How can AI assist my art practice?

Illoguild is an International Group of Writers and Illustrators.

Each month, Illoguild answer a question together. This June we discuss the topic of AI.

It took me a long time to start online banking. I am through and through a Late Adopter, despite being an Idea Generator. The risk of this approach is that the usefulness of new tech has already been taken advantage of by all your peers and competitors by the time you pick it up. But then, I really enjoy going into the bank, even if it takes me a couple of hours round trip; incurs parking costs and the bank might even be shut. The process is pleasurable; I buy a cup of coffee and don't suffer anxiety over paying the wrong bills.

This feels like a suitable analogy for how I use traditional media and Photoshop over Procreate; have always preferred android/Windows interface and why I want to write my own material over training ChatGPT. By contrast my husband uses Apple products and hasn’t been into a bank branch in several years. The last time I asked him where my Filofax was, he told me to look in 1993. Which funnily enough, is when I bought it. My Filofax works for me whereas AI feels like the start of Terminator.

Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of this cat. One of my development areas (aka weakness) is composition. Could I use my 30 commands in BingAI chat to plan a suitable composition for my picture book?

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I started with a simple request to draw:

A smiling mermaid with long blonde hair and a pink tail, sitting on a rock and holding a starfish.

And this is what I got:

Over several iterations of description, my request read as follows:

A mermaid with scales and red hair and a pink tail, sitting on a rock covered with silver and gold starfish at the water's edge and looking up at the moon with a happy expression on her face using watercolours in pastel colours with an ocean background with coral and an island with a tropical forest in the background at night with a bright moon reflecting on the ocean

BING drew this:

I also requested the colour palette used and over the process of 3 descriptions, received both a list of pantones and this sheet of swatches:

Next, I turned my attention to the second character in my story and asked for:

A 6 year old boy walking along a sandy beach at night with a tropical rainforest behind him looking out to sea and some big rocks just off the shoreline with a mermaid sitting on a rock who is looking at the boy and waving in the style of Judith Kerr using coloured pencils and dark grey outlines

Notice, that I added a well known author and asked to emulate her style. Prior to this request, the provided images had looked like this:

Along the way I had asked with varying degrees of success to put footprints in the sand, but they were in the wrong direction; to turn the boy in a three quarter view and to add the mermaid (who was defined as a strange upside down grey fish on the rock).

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The parts of this experience which interested me are as follows:

1. The Bot didn’t know that fish live underwater and many were flying in the air. Interpretations of my requests are, at this point, entirely based on information supplied and quite literal.

2. The order of the instructions mattered. I could build a day time world and then successfully convert to night time and the shadows would be realistic.

3. Switching between watercolour, gouache and coloured pencil offered entirely different compositions.

4. By request 28 the Bot got confused and said it didn’t want to play anymore, surely I understood it is still learning and it was time for a new topic. (unnerving!)

Presumably the use of compositions which have been generated solely by your own commands are legitimate to recreate in traditional media but as soon as you enter the element of named artists, it encroaches intellectual property.

I will be interested to understand Government policies which are laid in the future, to protect individuals and organisations.

Have you tried to use AI in your own creative practice yet? If you enjoyed reading this account of using AI, let me know and I will share what happened when I asked AI to write a story plot and character descriptions.