While there’s a rush to embrace the new reality of text-to-image and text-to-video AI, many are deathly afraid of these new AI-driven technologies. I discovered this when I peddled my AI “artistry” on a Facebook Group for Children’s book authors.
The backlash from those “digital and traditional artists” in the group was fast and furious. “Oh, then you’re a cheat and a thief, I guess,” was one comment. “So you think that ‘typing’ makes you an artist, huh?!” came another retort. Few of them took the time to learn that I am an artist/designer of 33 years, having started in the days of paste-up and stat cameras; I have made millions developing traditional and digital art, and I have been the CEO of a world-recognized branding and design agency of over 20 years.
To these misguided and misinformed creative-craft workers, weak-kneed at how the rise in AI tech would steal their jobs, I was simply a “hack.”
Most of them weren’t even around to recognize the last time this happened.
Many “traditional” digital artists were attacked by “traditional” painters 30+ years ago, as the personal computer arose and new digital artistic offerings like Aldus Freehand and Adobe Illustrator 88 landed on the scene to the fear and speculation of the “real” art world. These “digital” artists now claim that AI isn’t “real art.” It’s ironic.
The question to ask ourselves today is not “Is AI ‘real’ art,” but “Is the keyboard becoming the new paintbrush?”
Art requires tools to complete. The tools utilized to create art have accelerated as technology advanced. From rocks scratched on stone tablets to fingers smearing thick, indelible liquids onto walls in caves, to paint brushes spread on cowhides, to airbrushes blown on canvases, t-shirts, and the sides of vans, to the mouse gliding effortlessly across our digital screens… is the next technological progression, the Keyboard? Will words and the specific sequencing of those words create imagery generating a new epochal transcendence in art?
It very well could, for the five reasons I will share below. But first, let’s look at why this may become the case. It was Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, that addressed AI in the following manner:
“What all of us have to do is to make sure we are using AI in a way that is for the benefit of humanity, not to the detriment of humanity.” — Tim Cook.
What needs to be determined is how and if AI art benefits humanity. As I found out on that Facebook Group, there are certainly those who claim that AI is a detriment. AI is cheating. But so would have been said 30+ years ago with the trad artists vs. the upcoming digital designers. Technology continues to propel forward, and the output morphs and advances.
Burying one’s head in the sand or decrying the inauthentic nature of new technology doesn’t negate its reality. And, soon, its dominance. Having moved from Traditional Artist to Digital Artist to AI artist, one thing has remained central: the “artist” part. I have not sold out to a more accessible tech but assimilated a new creative tech into my skill set quiver of artistic arrows. Arrows I can shoot based on whatever creative need arises.
This is the empathetic way to look at new tech and these new formulations of art: to understand their place in the world and the past through which they came forth. Digital artists, scared of losing their jobs, won’t lose their market share because of AI. As the axiom holds:
“AI might not take your job, but someone who KNOWS how to use AI just might.”
Consider this in terms of historical change. For example, the traditional painter, now equipped with airbrush technologies in the late nineteen seventies and eighties (although the first airbrush was designed in 1876!), could “paint” onto the metal side panels of vans, trans ams, and El Caminos across the urban landscape, turning automobiles into mobile works of art and making serious coin in the process.
The acrylic painter could have complained that the airbrush artist wasn’t “true to painterly form.” But they couldn’t have slapped paint on the side panel of a VW Bettle or the front of a Hanes Beefy T t-shirt and expected it to stick to the metal or cotton substrate either. The tech opened up new avenues of application and revenue streams.
The greatest artists and inventors pivoted to embrace the technologies around them, advancing their skill sets and increasing their coffers as new avenues opened. For the rest of this article, I will describe WHY the Keyboard is becoming the new paintbrush and why YOU should embrace it personally.
Nearly anything imagined in the mind and typed on the Keyboard can be created through AI art. From breakout scientific diagrams to logo designs, architectural illustrations, and straight-up magazine-quality fashion photography, the only limitations for their development are your level of thought.
As a designer, illustrator, and photographer, I can “hand” render a scientific diagram, complete a logo, sketch a modern-looking lamp, and shoot a model in a museum. Still, those four projects would take hundreds of hours to complete before AI.
Let’s look at the museum model shoot. First, I would have to secure the model, pour through hundreds of headshots to find the suitable model, and then scout the correct locale and space in that building. Then, there is the time to travel to the shoot, the lighting package needed, the choice of the camera needed for the shoot, the time to secure the permits from the museum, and the time in post-editing. This is a huge time drain.
Or, I could do this.
I could make this AI generation even more realistic with more time and some of my specialized techniques (click here for my course), but you get the picture. What took 5 minutes in thought and render time would have taken over a week (or more) in prep, shoot, and post.
This opens the artist to many opportunities, even additional time working on traditional art projects. In my Branding Agency last year, I planned on hiring four additional people to handle the expanding client work level mid-year. After discovering AI and learning how to perfect it, especially in the photo-realism arena, I didn’t need those four new employees and still doubled the workload at the end of the year.
