a eye

artificial sweetener is not nearly as good as sugar…

…and artificial intelligence isn’t nearly as good as the real thing, either.

(now the title should make sense for any grammar inclined folk who want to correct me and point out proper english would be “AN eye”, not “A eye”…)

but we live in a “fake it till you make it” kinda place, which is turning into a “fuck it, just fake it” kinda place. enter “mar-a-lago face”, for instance:

(on the left the before, on the right the after)

talk about “chopped and filled”. here it texas we prefer…

but never mind that now.

the point is, the artificial will never replace the real thing. not in quality, not in substance, not in results. period. i recently “shopped” a design to a shop i’ve never done graphics for. i’m only asking for shirts for me & nikki for the “art fee”, which they’re amazed by, but both the artists there AND the owner asked me the same thing when i presented my design…

“is this AI?!?”

that’s just sad. i’ve only had two “artistic encounters” with the AI thing, and both were me batting cleanup for an artist that tried to use it. in the words of many a tattooer, your mind’s art process for making tattooable art versus making graphic art are typically not the same. so while a tattooer might rock at making art on skin, the stuff he puts on his business card might kinda suck. same with other graphic shit for a shop (shirts, stickers, koozies, convention banners, etc) and that’s where i’ve stepped in on more than one occasion.

from what i’ve been able to gather, one of the similarities between AI art programming and an actual artist is both seem to have a line where they’re done making edits and what you see is just what you’re gonna get or you can kick rocks. so when i say i “bat cleanup” i mean a tattooer friend tried to design a shirt or business card, tried to use chat gpt or whatever, and after a certain amount of “edits” the software just stopped adjusting the image and kept kicking out the same lackluster result.

that’s when i got a text.

i then get screen shots sent over, a paragraph or two of what was trying to be accomplished, and i drop it into adobe and make it happen. i then send back the result, with no price point attached, and get some dough shot my way via venmo or whatever the fuck. i later get a free shirt or sticker (never did get a copy of the card i had to edit, but it was pretty minimal work so i’m not too pissed about it) and we move on. but is the aforementioned “chat…” an app or a website? i honestly have no clue and don’t care.

on the upside, nobody who reads this will ever have any delusions as to whether or not this site is AI – you have to be a bit more fuct in the head than any pile of chips and such to come up with some of the ideas contained herein. but i’ll be curious to see how much of this goes foreign based – while everyone seems to love toying around with AI, nobody wants those loud humming water sucking power draining data centers to be in THEIR neck of the woods. but the computing power has to come from somewhere, right?

i have to agree with e – let’s see where this is in another five years. remember, at one point everyone was snatching up all the dot com shit they could because everyone just HAD to have a website. but most businesses don’t know what the fuck to do with one, so a lot are just url’s being paid for and underutilized. i remember when bars and shit were starting to develop their own apps. why? because you weren’t cool in austin if your business didn’t have an app – and now half of em are defunct because they didn’t really do anything. i think that might be were AI could lead…to a bubble burst. or skynet’s coming. maybe somewhere in the middle?