STEAL THIS: Handmade Art
This was not made by AI
STEAL THIS
This will be short1. Promise. Mostly. I’ll try. I’ll probably rant a bunch and then go back and remove most of it.
I just watched Will Smith eat spaghetti. He’s gotten a lot better about it. I won’t link to it because AI doesn’t need more likes or whatever, but you can find it. And I just checked in on Adobe Creative Chicxulub2 and found it progressing nicely— soon all businesses can just eliminate the art director, copywriter, studio artist, photographer, filmmakers, set crew…. and on and on. Even the influencer is on the hit list. You feed Adobe’s AI your marketing drivel, and it spits out images, copy, headlines, videos, animations, brand stories, instagram posts, yadda yadda yadda.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER, YOU OLD MAN YELLING AT CLOUDS?
Well, because I’ve always believe that the CRAFT matters. Set aside “Art” vs art. Craft is the pride in job well done. In knowing how to achieve the best results from your tools. In creating something that expresses your creative goal through the making of that thing. AI can’t do craft. By definition. By the fact that, outside of a singularity event, all AI does is mimic. It’s a good mimic, and it’s getting better, and lots of people will decide to give their money to AI. But it can’t do craft, because it has no intention.
But wait, you say, what if an Artist uses AI? HAHA got you! Sure. You totally did. And Richard Prince is a real artist and not a conman. Look: know your enemy, right? I had a Midjourney subscription for a while. It was fun. And creepy. And if you want to smear Studio Ghibli all over pictures of your dog or whatever, go for it. Indulge.
And in the right context, AI is super useful stuff. I use it in image retouching. I use it DaVinci Resolve to remove ambient noise from audio. My friend the Neurosurgeon uses it to mine datasets to help her do cutting edge research. When AI is used as a tool, when it’s under the strict guidance of an artist/researcher/scientist/etc and the AI itself is not the end goal, it’s good stuff. It’s a good tool. I’m not anti-tech.3
It’s when the “end user” starts mistaking the tool for the artist that I have a problem.
YOU DIDN’T REALLY ANSWER MY QUESTION
Fair. I guess this matters in this context because I was working on my Kickstarter and hit their official, Did You Use AI to Make This section. And have been thinking on that. All my ART is hand drawn. I use digital tools like Pro Create and Adobe Illustrator4 to make it. All the copy is my own. The mechanics are my own. But I’ve used ChatGPT (gasp!) to help brainstorm some ideas, I’ve fed it my rulesbook to ask it to check for inconsistencies, and to clean up the grammar. I tried to get it build a massive spreadsheet to do some analysis of the cards and their relationships — it failed, but spent about 14 hours swearing it was almost done. I’ve been using it as a tool, and not treating it as a creator.
So I am trying to own this, not tell a lie, and figure out how to talk about it. And at the same time, I spot AI used in the wild constantly, from AI Slop articles appearing in Real Newspapers, to AI images used in online ads (as if there are any other kinds anymore), to Grok spouting white supremacist nonsense — I guess I hope that people do care. That all of this weird effed up push to turn AI into the creator/artist/writer will blow up, that AI will return to being a tool. I mean, Djinn’s go back in the bottle right? As long as you don’t get tricked. You can, if you take time, put toothpaste back into the tube. Counterpoint: Cats didn’t want to be in that bag in the first place, so screw that.
TIME FOR THREE ARTS
The Dark Knight of the Soul is an Irish Dry Stout. She’s a bit melancholy, but is quite the warrior, and takes her fights seriously. Dry Irish Stout — of course we’re talking about Guinness, the mothership of Dry Stouts. My friend Dan once put up an Art Show at the Bug Jar, and his payment was unlimited pitchers of Guinness. I don’t think they understood how much Guinness we could drink. We def. tried to drink it all. It was a very very woozy walk home that night.
