AI Art, Part 2: It's actually kinda neat

17 Nov, 2025

For some reason it's been way harder for me to write this second part. It's taken me like two or three drafts, all of which have felt like they've gone on too many tangents, because my feelings on AI art are just hard to explain. It's hard to explain how it works and why I love it and hate it at the same time. But I'm going to try. I still think I ramble a bit too much, and I'm not sure I get my point across like I want to, but I just need to get this out there.

Androids dream of electric... stuff

Describing AI art as surreal seems pretty uncontroversial. I want to point out, though, that "surreal" has a bit of a different meaning than it used to. Today, people tend to use it for anything that looks or feels weird or dreamlike. In the art world at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was more specific than that:

Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

-- André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

That last part of Breton's definition--"Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation"--that's what I thought I was getting from AI art when I first got into it, around 2020 or 2021. I thought AI art was a fascinating look into a true outsider's (i.e., a non-human's) perspective on human creation.

The way I understood it, AI made art in a similar way to our brains creating dreams. Maybe the metaphor introduced to me by DeepDream got stuck in my head for too long, but I do think that "dreaming" is a more accurate metaphor for what AI is doing than "thinking" is. It regurgitates what it has been shown in an order which makes some kind of sense (i.e., it looks like something and not random pixels), but not enough to seem like waking life. Again, it is the creation of images outside of any sense of reason, aesthetics, or morality:¹ truly images for images' sake. And I think that same basic principle applies whether you're talking about literal images or written imagery.

We had some great times

The height of my interest in AI art was around 2021. Not coincidentally, I was really into Radio TV Solutions (RTVS) at the time.² They're probably best known for producing Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-aware (which, ironically, did not involve AI), but they also had an excellent series of AI Dungeon videos (which did involve AI).

I was obsessed with these. I made a shrine to AI Dungeon (WARNING: lots of gifs and autoplay music!) on my first website. I played AI Dungeon on my own and with friends. I even made some "fanfiction" about my characters with it.

I haven't played AI Dungeon in a long time, and it's probably different now, but back then it felt similar to working with a complex oracle. If you're not into solo tabletop RPGs, oracles are usually what you use as a replacement for a game master. When you're stuck in your story, you roll a die and consult a table and interpret the response you get in order to continue. AI Dungeon was an oracle that could answer in complete sentences and could pull from previous story context. You took turns with it adding sentences, and you could re-roll sentences that were too out of left field.

I usually liked the weird responses, though. Stories quickly became very gonzo if you let them.³ You'd end up with responses that seemed in line with the genre but not at all consistent in tone, or vice versa. You could lead the AI in certain directions to flanderize a particular element of the story. Random characters would appear out of nowhere at times, only to never be seen again. Characters you had never met before would become the crux of the whole narrative. It was genuinely like roleplaying within a dream.

I also played around with some visual tools, though I forget the names of them. I kept some of the outputs. For context: I have this fictional world called Tempest, in which reality sometimes mixes with what is essentially a physical manifestation of the collective unconscious. Describing it like that makes it seem way more serious than it is; it's mostly goofs and gags in a post-apocalyptic theme park, and it only sometimes gets serious. But the worldbuilding gave me reason to want surreal portraits of my characters. Here are my favorites:

And here's a drawing I did of one of the moments from the AI "fanfiction", because I think it's silly:

So what's the point?

I actually think AI could be a good tool for creating interesting art. It's just that most of the people who produce and market AI seem to think that art begins and ends with the product. There's very little, if any, consideration for AI as a medium or a process.

"You tell it what to make and it makes it." It doesn't. It makes an approximation of what you told it based on the countless number of images it has been fed, as well as the directions it has been steered by corporate interests. We essentially have on our hands the collective unconscious of marketable media. That's really cool! But nobody thinks of it like that. It just makes what you tell it, and that's all.

I am probably not the first to think of AI art as something similar to the invention of the camera. It is revolutionizing image creation. But like the camera, there are boring ways to use it and interesting ways to use it. You can take for granted the ability to capture the world "as it is", or you can experiment with lenses and the chemical process of printing light onto a surface. It's up to you.

Notes

#media #personal #philosophy #philosophy/art #technology #technology/artificial_intelligence