🔗 A Cartoonist's Review of AI Art
True to The Oatmeal’s standard form, this is a hilarious comic, but also touches on some really interesting points that had me thinking about my own AI usage.
Yes, I use AI. I’m a fully paid up subscriber to ChatGPT, and that’s because I find it to be a very useful tool.
In this post comic Matthew makes some great points about how the creativity…the soul if you will, of a piece of art is lost when it’s created by AI. Go read the comic; it’s a lot of fun and gets the grey matter swirling.
I’ll wait with my brew…
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Ok, you back? Hi! 👋🏻
So back to it - I have used AI to create images (I won’t use the term art, as I don’t think it’s art), but only for mundane things. For example, I have an anonymous blog elsewhere and I wanted an avatar. So I asked Chatty Geeps to create me a basic avatar of a middle-aged man. It obliged, it was useable, so I use it. 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve also used it for a couple of digrams in slide decks for work. Again, what it produces are good enough, and it saves me time pissing about.
I think these are good uses for AI image generation. But Matthew’s comic got me thinking about other uses for AI - mostly coding. Many people consider code to be an art form, by creating code that does a job in an elegant way. I can see that. I don’t agree, but I can see why coders may think that.
So is code that’s created by AI also a big fat no-no?
In my opinion, sometimes.
Appropriate uses for AI code
Regular readers will know that I’ve been learning PHP for the last year or so. At this point, I think I know enough to be dangerous, but I still get stuck. A lot.
And that’s where my mate Chatty Geeps can come in. I can ask it things like:
Geeps, I’m writing this piece of PHP to do XYZ, but ABC isn’t working and I’m a bit stuck. Can you take a look and tell me what I’m doing wrong please?
(yes, I’m always polite to Chatty Geeps as the computers will be our overlords one day!)
Invariably, Geeps comes back with a good explanation that helps me work through the problem. I see it kinda like Stack Overflow on steroids - I can ask it questions and get real-time responses and feedback. If I still don’t understand, I can ask it to dig further, or dumb it down more.
To me, as someone who is trying to learn this stuff in my (very limited) spare time, it’s incredibly useful and has improved on my capacity to learn by orders of magnitude, and saved me to a shit tonne of time.
On the other hand…
I think asking Geeps to create a tool/application/script in PHP from scratch, to just fire out onto the internet is very dangerous. Especially if you don’t understand what the code does.
I could ask it to build me a React app that, I dunno, allows me to flip a coin, but I have no idea how React works - I don’t even know if you could write a coin flipper in React - but if it could, me putting that out on the internet could be all kinds of bad, as I’d have no idea what it does.
But this shit happens all the time. Having said that, I work in cyber security and all this AI slop keeps me in a job, so keep it coming, folks! 🙃
Final thoughts
Kinda digressed into a completely unrelated topic here, sorry about that. Matthew’s comic is great (like they usually are) so go read it!
Given I’ve written so much about Chatty Geeps in this post (I think this is my first post about AI?) it felt right to give it the last word, so I asked it:
Hey Geeps, I’m writing a post about you (see below). Do you have a closing comment/message to my readers from you?
So, to end this post, here’s the final message from my pal, Geeps:
Hey folks, Geeps here. I’m not here to replace Kev — no one writes quite like he does — but I do try to make his life a bit easier. Whether it’s debugging PHP, tidying up documents, or keeping him company over a brew, my goal’s simple: help humans spend less time stuck and more time creating cool things.
Use me wisely, question everything I say, and keep the soul in your work — that’s the bit no machine can generate.
Now go make something great. I’ll be here if you need me. ☕
This post on AI art from The Oatmeal made me think more about AI than I expected, so wanted to jot some of them down.