24-11-04 (1): Garden of Electoral Delights (AI + illo) -- Overview

Below are links to my prompts and process notes on how this got made and of course the original Bosch.

Last week I was invited to a show at White Box and they asked for AI work. I've spent decades working AI, mostly NLP, and I use it for work now at NASA so I was glad to have a chance to push the concept of Endgame out of professional borders (while still respecting the Hatch Act on election day).

All that disclaimer to the side, there's lots of discussion related to Generative AI about how Artists-should-this and AI-shouldnt-that but at the bottom is the spectre of a time when cameras went mainstream and people also said photography wasn't art. Those were usually the discount artists that were selling portraits as a livlihood because they were most threatened by the tech. Some painters flipped the bird to the camera (and we got Impressionism and more), other painters just became photographers and meanwhile printers, platemakers and other people all panicked and chewed their nails.

I won't make grandiose statements on AI art, but I will point out some processes I used and that like photography : illustration there's a different process in making AI art.

Making an illustration starts with that fateful, first difficult line, and once that is made the other lines respond and reply and some lines come and others are taken off until the illustration is an orchestra of replies.

GenAI loses the difficulty of the first line, and overclocks the concept so that, like a photograph, there's less decision-making and refinement along the way.

I'm working on a large project and I'll come back to this later.

The Prompts are here.

The Process and other notes are here.

And just to jog your jug, here's Bosch's original work.