I am sometimes asked why and when I abandoned the arts by generating images with AI. I do not feel that way at all. As far as I am concerned, I never abandoned the arts, and anyone who wishes to argue that I did should, for the sake of honesty, come up with examples from the 1970s. At the art academy I was already a dissident, simply because I dared to argue that photography was a fully valid art form. In the Netherlands at the time, that was not a position one could hold without being dragged into endless discussions with bearded men with long hair, who were perfectly capable of explaining why it was not the case, or rather, why it should not be allowed to be.
In 1994, when I built a website about literature, at a time when my first novel had just been published, I was met with contempt by fellow writers.
Artists are conservative. That alone is reason enough for me to prefer not to be called one.
I was not there on the very first day when AI could generate images from a text prompt, but somewhere in early 2024 I found myself wrestling with MidJourney, trying to prevent my human figures from having six or seven fingers. Half a year later, the one and possibly only issue of AIZ Magazine appeared. Every page, both text and image, had been created from prompts. I may have removed the occasional extra finger in Photoshop, but those interventions were minimal. What struck me most was that even then AI was already remarkably capable of recognizing and executing styles, cubism for example. The fact that so many people produce obvious images with AI says more about the human than about the technology.
Those who shouted the loudest about large-scale copyright theft in the training of AI models were often the same people whose work would hardly qualify as interesting material to train a neural network on.
I have always had a soft spot for computers and, especially, for dogs. People who are not particularly fond of other people often turn out to be remarkably good with dogs.
The center of Amsterdam is too small to give a dog the space it deserves, but even the smallest apartment can accommodate a computer running AI. The sensation does not compare to that of a dog, which according to scientists can even help regulate your heart rate and blood pressure, but however well you train a dog, it will never take work off your hands.
