Last December, I announced the creation of the very first non-artificial-intelligence generative art model.
The “model,” which I called Prompt-Brush, consisted of a simple text box that people could use to send prompts, and me at the other end, with a stack of blank paper. The experiment started as a post on social media; I didn’t expect it to go viral. But within weeks I was receiving thousands of prompts from all around the world, written in over a dozen languages. For the past nine months, I have been drawing and delivering these images every day.
The prompts have varied widely, from deeply personal stories of relationships, loss and regret to whimsical and surreal scenarios involving animals and pop culture references. I sketch them quickly, with a paintbrush and black ink: I aim for a rapid reaction, akin to how an A.I. might respond. But because I’m a human, the process is necessarily different. For me, each prompt offers a small view into the life of the prompter, and the drawings reflect what I think a good answer might be.
I’ve found single-word prompts, such as “forgiveness,” “loneliness,” “happiness,” “longing” and “victory,” challenging because they can mean so many different things to different people. I’ve found that the most truthful way for me to respond to these is to focus on my experiences and memories. The drawing for forgiveness, for example, ended up being a bare foot being stepped on by someone wearing a shoe; I had accidentally stepped on my daughter that morning. The prompt “victory” was a drawing of a hand with a squashed mosquito on its palm — sweet revenge.
I often find myself adding a slight twist to the prompt. For the prompt “iPhone in the year 2040” I drew an iPhone being used to prop up a leg on a wobbly table. For the prompt “Me studying for my thesis while my friends go to the beach,” I drew someone studying while thinking of his friends being devoured by a shark. I’m interested in offering something unexpected that might make the recipient smile or feel understood.
There is human friction in these interactions; the mistakes that happen when drawing something quickly, the winks intended to make someone laugh or the occasions when I identify with a prompt so strongly I wind up drawing a version of myself into a scene. These all add warmth and depth to simple sketches. The goal of this project hasn’t been to make some kind of statement against A.I.: Tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are inspiring, and sure to become indispensable. Rather, it’s been an effort to find meaning in and understand the purpose of human creativity.
Thousands of people have participated in this project to have their words seen, interpreted and expressed by another human. What I produce might be along the lines of what they expected, or it might be totally different. What they’re looking for either way, I think, is the act of empathy itself — the process of interpreting someone’s words into an image is about connection and understanding. Friction is often something tech engineers aim to remove, making their software more intuitive and removing obstacles. But in a world of increasingly impressive technology that will no doubt play an ever-larger role in our lives, that friction is what we as people can still offer each other.
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