The artist Charlie Engman is one of the few photographers who have leaned into the alien logic of the new machine age and found a way to make something that feels new.
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Engman as an A.I. artist is dizzyingly prolific. “The amazing thing about A.I. is that I can make, like, three hundred pictures a day,” he told me, “And every single one of them can be an entirely different set of characters, and new location, and new material. I’m not constrained by physical reality at all.”
We need a better way to describe AI artwork than “photography.” It is a collage where each element is, at the same time, bespoke and not under your control. It is a new medium. Our conversations will improve once we acknowledge it as such.
In this context, it is clear that the artistic tools used to create within this new medium are painfully immature. Engman’s “characters” are fleeting apparitions. Any minute tweak to your seed number, token choice, or model architecture, and they are gone forever.
We should be able to recompose a frame, resituate characters in a different environment, give them a haircut, and change their wardrobe, pose, and expression. Characters should have a history. Maybe one is afraid of heights. That should be remembered next time you pose them crossing a mountain overpass. The ways that characters relate to each other and their environment should have a consistent logic while continuing to allow for surprising choices on the part of the model.
Technologies such as ControlNet could begin to help here, but they are still early and only accessible to those with a technical background.
Or maybe this is all the wrong attitude to take. Maybe treating AI artwork as a new medium means embracing a certain loss of control.
It is too early to say.