Eryk Salvaggio compares the process of creating with generative AI to creative play inside of a video game:
Video games create systems that shape the way we play them. AI art interfaces create structures that allow us to play. These interfaces offer genuine delight and curiosity. But like video games, this delight and curiosity is bounded by invisible mechanics, which ultimately shape the desires that we bring into them.
It is possible to create genuinely interesting things within the constraints of a video game. You are, however, still limited by what the game designers originally intended — you can’t do anything fundamentally new because everything you do must first be programmed into the game itself.
Because of these limitations, Salaggio argues that artists need to completely reimagine their relationship with AI tools just as Cory Arcangel did when he hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to remove everything other than the clouds.
How we do move our relationship, as artists using DALLE2, away from consuming its choices, and into producing work — to steer this relationship away from machine dominance and toward our own desires? In other words: how do we begin to make our own games, rather than playing somebody else’s?
The most exciting possibilities for creating AI art are not in the nuance or fascinating minutiae of prompt engineering. The potential of AI art is yet to be realized. It will come about as artists learn to pull away from the call-and-response of the prompt window and its prizes.
When we defend tools like DALLE2 as if the raw product is an artistic expression of the one who types the prompt, we sacrifice some of that criticality in negotiating the lines between personal expression and technologically mediated desire. The prompt is an idea, but the image — the expression of that idea — is left to the machine.
Let’s embrace these outputs as a source of further play, not the end point.
Midjourney, which was, until very recently, built on top of the open source Stable Diffusion model, has an intentionally distinct style that is consistent across all of the images it produces. This is a deliberate choice the Midjourney developers made because it is a differentiator: the reason you would pay for Midjourney instead of using a free alternative is because you want the unique, proprietary style that Midjourney offers.
This might serve another purpose too. An AI image generator that has a recognizable “house style” is obviously not a neutral medium. It is not simply an unbiased extension of the artist but a tool with constraints, not fully under your control.