Grumpy bunnies make me nervous.
I’ve spent the better part of the last six months asking the dumbest questions. By that, I mean I’ve been “prompt engineering” as the kids say. I’ve signed up for and tried any shiny new AI toy I could find. I’ve spent countless hours in Discord chats running synonyms and parameters through diffusion engines and general-purpose transformers. I’ve systematically tried every app that could convincingly produce an AI-like experience. In that time I’ve rewritten reports in iambic pentameter or the style of Ernest Hemingway and I’ve asked MidJourney to give form to every crazy machination in my mind. I’ve spent hours making scripts for various AI-generated voices to play crafted audio directly in my ears. I’ve become obsessed in the way I was when I got my first copy of Photoshop 2.5 in 1992, like the people in Wim Wender’s ‘Until the End of the World’ addicted to watching their own dreams. I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole in the same way I did with the smartphone and apps. All of it is amazing and beautiful and satisfying to curiosity in a way that makes the process pretty fulfilling. But it sucks.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen
I love Davis Suchet’s reading of the New International Version of the Bible. The recording lives on my phone; I listen to it all the time. I’ve come to love little quirks in his speech and pronunciation that once bothered me. Out of curiosity, I trained a voice AI with the recording of Mr. Suchet’s reading of the Bible and had that trained AI voice reread the NIV Bible just as it had been taught. The resulting audio is, basically, the same recording done with complete perfection, relative to David Suchet. Having been stripped of any minuscule stumble and all moments where the tongue was slightly misplaced the recording is perfect in every way, and a chore to listen to. I struggle to distinguish the two recordings but one is clearly perfect and one is clearly better. The exercise has shown me the brackish waters where Art lives but hasn’t shown me how to get there.
The other night I spent several hours using MidJourney to illustrate a concept my wife and I have been working on. I had made a little quirk and used the phrase ‘grumpy bunny’ in passing and my wife had latched on to that phrase as the perfect name for a corporate holding company for me. I took that as a starting point to have MidJourney develop some concept art for the new corporate logo. I started with the prompt “a grumpy bunny in the style of a corporate logo.” It was a prosaic start to a fun experiment and generated hundreds of logos and generic corporate art. It was fun having a (simulated) team of artists competing to please me in seconds. But every one of the resulting images has flaws that have been blown way out of proportion. Take a look at the featured image for this post. One grumpy bunny, just as asked. But take a look at the ears, for example, how many can you count? I was so seduced by this image that I didn’t even notice the five obvious ears. I’ve probably always wanted to be an art director for my own ‘zine. Somewhere deep in my psyche is a punk rock Anna Wintour just begging to get out. But I worry about a world where amazing is available on tap. I think that some of the magic of creation is in the work involved with polishing out your mistakes.
AI is producing amazing things right now. It’s amazing because it isn’t human. It’s novel and beautiful and technically perfect, but what it isn’t is human. There’s no recognition of mistakes there’s no serendipity, and the discovery is all in the final piece. It’s polished without the polishing. There’s no work there and that is ultimately frustrating. When an artist tries something and comes up short it is the trying that’s most important. As a human, you can usually see what the artist was aiming for and clearly define where the work falls short. That is exactly what the AI is missing… all the striving, the work. It’s the striving that makes the difference. You see it and you hear it and you miss it when it is gone. Because in the striving you, as a person, can relate to another human being and relate to the struggle of bringing form to an idea. Which is ultimately what we are here to do.
We are about to be hit with a flood. A hard rain of the perfectly mediocre is coming. I worry that the open web will be swept away in the generative flood of work that isn’t work. There will be a time in the next few years when everything visual is assumed to be fake and anything written is probably fallacious. What will we do when ten million art directors flood the world with hundreds of millions of on-demand artworks that required no work and demand no action? How will we deal with a world where all text is suspect and nothing can be assumed to be true? Where do we do our research if any question asked to a computer will generate a convincing answer, that might be true… or might not. The whole thing makes me a grumpy bunny.
Grumpy bunnies as generated by MidJourney in the style of a corporate logo.
