I was recently asked by The Milken Review if I would be interested in producing a piece titled, "Computer Chess and the Future of Artificial Intelligence" - a story about chess and how AI is now dominant within the game.
To make the images more relevant I was asked if I could collaborate with AI to create the art. The irony of which was quite appealing. The brief was essentially to depict the opposing forces of artificial intelligence vs that of humanity within a chess/board setting.
Interesting process! To those unfamiliar with using AI to make pictures, let me just say that the technology has now reached the point of being extraordinary good at producing high quality imagery with minimal input from the user. What it is not so good at however is delivering anything with the more specific requirements of a conceptual image. Accordingly many images were generated before I could find anything that I considered even partially usable.
The creation process itself is actually very nuanced, much more involved than the current media view would have you believe, and I often found myself thinking how much more straightforward it would be to simply make my own illustrations! Having said all that, the tech did come up with things I would never have thought of and opened up different approaches to how the images could work. Eventually the illustrations developed almost collage-like so these end results are actually a blend of many generations - specifically a blend of the man-made in tandem with the machine-made.
