JOURNAL OF NULL

9 times out of 10, a deep boredom washes over me when someone mentions “oh yeah I use ai in my process”. Kinda like car dudes who don’t really do much of their own work, they just have a shiny car. Possession is not as interesting. There’s not much else for me to say. The shitbox with the dubious diy hydraulics has an actual story to contribute. To me, at least.

I feel similarly when someone has a LLM generate info on their work for them [artist statements, art commentary, bios, so on]. With rare exception: if you are trying to communicate your unique vision, or talk about yourself and your experiences, doesn’t it seem ill-fitting to have ai do that? Shouldn’t your voice be the one that does that? Or is that agency, and that responsibility, vulnerability, too much to exercise?

I’m rough drafting my write-up on a recent painting, and getting started outlining [organizing?] the notes and commentary for the next piece I will be working on soon. My prose is jank, my grammar brandishes the ‘Bama education I got. Not wholly proud of it, but the idea of handing over my ‘voice’ to a machine to do that writing for me? Feels cowardly.

The other frustration is the distrust in others that grows in me; is this work I’m seeing legit or a product of a slop machine pretending to be anything else? Are these little errors marks of a being or of [insert modern generator here]? Am I and others around me jumping the gun on our assessment out of fear of being fooled, or is it grounded? How do I prove my own legitimacy when the finger is pointed at me? A new kind of impostor syndrome brews while I lay strokes on wood board.

—

Like a lot of other art folk right now, I’ve been spending more time with physical media. Ink is a staple for sketching and drawing, acrylics are my choice for pieces I want to render more fully, when I got something I really want to mull on. I think the pressure to not waste expensive materials compels that.

While I don’t think the works I’ve made using Krita can’t do the same, the very tactile nature of working with a physical medium is particularly grounding, as is the tangibility of seeing a physical object made by another being in the physical world is. Done right, it commands a dialog between viewer and piece and artist more firmly, I think.

The situation has me appreciate the “amateur” attempts as artmaking more so. Maybe in the face of this growing skepticism, when I do find those with a similar freak about this stuff, the connection made is stronger. Feels more important than it did in times prior.