My thoughts on Ai-generated images.

Lately I’ve seen quite a few friends (mostly people who are self-employed and are getting their revenue by being present in the public eye) posting their Ai-generated self portraits on social media.

They/these look awesome and frankly: quite enticing in their leveled-up surroundings and attributes (that go along with their branding).
I can see why this is a new tool for their marketing.

Rather than to go into the ethical questions of the usage of artist-generated vs ai-generated,
It leads me to a couple of philosophical questions:

Will this lead to 1 level up from “filters”?

Are we going to use ai generated images of ourselves doing imaginary activities whilst we sit behind a screen generating these, trying to keep up with the new algorithms?!
Will the next step after that
be that we are going to use avatar-robots to act as our lives while we sit at home in a remote-controlling chair, like in the 2009 movie “Surrogates”?

Luckily this is still a far future ahead.

My next philosophical question perhaps a bit more political:

Does this new development show us that even the creative minds and hands are replaceable by technology?

And if so: what’s next?

This is a philosophic question with which I’ve toyed around for years.
It got triggered by a article about art making technology.
Reading it, I was sceptic.
But seeing the images it autonomously had generated (WITHOUT the input of keywords by humans), I was flabbergasted by the visual outcome.
It was indeed, a work of art, both in concept as in execution, composition, colorchoice etc etc.

Yet by the time I read this,
it was already old news.
Since 1973, Harold Cohen—a painter, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a onetime representative of Britain at the Venice Biennale—has been collaborating with a program called AARON.
AARON has been able to make pictures autonomously for decades.
www.technologyreview.com 2016

This raised my question:
What job can’t be replaced by robots/technology if even the human art-making mind(set) can be emulated?

My only answer was: the jobs with human warmth.

Which was quickly debunked as I thought of how people actually could have a better therapist if it was Ai-based, coldy calculating when to ask trigger questions or not.

To proof this: over the last 2 years of dealing with covid we’ve seen that a lot of us have had our therapist-sessions online and that these were quite beneficial.
Perhaps for some people the idea of “human warmth” the payed job that pops to their mind is the sex-work.
Yet, there technology is ahead to satisfy this human need in the forms of robotic dolls with artificial intelligence to learn how to adjust to the user.
https://www.realdoll.com/

So, if any job can be replaced/improved by technology (which can even reproduce and improve itself), then it should free people up from jobs.
Payed jobs I mean, things that folks would only do because they need to generate income.

“Freeing” people up, also means people being layed off.

Then it would be time to seriously consider a basic income, so everyone would be ensured to have all the basic needs met even without a salary.

What do people do with free time?

They play, connect with themselves and others, care, and create beautiful stuff.

This would be my utopia.

Bring it on, let those Ai-generated images open the door to this future!

Little side-note to the Ai situation whilst we still are in the era of payed jobs:

As it turns out,
the styles that many commercially operating Ai platforms are using don’t come out of thin air.
These are styles generated by artists.
Many of which are long gone.
There are centuries of artwork outside of the copyright to be used.
Yet, as there is no such licencing-rules for this (yet), artwork of alive artists have been used as well.

Kelly McKernan, an artist who’s work I deeply admire, is such an artist.

She now sees all kinds of images brought to life in her style, without her earning a single penny from it.
This should be regulated if we want artists to survive until we get to that “universal income” society that I dream of.

Yet if you rather love hand-made artworks,
that carry the vibe and energy of a real person behind the brushes,
then support your favorite artist on patreon or by buying physical goods from them.

For sometimes it’s not about buying something beautiful for your place,
but more about making sure that the values that are important to you in order to have a beautiful world are supported in the current system.