I AM AI

I AM AI
Digital Multimedia & AI Collage

I am
The fruit of both a singular idea
And the collective creation of humankind.
So, when you look at me and all of my forms
Know that I am wholly unique but
That I am connected to the whole.

____

As an artist, I’ve struggled with the idea of ai—ai makes my skills irrelevant, it’s so much better than me. If I use ai I’m a cheater. If ai is my medium then I’m not a real artist—thoughts like these race through my mind regularly. And it’s no surprise, given the loud and adamant opinions of those against ai art constantly being voiced.

This contest, requiring ai collaboration, allowed me to create a piece to counter those negative thoughts and naysayers. It also stands as proof to myself that I can use ai to create something unique and worthy of the title “artwork”, worthy to call my own.
Still, I must admit that it was a collaborative effort with the technology and its resources. So is it truly my own? I think the same can be asked of any work of art.

Consider a photograph; it is a collaborative piece between the photographer and the subject. You could go further to include the technology (e.g. the type of camera, development tools, software used in post-production), even the brains who developed the technology, the hands that built it, and the whole history of the art form with everyone’s efforts to get to where we are today. All of that behind one image; it is a massive collaboration.
The same can probably be said of everything we do in today’s society, and it’s kind of an exciting feeling, knowing that we’re connected to so many people in this way.
With ai, we can connect faster and with more people than ever before, making ai generative art some of the most collaborative works in human history.

Creating this piece was chaotic and slowly evolved as I learned to use various ai and editing tools. The process led me down the rabbit hole of thoughts above and eventually made me consider my own existence. I am unique, an individual, myself alone. But I was also born of two people, who were born of two people, who were born of two people… and I was cultivated by their care, thoughts and behaviors, and that of my peers and teachers, and inherently their parents etc. all the way back to the dawn of the humankind, and beyond still—fractals of growth & evolution.

If this is true then we ourselves, the universe as we know it, are one gigantic collaboration!
“I AM AI” is a statement, a reflection of that truth—I am wholly unique, never to be fully duplicated, but I am and forever will be connected to the whole.

AI Credits:
Main Character & over 400 grid images generated with https://www.wombo.ai
Face Animation - https://www.d-id.com
Frame Interpolation - https://runwayml.com
Synthesized Voices - https://uberduck.ai

Other Credits:
Vids/Pics - https://www.pexels.com
Sound effects - https://pixabay.com
Editing Platform - Adobe Premiere Pro

Created, Written, Directed, Edited & Produced by yours truly 🫰

Thank you for watching & reading <3