AI Syrian Art: A Stream of Thoughts

 

Looking at an AI image I generated with a help of a one-word prompt
Through the discord channel during my free-trial period at Midjourney.

Syria

(An image of a warm-coloured painting of a crowd surrounded by a destroyed city)

Many running thoughts and feelings through the last months came by thinking about that result:

• Surprised: to witness the edge of human technology.
• Inspired: by how accessible visual art is going to become, even for people who have not had the opportunity to learn the skills they longed for since childhood. As we are witnessing the age of democratising the arts. Each person no matter their skill level can finally bring their stories and imaginations to life.
• Excited: for all the people who were due circumstances, couldn't access their imagination. Not only thinking of Syrians like me, who were pushed to not pursue art (we say it in Arabic: Art it will not feed you bread). I am also thinking here about the aphantasia people, who for the first time in their life accessed the visual part of their brain. As well as people whose health or financial issues led them to stop their art journey.
• Awe: reflecting on how AI works. The resulting images are the synthesis of human creativity all over the world (and throughout human history!). We can almost say, that every generated image, is in a way, a manifestation of this collective unconscious, as described by Jung while referring to dream symbols that is similar across civilisations. Our intimate dreams are now a collective reality.
• Sad: the resulting image of Syria, tells me, how the internet content related to my home country is heavily entangled with the recent war. That was just about 10 years of time. But the Syrian visual culture is much much richer than that. Where is the Damascus house, the Islamic ornamentation, the roman artefacts, the textile, the orthodox churches, iron works, food, clothes, TV shows, and the traditional dance “Dabkeh” should have been, for me at least as a Syrian, the first generated image. But we reduced ourselves to a political word, that is even censored by DALLE 2.
• Dumb: It totally makes sense that Syrian content that is written in English is the only source of images that AI is trained in. We haven't got the chance to pitch in our visions, as the slowest internet came for the first time in Syria mid-2000s. And we post mostly exclusively in Arabic.
• Empathy: of the possible change of livelihood for living artists. Making it harder for those who spent years of their life honing one skill that could possibly go obsolete with time. As someone who works in a somewhat stable job (construction). I feel sorry for people who need to relearn how to earn money. Money (in life-sustaining necessary amounts) should be easy, you just sell your time for others. I have huge empathy for those who should keep themselves on their toes their whole careers.
• Sceptic: Is this the end of everything that is original? Will we reach a point where the digital art landscape is just a monotone of AI images? And looking back at the result of the image of Syria: Are we ruminating the same stereotypes about other non-dominant cultures?
• With today's developments, I feel that the future artist has no chance of introducing anything new that takes time and research. The integration of AI in the art process (AI-assisted Art) is going to limit the originality of ideas that usually comes from everyday life encounters or extensive research of a subject (that is learned from books, historic documents, interviews with the elderly, etc.).

Thank you anyway for reading my thoughts, they are just a stream of ideas. I am new to this world of visual art and I expect to be short-sighted concerning the art industry and AI.