Do I do everything in AI? Of course not, but I now have the skill sets of AI combined with my traditional and digital talents to produce what few can produce in each field alone. This is why my agency, Pure Fusion Media, is one of the top 250 branding agencies in the world, according to Clutch.co.
One thing should be glaringly apparent, both in the museum shoot analogy and the increase in workload in my agency: I’ve saved and made a lot of money because of AI. The speed and ease of AI allow me to stretch far beyond my current abilities, time, and resources.
In the museum shoot, I would have saved the cost of the camera(s), the lighting package, the model, the permits, the rental of the space, etc. And that is just one project in a host of other work that hits my office weekly.
The speed and cost savings of AI artistry allow individuals to complete projects that require more time or money than is available from traditional artistic means.
This is an insight that those on that Children’s book Facebook group are going to have to resolve or get swept up in the technological tsunami.
In the past, the rise in new technologies allowed would-be creatives the opportunity to enter the marketplace and claim themselves as “designers.” It was a predominantly lateral move. But AI opens up vertical moves for a much broader swathe of individuals.
I am not merely a designer, but the author of six books. I’ve completed most everything I’ve put my mind to, but there was one thing I failed to complete. My children’s book. I wrote the story twenty years ago. It was never produced because a children’s book isn’t merely story — but illustration as well.
Not wanting to shell out the costs for an illustrator with enough skill to produce commercial viable art (probably around 5–10K in illustration fees), I sat on the project for years. Cost was a stop gap. But on January first of this year, I woke up and designed all of the art for the book (20 panels) in just under 8 hours. I wrote about it in this article:
davidwlitwin.medium.com
Bottom line, no matter how hard I could have tried the creative technologies available to me, I would never have created this level of artistic dynamism on my own.
It took my keyboard to get me there.
This is the same for numerous other applications, from medical diagrams, to inventive sketches, to cookbook imagery. People who simply don’t have the rare skillsets to produce the commercial or professional quality visuals, artistry, or photography, no matter how hard they try, are given access to an entirely new world of endless opportunities. It’s a vertical move, across domains. That makes AI special and specialized.
Like other forms of creative tools, the keyboard isn’t merely a guarantee of AI visual success. This isn’t easy, and AI is not a respecter of people. AI doesn’t simply create what you want. You must master it, study the prompt formulas, develop your strategies, and use numerous additions such as VARY (REGION), AR, SREF, CHAOS, and other options.
It reminds me of one of the top lines from one of my favorite movies, Ratatouille.
“Not everyone can become a great chef, but a great chef can come from anywhere.” — Anton Ego in Ratatouille
AI isn’t merely typing in a few words on a screen, expecting spectacular results. You must craft words like an artist, creating an emotional response to your text before it is ever generated.
A myriad of components make up the most effective forms of art and imagery. Like a child who can pick up a crayon and create a stick figure and an art prodigy who can melt the crayons down into a softer form and craft a dimensional masterpiece, there are vast differences between the outcomes of each usage of the same “tools.”
Here’s a great resource to delve into some of those “masters.”
As much as we appreciate great art, we can flatline our neurological reaction to visuals over time. As we become more accustomed to certain forms of art, our brains regulate the physiological impact. Remember the first time you saw a Harding or Banksy? Or, for others, it might have been a DaVinci painting or Donatello sculpture. It was a raw and honest emotive moment. Eventually, we don’t have the same reaction.
Like illicit drugs or porn, we often face what C.S. Lewis called “The law of diminishing returns.”
Though each of these artists carries masterful skills, their style was limited to their incredible brain power, God-given talents, and tools available at the time. At no other moment have we had the ability to combine multiple creative styles and artistic techniques to create visuals that have never manifested on humanity.
That level of “newness” creates a new visceral experience in our hearts and minds, especially if we can’t tell it was designed in AI. This ties back into Reason #4, which is that not all AI artists can create this level of physiological response.
But some can.
They transcend the tech and the tools, create visual keyboard-based masterpieces few can replicate. Most of these AI “artists” already have creative understanding; they can “see” the text like Cypher could see “blondes, brunettes and redheads” in the coded Matrix. They use the keyboard like a paintbrush, in a synergy between the tool and the tech.
That is its own form of mastery.
Will it ever replace the shock to senses that is the Sistine Chapel? To quote scripture, “may it never be!” Regardless, the uniqueness of the AI generations allows us the opportunity to pause and viscerally appreciate.
AI, pending short-sided legislative restriction or an EMP from space that wipes out all technology, is here to stay. And the keyboard has the capacity to become the new paintbrush as the creative “tool” can:
Save inordinate amounts of time and money
Open up vertical moves across disparate domains
Create new creative “masters” and mastery
And evoke visceral responses at new levels
Those hoping AI goes away will be swept up in the tsunami. You can’t duck dive under this tech. But those that embrace the keyboard as another creative tool in an ever-expanding toolbox may ride the wave to new and broad artistic and financial opportunities. If you too want to be a surfer of this tech check out some of my other stories, where I teach you how to master AI, and look into my course for hands-on practical strategies that came out of hundreds of hours of study and application.
Because, for this technology, and the tools that go with it (like the keyboard), I’m not simply riding the waves.
I’m selling surfboards.