“We are watching the death of art take place in front of our eyes. If creative jobs are no longer safe from machines, even the most highly skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have left?”, an angry tweeter wondered when he discovered that the winning work of the traditional artistic competition of the Colorado State Fair last summer had been generated... by an artificial intelligence.
The work –entitled Space Opera Theater and in which the baroque, the Gothic and the retro-futurist come together in a splendid space in which one of the characters looks through what appears to be the immense emptiness of an old church rose window– it had been submitted to the contest by a video game creator, Jason Allen. Without hiding the fact that to achieve this he had resorted to the artificial intelligence of Midjourney image generation, one of the new tools that in the last year, together with Dall-E or Stable Diffusion, have impacted the world of creation like a radiant meteorite.
Midjourney has learned thanks to huge databases of images and it is enough to insert a text into it, for example ask it to show what the eighties science fiction film Tron would be like, shot in the style of Chilean filmmaker and psychomagician Alejandro Jodorowski, to obtain impressive stills that mix both styles, such as those obtained by Canadian filmmaker Johnny Darrell. And also with the powers of Midjourney Steve Coulson, from the creative agency Campfire, has produced four comics that have already caused a lot of noise, Summer island, Exodus, The letter home or The lesson. All of them can be downloaded for free on the internet, and in which an exponential improvement is observed in a short time, which corresponds to the advances of this artificial intelligence tool.
Coulson had always wanted to create comics, but drawing was not his thing. Now with Midjourney he only has to write texts for the tool to generate images, typing styles and characteristics, for example, “a Hitchcock blonde”, which has resulted in the pages of The lesson in a protagonist who looks like Grace Kelly. Or suggesting the style of films like The Wicker Man, a 1973 horror film, or the most recent Midsommar, which bring the images of Summer Island to life.
Of course, the capabilities of artificial intelligence are enormous, but it is a work of co-creation: texts are provided to which the tool responds by suggesting images, which the artist selects, refines, perfects with photoshop and with continuous new searches. . What text is entered – the prompt – is key, and Coulson himself explains that “composing a prompt is almost like composing a haiku and watching it come to life”. And he adds that the process is full of improvisation, almost jazzy: you have to have a general idea that, as you develop it with artificial intelligence, will create surprising images and new paths with which you then have to give the story definitive life.
And all these new processes, and those that are about to arrive shortly, which will also make it possible to generate millions of films, are going to change everything, says the curator responsible for Medialab Matadero, Eduardo Castillo Vinuesa. “They are amazing tools, the beginning of a new paradigm to which we will adapt like many others. It is not as science fiction as we can imagine, we will normalize it very quickly. It will mean an important change when producing things and we will adapt, like when digital tools came out and there were cartoonists more adapted to other processes. In reality, these are co-design processes between people and external agents. Normally we had never given identity to these external agents, like the pencil or the photoshop, and now because we call it artificial intelligence yes. It is a tool, but a very big one, that will change both the way of drawing and writing”.
“As with the appearance of any technology -he acknowledges- there will be sectors that will get angry. Could it be the end of comic book artists? Well no, but many will incorporate these tools into their design processes.” And he warns that it will be a revolution -he says that both Google and open AI already have much more powerful tools than the ones they show, but that they have not yet introduced them due to their strongly disruptive nature- also for video production: "It will come sooner or later Then you can feed these language models millions of movies and say, 'Make me Titanic like David Lynch did it,' and in a matter of seconds you'll have a three-hour movie."
The capacity for cultural production, he warns, "will be faster than the capacity for consumption, something that has never happened before. Until now it took us longer to write a book than to read it, that is going to change. The next three years there will be a change huge. In fact, the video will be crazy, there will be conflicts with the deep fake, people will appear saying things that they have not said. We will ask the artificial intelligence for a video of Donald Trump in a Hawaiian shirt making a Nelson Mandela speech. It is a tool, and it can do a lot of good and bad depending on how we use it. As for whether it is art or not, art is almost a social evaluation of what art is. If there is an evaluation by society, what these tools do will be art, if not, it will not be”.
The opinions there are strongly found. Comics author David Rubín, who is currently triumphing with the graphic novel El fuego (Astiberri), says that he has not used these artificial intelligence tools like Midjourney and will not. “They promote a trivialization of art, cut and paste a lot of styles from other previous authors in a kind of mix. So far I have not seen anything that catches my attention, the more images it generates, the more banal it is. And yes, anyone can make art with artificial intelligence, but along the way you leave aside and eliminate from the equation the most important thing about art, which is the fact of stopping to think creatively about what you want and how to achieve it. That you put 'Moebius style' on it and it makes you something Moebius style takes you away from thinking about what you want to create, how, what sensation you want to convey with those images".
"It does not stop being a robot, it does not feel, it does not think, it does not value or use feelings or emotions or the previous experience acquired through life, how you are living, evolving as an artist and person, which makes your art vary and is born his own graphic calligraphy", says Rubín. That he believes that "in comics it won't do much damage, but it will in sectors such as illustration and concept art that many artists create for movies, video games", and that it is made to have an idea of what they will be like before making them.
“I have friends who like these tools, I have mixed feelings and I think they do not contribute anything. They create characters that look like corpses to me, I don't see life in their eyes, they don't convey anything. And the gasoline that moves the comics industry is getting excited about the stories and the drawings”. In this sense, he believes that what he sees as intrusiveness may be curbed by the fact that the images developed with these tools "are created by taking the work of others without permission and it is illegal to collect copyrights for that work."
On the other hand, the artist Fito Conesa, who is experimenting with Midjourney, says that “it is a tool that interests me and not even to simulate, because it is a simulation but also an interpretation. It is a possibility, and that is what interests me". "You ask for the Barcelona skyline in the style of such and the image you get is what artificial intelligence understands from the information it has about what Barcelona is. In any painting you also see an interpretation or approximation to the idea of Barcelona, the one that the artist possesses", he reflects.
And he says that "little by little you understand how you should communicate with this tool to get what you want. And how I express myself is different from how another can express. You know how to talk to her, you make a decision-making curator, you spend hours discarding images... I think it will open the way to new imaginaries. I don't think it will end anything, but with those polished and perfect images that seem highly treated, it is generating a new aesthetic”.
