I can’t draw, but pencil me and my AI in for next year’s Riverfest art contest | Opinion
I’ve never started a column with a disclaimer before, but there’s a first time for everything, so here goes:
I can’t draw. And the only thing I could ever paint was a house.
The only grade I ever got in art class was a “C,” which was about as low as you could go if you actually showed up and looked semi-awake. Even today, I’d struggle to do a paint-by-number picture if I ever were to attempt one, which I have absolutely no interest in doing.
But I can’t wait until next year, when I’ll have the opportunity to enter the Wichita River Festival’s poster art contest and maybe win $4,000.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the brouhaha ignited by festival officials picking a poster design that was largely generated through the miracle of Artificial Intelligence.
The design consists of a frog on a lily pad, with a collar and tie, blowing bubbles from a briar pipe like the one my Uncle Bud used to smoke. The frog’s also wearing a cowboy hat with the logo from the Wichita flag, and the Keeper of the Plains is reflected off two of the three lenses on the frog’s sunglasses.
From posts I read on Facebook, the three eyes on the frog were apparently a significant “tell” that the image originated with AI. I don’t know enough about art to known why that is.
But knowing what I know about the source and quality of Arkansas River water (less said about that the better), a three-eyed frog is well within potential outcomes. It brought to mind the three-eyed fish in the river behind the Springfield Nuclear Plant in “The Simpsons.” As Mr. Burns would say, “It’s evolution.”
Dave Allen, the artist who created the poster, explained online how he did it:
1. Used Adobe Firefly to generate the basis of the frog character.
2. Used digital graphic design and illustrator tools Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to create the concept and design of the poster, including the tie and bubble pipe.
3. Incorporated the Wichita logo on the hat.
4. Purchased stock photography of the bubbles then designed and placed them in the poster.
5. Created the sky and skyline in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop from a personal photo.
6. Created the fireworks in Adobe Illustrator.
I asked Chat GPT, the text equivalent of Adobe Firefly AI, to write an opinion column about the River Festival controversy. Here’s its conclusion:
“As we tread the waters of technological innovation, we must carefully navigate the delicate balance between tradition and progress, ensuring that AI serves as a complement to human creativity rather than a substitute. The future of art lies in our ability to embrace both the organic and the artificial, creating a rich tapestry that reflects the diverse and dynamic nature of our collective imagination.”
It’s generic, boring, sterile and soulless word salad, telling us nothing meaningful about the state of the arts in Wichita, Kansas, 2023. If I’d gotten that passage from an intern, I’d suggest they’d be better off studying HVAC repair.
As I said, I don’t know much about art. But I do know cars, so I’m going to draw a car analogy.
In my driveway sits a Dodge Stealth. It’s one of those “wasp-waisted” sports cars that were popular in the 1990s, so it’s pretty sporty looking as-is.
But I could replace the stock banana spoiler with a variable-pitch rear wing, install some aftermarket fender flares and an air dam, put in LED underlights and add a hood scoop and some stick-on stripes.
That’d make the car look hotter, but I wouldn’t enter it in a car-design contest. Because I didn’t design the car, I’d merely be taking things that others designed and bodging them together.
That’s what AI is. It can’t create, it can only sample from (millions of) existing expressions of human creativity and recombine what already exists into something that pretends to be fresh and meaningful, but isn’t.
As an experiment, I typed the phrase “Michelangelo’s David noodling for catfish in Wichita” into Adobe Firefly. The result is the picture above.
Why the program drew David with fins instead of feet, and why he has what appears to be a giant lamprey eel clinging to his back, I have no idea.
But if I can just figure out a way to Photoshop Century II and the River Vista Apartments into the background, and brighten up the fish’s third eye, I think I’ve got a poster contest winner.
As I write this, angry artists who spent hours conceiving, drawing and painting their entries this year are calling on Riverfest to ban AI-generated art from its future poster contests.
To Riverfest, I say please don’t.
With no artistic talent to speak of, and without AI, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
