like the works of M.C Escher. Check these out:


It wasn't doing the best job of that based on my prompting, so I switched gears and tried creating some pretty pictures. 








Then I tried creating some strange artwork, just to see if it could do it. I also wanted to see if it could create optical illusions. 








Those were just some of the things I prompted Copilot to create. It's not that these images didn't turn out interesting, because they did. It's also amazing how quickly these images are generated, but AI didn't capture the essence of my prompts in the same way I would image a person to. When I was asking it to create a canal in Amsterdam with flowers falling from the sky, it did a pretty good job. But when I asked it to add swans, it pretended to and didn't. I also asked it to change the flowers to tulips and it didn't turn out as I imagined. The attempt to make the birds turn into planes with an interlocking pattern didn't quite turn out right either. They didn't interlock, not like the Escher piece I had in mind. 

Overall, I am both impressed and unimpressed with the images created by AI. It does a better job with images that look like paintings than those with real people. So--creative or cringe? Do I really have to pick? 











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