She’s riding Richmond, the Goth Horse. Richmond’s hair reminds me of someone… can’t quite put my finger on it tho5. His name tho, is from one of my favorite Goth’s of all time — locked in the basement, away from all sources of natural light, as is the Goth’s true habitat. I was never Goth, but was frequently Goth-Adjacent. The CURE was my first exposure to the genre and it pried my mind open for all types of music. Thank you to the guy I worked landscaping with whose name I don’t remember, but for the sake of a good story I’m going to assume was Rich. He lent me his stack of CURE vinyl which I listened to and duped onto cassette so I could blast The Head On the Door over a shitty car stereo on the way to my landscaping job. Those were the days.
She is bringing Stoutbringer into battle — to quote the BeerKnightIpedia:
Stoutbringer is a magic sword featured in a number of beer related fantasy stories. It’s described as a huge, black sword covered with strange brewnic runes, created by the forces of Dark Beer Magic. The sword has a will of its own and it is hinted that the sword may be controlled by an inhabiting entity.6
I read voraciously as a Young. And the Fantasy Genre was a different place back then. Every once in a while, you’d bump into something Strange and Weird that jumped so far off the well worn tracks of Tolkein’s Hobbits and Elves or Anne McCaffery’s Dragons — for me Elric of Melniboné was an important Weird. The stories of Elric were twisty and bizarre, frequently psychedelic and hard to parse. Which made them stick.7 Elric’s best friend and enemy was his sword Stormbringer, which was just sad and not triumphant. It was a weapon unlike any other fantasy weapon. It wasn’t Sting, or Excalibur. It was moody AF. It was as likely to turn on Elric as it was to help him. So when I needed a weapon appropriate for the forces of Dark (Beer) I had my goto all set.
STEAL THIS
To wrap up, I read a thing that said people engage with you if you tell them to “Steal this ____” . Have you engaged yet? Hmmmmm. OK…. not sure what to do with that answer. What if I gave you a CTA? That’s the way the military says Call To Action8 - fancy right?
When I officially put the Kickstarter into pre-launch phase I need my supporters to go sign up for the Kickstarter PreLaunch Notification. In order to get my KPN numbers up I need a STRONG EMAIL LIST. Kickstarter breaks down with Pareto’s Principle — 80% of my backers will come from my list and 20% will come from Kickstarter. If I don’t have a strong list coming in — say at least 500 people, preferably 1000 — there’s a good chance the KS will fail to launch. Which will be a bummer.
Call To Action: Steal this post, and send it to two friends and ask them to sign up. According the folklore, if that keeps happening I’ll have everyone in the world backing Beer Knight. Or at least 2 more than I had before this email.
OK> Thanks Fans!
Beermeister in Chief, BeerKnight Batt Out!!!9
Sorry Greg, it’s as short as I could make it. I even went back up and removed at least 3 or 4 words.
Hi Greg.
if they are currently a Cloud on our horizon, what they are proposing is gonna be the equivalent of a “dinosaur killer” asteroid impact on the creative community. Gallows humor ya’ll.
But wow. Companies are trying very hard to turn me into a neo-luddite. Google and Adobe just announced massive price increases so that they can give me AI I didn’t ask for, and have no option to not use. AI slop is everywhere and it’s getting worse.
But really considering switching to Affinity Designer. See #3.
Come on. You know whose hair this is. Bonus points for you.
Parody and Satire. Not plagiarism. I totally stole this from the wiki on one of my old School favorites, Micheal Moorcock’s Stormbringer.
Shout out to my best buddy Gestalt Theory! I may not remember a lot from all those liberal arts college classes, but this one is locked in.
It’s totally not.
Some of ya’ll can’t get enough of these footnotes can you? I know my tribe. We are the ones that follow the footnotes, hoping they will learn some kind of dark secrets. Here’s one: if you back the game at a high level, I’ll draw a custom card. You tell me your favorite beer and I’ll create a new Knight, and you can help me name it. No, you don’t get full naming privileges. I won’t be creating Beery McBeerface, or The Knight of Dick Butt Boobs.
Love this - "It’s when the “end user” starts mistaking the tool for the artist that I have a problem."