It’s been a surreal pleasure
Generative AI tools are deservedly gaining a fantastic reputation for their creative capabilities, but they’re an equally powerful weapon
Ifreely confess that playing with the generative AI image service Stable Diffusion over the past few weeks has been enormous fun. And why wouldn’t it, since I’ve been using my own computers to create images for the last 30+ years – and I’m a sucker for surrealism. You should now be sensing a “but” coming...
Perhaps (fooled you) I only enjoy this experience so much because I’m an amateur and dilettante. I don’t depend on selling images for my living; I make them for pleasure and publish them for free on social media. The fact that generative AI apps confer the ability to create professional-grade, photorealistic graphics – even to those who lack any drawing skills at all – is not a threat to my livelihood.
I chose Stable Diffusion over more popular platforms such as DALL-E, Midjourney and the rest (and there are lots of them) because it’s free, doesn’t lure you into subscribing, and is very simple: you type in text descriptions and save images you like from its stream of results. That suits me because I’m not intending to create a manga comic or an animated movie. Indeed, the restrictions are the point: I save the most outlandishly “wrong” interpretations as instant surrealist pictures.
I tried Fotor and Midjourney, and came away traumatised. The latter is hosted on the gaming-oriented social network Discord, whose frantic user interface is the most baffling and vaguely threatening I’ve seen since I dipped a toe into 4Chan back in 2010.
Were it only a matter of using AI tools to forge Marvel-type comics or Picasso-type paintings (which they do well) then the people who need worry most are illustrators and animators, who face being put out of work by greedy publishers. But the rest of us are equally at risk from the ability to alter the appearance of reality so simply. Ever since the Trump presidency, we’ve become overfamiliar with the concept of “fake news”. Before that, we had the worrying rise of deepfakes. And for many years students have been able to plagiarise documents for their essays; now ChatGPT can write them from scratch. Generative AI gives anyone the power to depict events that never happened and objects that don’t exist with almost undetectable realism.
Generative AI gives anyone the power to depict events that never happened and objects that don’t exist
Generative AI could make post-traumatic nihilism available as a visual weapon for everybody who desperately wishes to defy reality
Wearing my political commentator’s hat, I try to keep abreast of what the far right – currently the source of the most venomous misinformation – is up to. I feel obliged to explore the bizarre conspiracies and pseudo-sciences they conjure up, from anti-vaxxing and “black goo”, through graphene oxide, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to Bill Gates’s injectable nanobots. Google these at your peril.
Such propagators of nonsense aren’t just a problem for the USA. In a recent edition of the New York
Review of Books, Vanessa Barbara described the way the far right used YouTube videos during the Brazilian election that only narrowly unseated Jair Bolsonaro (whose anti-vax policies killed 700,000, almost as many as Trump): “People who trust vaccines are called aceitacionistas (a neologism to describe people who accept things without questioning). Those of us who received Covid shots are ‘hybrids’ who have been ‘zombified’ [...] Despite exhaustive efforts from factchecking agencies and the WHO, these groups continue spreading old falsehoods claiming that Covid vaccines contain microchips, nanoparticles, graphene oxide, quantum dots and parasites activated by electromagnetic impulses. According to them, vaccines can carry HIV, make coins stick to our arms, and give us the ability to connect to Wi-Fi networks or pair with Bluetooth devices.”
You couldn’t make it up, but Midjourney can, and illustrate it with stunning visuals.
The original Surrealist movement of the 1920s was an artistic response to the horrors of World War I, which employed unnerving and illogical imagery – both literary and visual – to satirise and oppose the conventional ideas that had led to the war. It was a radical, revolutionary movement, leaning toward anarchism and communism, which depicted the darkest aspects of human nature using equally dark humour. A century later, that dark humour thoroughly permeates our current popular culture, entertainment industry and even advertising. Generative AI could make such post-traumatic nihilism available as a visual weapon for everybody who desperately wishes to defy reality, which means quite a lot of people since reality is looking increasingly grim.
Am I suggesting that AI imaging be restricted, licensed, even banned? Not at all, it can’t be done. Just as with handguns in the USA, this genie is well out of its bottle. (Memo to self: “genie with jewelled turban on copper lamp, octane render, photorealistic, style of Brueghel”.)