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Update: My AI portrait got roasted at a gallery night in Portland
I entered a piece I made with Midjourney in a small open show, and another artist pulled me aside and said, 'You didn't even make the brushstrokes, man.' I stopped submitting AI work as my own and now only use it for brainstorming thumbnails. How do you guys handle explaining the 'making' part when you use these tools?
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fionam112mo ago
Lmao, that's the exact same energy I got at a local art fair last year. I had this print from a prompt I spent forever tweaking, and this older guy just kept asking which brushes I used in Procreate. When I explained it was AI assisted, he just nodded slowly and walked away. Now I just say it's a "digital composite" and immediately start talking about my curation and editing choices, like which layers I kept or threw out. It totally shifts the talk away from who held the brush.
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andrewwilliams2mo ago
Yeah, my buddy had a similar thing happen. He was showing off this cool landscape he made with a generator, and his aunt, who paints with oils, just stared at it and asked how long he spent mixing the greens for the trees. He said he just typed 'misty pine forest', and you could see her kinda deflate. Now he calls everything a 'digital collage' and talks nonstop about his editing process in Photoshop, like which sliders he pushed. Seems to work for him.
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evan_davis26d ago
Respectfully disagree a bit here, Sean. Calling it a digital painting or composite feels like we're just dancing around the same question people have, which is how much of the actual making did we do vs the machine. I get why your buddy does it, but it seems like a lot of work just to avoid a slightly awkward conversation about how AI generators work.
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