I am not comfortable with AI. As a writer, it feels like the push, push, push by corporate America to embrace this not-very-new toy feels forced. We still don’t know what we should and shouldn’t do with this powerful tool, and yet it’s being leaned on for everything now. AI isn’t new; it’s been around, in lesser forms, for ages, but now it is becoming the gorilla in every boardroom. Worst of all, it’s being used to replace creatives, who, among other things, bring a human touch to projects.
AI is a tool.
But it can’t be used to replace who we are and what we do as humans.
Like CGI in films, it works best when it’s in the service of what human hands create, but not when it takes center stage as the main act.
Last year, I began fooling around with ChatGPT, making silly fake movie posters for movies I was making up out of weird ideas I had. I started with wordplay, then moved to mash-ups, then adapted a novel of mine to the pseudo-screen, then imagined a world where my silly Bigfoot movie ideas saw the light of day. I present to you the end results of these tests: what the platform can do and the silliness I could think up. (PS, dang ChatGPT, why is everyone so White?)
None of this is to say that AI should be relied on to take the place of artists, as is happening a lot, but as an exercise, and for my own amusement, it was pretty fun. And truly, creating a fake movie poster based on one of my books was addicting. I LOOOOVED it.
ALL images were created via ChatGPT with prompts from me.
