My views on AI were, and continue to be uncharitable. Creativity is a language onto itself- a way for people to tell stories, have fun, feel something, or just because they felt like doing something in the moment. Artistic jobs aren't usually pursued to make money, they're pursued to fulfill the individual or team that's making art. Automizing unfulfilling busy-work jobs that people pursue solely for good pay is one thing -ignoring how many people it leaves out of jobs, that is - but automizing human interaction, human creativity, human storytelling is a misunderstanding and diminishing of what is important to us.

Not only is artistic AI pursuits harmful, it also yields poor quality "art". It takes years to learn composition, human anatomy, visual storytelling, color theory, a steady hand and many, many other skills artists perusing a career tend to learn. When mashing and splicing together several human works of art that implement these things to varying success, the AI isn't truly learning these skills. Only some common trends in the art pieces. This means it's output commonly makes mistakes- lighting that doesn't make sense, poor color theory, multiple fingers on a hand. It reminds me a lot of fast fashion, in pursuit to follow trends, companies make low quality but quickly assembled clothing that ends up in landfills. In personal protest, I began thrifting and making my own clothing, via sewing and crochet. I can't help but relate the quality of AI's "art". And just like fast fashion, I'm now trying to find ways to screw over the AI's learning models.

I tried to minimize my use of AI for this project, trying only to use it when prompted to, or to see if the AI could genuinely put out something of good quality. I found that usually it couldn't produce anything that was satisfactory to me. I feel conflicted still about contributing monetarily to Midjourny and ChatGPT 4... I think the text output I got for our story usually formulaic, and boring. The art usually didn't have a good idea of what we we're asking of it. We figured out it didn't know how to make unattractive people, without making them old or a caricature.

I can't imagine any way's I'd personally use AI in my own creative process. If I want to see how my piece could be different or get feedback, I'll likely go to friends or teachers for help. I think AI is currently best at producing things beneficial for story boarding- since they're decent at still images, but I normally find the composition to be dis-satisfactory. I just find that I have other ways to improve my process that don't involve AI- and most of my solutions involve talking to other humans! Which is amazing. The social aspect of art making is important to me, and I don't wish to replace it with a machine.