I finally got access to Dall-E 2 and the thing I like most about it is the outpainting feature. You basically take a photo and ask the AI to add to it using prompts. For this little film I used outpainting to create some very long horizontal images. I then added them to the iMovie app, where you can do something really cool with horizontal images. When you drop them in and use the “Ken Burns” effect, it automatically creates a situation where the camera seems to be panning across a scene.
Some of the clips in the movie were made with by stitching together multiple images in the procreate app. I was very excited during this phase because I realized that it was the next iteration of a process I began to think about it when I was questioning the addictive nature of AI art apps. In other words, I found something to do with all of the images I’d been making and collecting!
I’d like to make some more of these. It was a satisfying process. There are many imperfections that the AI creates that make it interesting. I suspect that at the rate AI art technology is advancing, these types of imperfections are soon going to be less common, and I think we will look back on them as a style of art that is hard to duplicate on purpose. It’s sort of a randomness of distortions that can create some compelling and strange images. Like this one:
So what is this movie about? I have no idea. But I was thinking about women looking at art that depicts other women. And somewhere there is a voyeur who is watching the women, looking at the women. I was also thinking about the randomness of when you ask the AI to create art that depicts women. What does the result say to us? It all depends on what images the AI has been trained, but I like the idea that it is some sort of synthesis, for better or for worse, of how we see ourselves. We collectively added a bunch of images to the internet over time, and this is what happens when the AI tries to derive sense from these images. We are looking at ourselves through the lens of a collective intelligence. Kind of unsettling and creepy when you think about it that way, but also kind of fascinating.