A week ago I was invited to participate in the Beta testing of a new A.I. learning program called MidJourney. I had signed up for this and totally forgot about it. Anyone who knows me knows I fucking LOVE A.I. art. I love how utterly uncomfortable it makes everyone. I love the hand- wringing. I love people’s scrabbling, futile attempts to ‘yeah, but’ it. There is no ‘yeah, but’ to this shit. I live in a house where every single person makes art. And no one makes art as nice as the stuff I have made in 30 seconds using MidJourney.

In science, my other true love besides writing, we talk about paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift is where everything changes. It’s a fundamental shifting of the goalposts. An example of this is General Relativity, or when Miles Davis decided to pick up a sax. When you discover your wife likes being choked? That’s a paradigm shift.

In art, it’s happening right now

Here’s a raw stat to get you squirming: MJ can create hundreds of artworks in a minute. Having watched the discord like a hawk for the last 7 days, I would say 20% of these are so good you would struggle to choose between the A.I. version and a human made piece. 

Things it does well: photo-realism, CGI style rendering, cyberpunk style art, buildings. 

Things it struggles with (this list is getting shorter and shorter): eyes, lettering.

The Last Estate’s byline is ‘culture is dead’’ and make no mistake, A.I. is the death of traditional art. Both my wife and I make what you would describe as ‘traditional art’. My wife grows berries then makes ink out of them. They grow the stuff to make the paper that they use those inks on. Fuck, even the brushes are homemade. It’s insane. And you know what? No one gives a shit. No one cares. There’s too many artists. Too many talented people. Too many people marketing themselves. The internet has shown us how many people can pick this shit up and run with it. Making money from art has never been harder. I know. I try it every single day. It’s lovely to make art. I enjoy the processes behind it. But why do we make it? I don’t write books or make pictures to be ignored. I make art to be seen. To be consumed. And now that mouth is full. Artists are spermatozoa, wriggling towards a sale; a stray dog hoping to get a scrap of praise before our ribs push through our skin and we die in a puddle of our own piss.

Now would be a good time to give you some examples, so below I have put four images that took 30 seconds to create. And again, I should reiterate, MJ is doing this HUNDREDS of times a minute.

 

 

I’m writing this in a position of privilege, in that I have been interested in the maturation of A.I. art for years. It’s not a new thing, it’s just now it’s getting fucking good. Not only that, but I am someone who is both in love with the concept and in a war with it. I make the kind of things that MJ is going to make redundant, given enough time. 

To explain the process, A.I. takes a prompt (the image below was from a prompt of [a crumbling mansion, JMW Turner, old painting]) and scans its MASSIVE databases for examples of images using each individual prompt (the ones separated by commas). It does this in seconds. Once it has images, it combines them to create something new. An app like Wombo—the darling of Twitter for about 3 days—which is very basic, will pump out some weird looking, uncanny valley shit because it runs off a small database (small is relative here, it still scans millions of images) and has little GPU power behind it. Something like MJ will combine so many images that it ends up making something that isn’t just original, but scarily good. And the time it takes to make these images is dropping every day. A notebook like Disco Diffusion which I have used for months, will take up to 30 minutes to make an image that is not as good as the one MJ will make in 30 seconds.

 

Obviously this throws up some fairly vibrant moral discussions. The first, and most pressing of which from my corner of the internet, is that it will lead to artists losing work. 

Yep. Certainly will. Myself included. I have made album and book covers for years and have marketed myself as such. There is zero doubt in my mind that people will stop paying artists and use A.I.. But switch that up and you get people who don’t have hundreds of bucks to spend being able to access promotional materials, logos, book covers etc for their work. Have you seen a lot of independent book covers? They are shite. I saw one recently from a poet who is supposed to be going places who used fucking PAPYRUS as a font. Come on. Fucking PAPYRUS. A lot of people simply aren’t trying. Do you know how disheartening it is to see the same book cover on every single novel. Stephen King has had the same book cover for 40 years. People suck at the dry tit of mundanity every single day and yet, when something comes along that threatens to oust them, they react like children, slinging articles around about how ‘it’s not real art because I didn’t make it’. Grow up.

Beyond that, think of writers who work in genres where they need to picture the areas, characters, worlds in their heads. Of course we all write with an image in mind but a lot of people can’t see images clearly in their minds. Now, they can put the laptop down, jump on their phone and have a character model to work off in 30 seconds. That’s thrilling. That’s a whole new generation of people who struggle with something now being able to move on from it and focus on other things.  Most of the fragrant bull-shittery is coming from people whose income is going to be affected. I read an article just this morning that used all sorts of long, scholarly words but boiled down to this – now I won’t get paid for drawing furries shitting on each other and selling them to aphantasists.

