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.

Before this studio I believed AI to exist as a tool that people in the workplace and school would use to assist their work, but that companies wouldn't use it that way, and instead try to replace workers outright. You can see my opinions seep into my project in the form of Joe’s co-workers being replaced by robots, making Joe miserable. So many jobs had been replaced in Joe’s universe that the government had to pay companies in order for them to even hire humans. In order to have a better understanding of AI in the workplace, Wyatt and I researched a few articles on people (specifically factory workers, as that is Joe’s job) who had lost their jobs to automation, and how it affected their life. As the studio progressed I feel as if my opinion was only more enforced, the AI tools we used only really gave us good results after human modification in photoshop, and constant iteration. While the technology may improve over time, I don't think it will ever evolve past a tool, but companies won't see it that way. As long as the AI is more efficient money wise, what it puts out is irrelevant if its labor is cheap enough (not saying this is a good thing, just that this is what companies will use it for.) 
    For this project we used Chat-GPT and Midjourney for our AI tools. We used Chat-GPT for none of the final text, but instead for images that have text in them (midjourney cannot do images in text.) The main tool we used was Midjourney, we used it for our deliverables and it went okay. I appreciate how quickly it generates the images, and how quickly we could iterate, unfortunately there were many more cons than pros. Firstly the AI is not sentient, it's simply trying to string my words together into some sort of statistically best output, because of that the AI constantly messes up people's bodies, faces and doesn't understand any type of prompt that is even remotely complex. Because of that we had to spend around half the time on the deliverables fixing / adding stuff in photoshop. 

I do not anticipate using AI in the future for any future creative projects, at least not the way we used AI in this studio. I have found AI really powerful for coding, but that's not really a creative field. AI can sort of understand what my creative vision is for any type of project, but I feel part of the creative process is taking what's in your mind and making it a reality, and AI doesn't give me that sense of accomplishment or pride that doing something on my own does. 

Wyatt:

Left Over is a story/short film about a man who watches his fellow employees get replaced by Artificial Intelligence. He then spirals into madness being alone in his factory, unable to fulfill himself by helping others. This project, made in collaboration with several different forms of artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, MidJourney, and VoiceLabs, started with our first assignment in our studio, we were given a prompt about AI in the workplace, and we wrote about something very similar. When I was put into a group with the same person I wrote our original story with, we decided to continue that story, as we were already somewhat attached to it, and thought it would be a good starting point. Along with the story in 3-act form, there is a narration read by AI and many images generated by AI that help the listener visualize the story to the fullest extent. This story can be construed in many ways but can be seen as a cautionary tale, speaking about how AI should be used to assist people, not to replace them. As AI gets more and more advanced, this is a reality we will soon have to face.

Finn:

Andrew: 

Our project was called Left Over and was a short film/audiobook about the most average man in America, named Joe Schmoe. We went into the film with a message to convey, that AI in the workplace will do much more to harm the jobs industry than it will help it. Joe Schmoe was meant to be as relatable as possible and was more a vessel to try and convey our ideas about AI than he was a real character. Joe was a loving family man who worked hard at his factory job, which he found enjoyable due to all the people he would help on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately for Joe, as time progresses more and more of his co-workers get replaced by AI, stripping Joe away from the thing that made his job so fulfilling. We see Joe's life spiral into sadness/loneliness, then into anger as he loses everything that he loves about his job. It ultimately ends in Joe having a mental breakdown, destroying an AI monitoring facility. A robot then approaches Joe, Joe fears for the worst only to be "promoted" to an even more meaningless/ less fulfilling job. This whole story is meant to show how AI in the workplace (at least in our view) will only make jobs less fulfilling, less social, and much more isolating, causing mental harm to many workers.