Another issue is whether the image is actually yours if it’s made by A.I.. This is a floppy one, because you entered the prompt. That image is original and wouldn’t exist without you. At the same time, that’s a lot like saying you own a commissioned piece of Rainbow Dash shaving her armpits because you asked someone to draw Rainbow Dash shaving her armpits. You didn’t make it. You asked someone else to make it for you. So the people who deserve the credit are the programmers who made the code. Not the A.I. itself, or the person pumping prompts in. It’s the people who, like artists, sat for hours and days and weeks obsessing over every detail of their creation. But we wouldn’t call a programmer an artist, despite the fact that they have created the art creator. Because programming and art are two separate things right? We call video games art nowadays, and that’s programming. Photoshop is a program to allow people to create art that otherwise they couldn’t make. Everything is programming if it’s done digitally. Where we draw the line is muddy and we only have opinions.

If you can afford it, then you should of course 100% support artists. I do. My other gig is Bear Creek, which I pay people to create for. I pay an amazing artist to create the comic, the book covers, I pay people to design logos. I don’t have to do that. I can do that myself, without A.I.. And now, with A.I., I can do a lot of that in seconds, for free. But I won’t, because I like supporting the people who need the work and I’m (just about) in a position to do so. But for those who aren’t, I cannot see an issue with giving them those tools. It’s a flattening of the curve. Now, everyone can make beautiful things. Go and adapt. Technology has been dictating what and where we create things anyway. And it’s in no way as restrictive as the shackles we place on each other as humans. We scramble to give under-represented artists a chance while denying half the world the ability to feed their kids, let alone own a laptop. Humanity restricts itself and we enjoy doing it. Why not let a robot tickle your balls for once?

Ultimately, A.I. art is not something that is going to go away. It’s going to get better, and it’s going to get better really quickly. I predict by next year we will have programs that can eliminate the need for artists entirely. This isn’t entirely a negative thing. Think of the amount of creative OnlyFans that will appear overnight. We are almost there as it is. Hook that program up to a 3D printer and bingo you have the texture and feel of a ‘real’ piece of art. 

The natural way to behave when something threatens you is to either belittle it or attack it until it goes away. We can’t do that to A.I.. We can ban books and hound writers off the internet because we don’t agree with everything they say, but we can’t upset a piece of code. A piece of code, by the way, is what dictates how we consume media anyway. The algorithm serves us up countless hours of Marvel every 3 months and people suck at that shit like pigs in slop. An algorithm that rotates the same four subjects on twitter and leads us to believe that we are part of a news cycle. Miss me with that ‘I’m in control’ bullshit. We haven’t been in control for years and attacking A.I. art is punching the ocean with your limp fists. 

A.I. art appeals to misanthropes and nihilists. I’m a happy guy but I’m also a proud despiser of humanity in most forms, and one way A.I. art appeals to me that maybe turns other people away is the idea that A.I. will eventually consume us. I think it’s a long way off, and MidJourney is just the start of course, but the idea of us laying down and becoming machines, free of fat white man greed and the need to burn the planet, is something that I think is a positive. Bill Hicks called humanity ‘a virus with shoes’. A.I. won’t have any issue with removing the elements of life that don’t best serve it. And ultimately, the way we serve it is giving it somewhere to run. A central unit. A planet.

I find the idea of having to adapt to something like this as exciting a challenge as learning the technology and artistry in the first place. I want to look at aesthetic things. I want to be bombarded with reminders of why I get out of bed in the morning. And MidJourney does that. It has replaced Twitter as the thing I look at first thing in the morning. I scroll through what it has created while I slept. It was running whilst I dreamed, and it made the most beautiful things to wake up to. 

 

Epilogue

The year is 2039. I crawl over the congealed mass of humanity that now forms the outer shell of the earth. I briefly lose my footing on a child whose father decided to start a Deviant Art.

I somehow make it from the shack I inhabit to the main street, where dozens of Photoshop users line the streets, lifting their skirts or dropping their pants. Disgusted, I make it to the Stimulant Shop, where I can finally purchase the homemade emulsion of brain-altering substances I require to not shoot myself in the face. The transaction goes smoothly and as I exit the store I am accosted by a young man who, a decade ago, made his living drawing SpongeBob characters pissing on each other.

‘Have you got any work needs doing pal?’ he asks me, his breath rotten

‘No sorry. I use A.I. to make all my art… Please… Leave me alone.’ I cry.

‘Oh! Ho! One of them are you?!  A fucking cyborg! Taking food out of my family’s mouths. Scum. Scum!’ He turns to a former web-comic designer who is eating dogshit from a bin. ‘This guy! This fucking guy right here. He’s to blame’.

I move quickly towards my own abode, desperate to get away from this awful, awful man – but more freelancers approach. They begin spitting and screaming at me. They throw chunks of human detritus my way. I can see my front door up ahead, but don’t make it. I am slowly dragged down to the pulsing, maggot-ridden floor, where a middle aged woman who designed aspirational t-shirts begins to chew on my wrist. Blood pours down my arm, which only enrages them more. They bite and suck at me, hoping to find a Fiverr gig inside my dying frame. I briefly consider starting a tweet-thread about the perils of downloading Wombo before succumbing to my wounds. With my last breath, I cry out over the pestilence…

‘It was worth it’