One of the questions that arises in my mind is how we can make generative AI art an actual meaningful creative tool that does our bidding, instead of doing its own thing. The ‘slot machine’ effect is very widespread in generative AI tools, and very rarely do you get anything out that resembles the image you had in your mind as you were going in.

I believe generative AI art tools can be an ally for artists, helping us improve workflows, find new ideas and speed up creativity. The generic nature of AI art can work in our favour, as text prompts alone really can’t replace the imagination of artists. This gets to the very heart of what AI means for creativity, and how we manage its use.

Considering the way these systems are trained, it’s no wonder the results of text prompts alone are artistically poor. All of the data is basically condensed into a thick soup of visual data, linked to metadata that explains what the data depicted. Trying to give that data an interesting form through a text prompt alone, is inferior to what you can do with a brushstroke, a few coloured splotches of paint or a detailed sketch or digital painting. Even a quick 3D model says more than a hundred prompts.

I believe that we, as creatives, can steer this generative power in a much more interesting direction by utilising all our existing skills and applying a layer of generative AI where it makes sense for us. By taking a 3D scene 90% of the way, for instance, we can focus much more on storytelling, image composition, aesthetics, and design instead of spending ages in the time-sink that is the last 10% of an art piece or production. 

Do you let the generative process define the folds in the clothing of a character based on a brushstroke or two with your tablet? Or do you let a few 3D gestures define the hairstyle of a sidekick in your game with a swing of your 6 DoF VR controller while the AI takes care of the individual strands of hair?

I would much rather see passionate creatives help shape the creative tools of the future, with generative AI art in the picture, than leave it to prompt-jockeys (sorry about the pun) or corporate money people. I hope my work in this field can help inspire others to help with that.

Of course, my belief that AI art tools can help and not hinder creativity is set against the heated debate around generative AI’s impact on artists, particularly about the aspect of the training data and the issues around how many systems were trained on data from the internet without regard for copyright and without consent.

Systems like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and Sora were all trained on data that was read into the datasets from all available sources. Some argue that it’s direct theft, while others argue that the systems are learning by watching the content, just like we are when we get inspired, read a book, watch a movie, read a news article, or listen to a podcast and form opinions about the world through doing so.

Everyone from acclaimed artist Sacha Jafri to D&D illustrator Greg Rutkowski, whose name has become a style in many AI art systems, have spoken out about the issues with AI. There are also ongoing legal struggles around this very topic, lead by artists like Kelly McKernan whose name has become a prompt, losing her work. The outcome of these is yet to be seen.

Regardless of the outcome of that struggle, generative AI is here to stay. Systems like Adobe’s Firefly are trained on legally sound data (for the most part, outside of the occasional Midjourney or Stable DiffusionAI-generated image that snuck its way into the Adobe Stock library). While in the future AI art tools could be better legislated against and controlled, to protect copyrights, the actual technology is’t leaving us. The challenge, to myself and others, is to find better ways to make AI work for us, not against us.

Martin Nebelong has been experimenting with AI art to enhance his workflow, not replace it. Read his tutorial on how to use AI with Photoshop to paint live adjustments and his seven secret Photoshop AI tricks you need to know; tips for using Firefly and AI in Photoshop creatively.

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You can’t help but be caught up in the swirling tubular lines that tumble through Vickie Vainionpää’s paintings. Twisting forcefully yet gracefully, her gestures, often rendered in florid neon hues, feel at once fluidly organic and yet purpose driven. On closer inspection of the Montreal-based artist’s more recent oil on canvas works, the images of faces and bodies materialize from within the corkscrew-silhouetted translucent forms she masterfully articulates.

These glimpses of human presence reflect the painter’s source material for the pieces in her show Gaze Paintings, on until April 27 at Toronto’s Olga Korper Gallery. Here, Vainionpää reinterprets in a beguiling and modern way the male gaze cultivated by female nude-centric works by the likes of Peter Paul Rubens and Jacopo Tintoretto. The shapes she has painted have been informed by intel gathered through the use of eye movement-tracking hardware and generative 3D software, plus a plugin she wrote in collaboration with her partner, data scientist Harry Vallianos.

“I’ve always been a painter first, and I’ve always been interested in how to make a painting,” Vainionpää says about her practice. “We also live in a digitally saturated world, and I feel like it’s my duty to reflect the time that I’m living in and to use these tools in my process.”

Many creatives echo this idea, using digital tools to inform their art. Computer-crafted works are appearing in an increasing number of venues, from galleries to art fairs. Augmented reality experiences and virtual reality headsets have also become more common in art-centric spaces, such as at Shezad Dawood’s multidisciplinary exhibition on until May 5 at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum. The show boasts an immersive virtual reality (VR) component that more than one visitor can interact with at a time, making art something viewers can actively participate in as well as engage with as a viewer.

Gaze Paintings poses the question: “What does it mean to look at a painting?” Most of the pieces represent Vainionpää’s own visual journey as she viewed some of history’s most vaunted works, with her eye movements being tracked and captured by hardware made by Pupil Labs. The company’s glasses, which Vainionpää added to her artistic toolkit in 2022, have forward-facing cameras that record different data points such as cicada amplitude (how much the eye moves back and forth), fixation points and fixation duration.

The data are then imported to a computer to create a variety of different visual forms that Vainionpää uses as inspiration to create the final work she crafts with oil paints. Vainionpää also used the optical actions of over 100 volunteers who answered her call out on Instagram for works The Painter’s Studio and The Dream; their data points were collected using a webcam eye-tracking platform.

“Taking that data as a starting point is like reflecting the painting back on itself and asking questions of it,” she says, adding that she discovered consistent areas of lingering across her subjects’ gaze so far. “There’s an effort to reveal some sort of hidden logic behind every painting, which I find fascinating.”

Two new additions to Vainionpää’s series, The Judgment of Paris (Excerpt I) and (Excerpt 2), were on view at the Patrick Mikhail Gallery booth during the recent Plural art fair in Montreal. Referencing Ruben’s work, these canvases are even more colourful and hypnotic in nature.

“Technology is something that supports her talent,” says Plural’s new general director, Anie Deslauriers, when asked about Vainionpää’s oeuvre in the context of digital art. “Artists will go from integrating parts of these technologies to support what they’re trying to say through to the other end of the spectrum where artists can create an entire world.”

At the fair, the gallery Ellephant’s booth, for example, showcased multimedia artist Skawennati’s Indigenous Futurism-focused work. She’s perhaps best known for her animated videos crafted on the interactive platform Second Life.

Deslauriers notes that integrating digitally presented art into personal, corporate and institutional collections has introduced new considerations in terms of archiving. “We have to keep researching and developing different methods of preserving these works,” she says. After all, as time wears on, a new media work will be considered just as vital to the canon as one of the pieces fixated on in a painting by Vainionpää.

“I think that as a painter, you assume that people are going to look back on your work and reference it,” she says, noting that one day she hopes to capture the experience of someone looking at a piece of art in a gallery or museum setting instead of through a webcam. “You hope that it means something to people in the future.”

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Norman Lear was best known for what he created on television, but he also appreciated the kind of art you can hang on the wall and collected his fair share over the years.

Lear died in December at 101. On May 16, his wife, Lyn, is selling seven of the producer’s prime pieces of artwork at Christie’s with a total estimate of more than $50 million.

The artworks will be featured in the auction house’s evening sale of 20th-century art, with additional works offered in the postwar and contemporary art day sales and subsequent auctions.

“It will be like letting go of old friends and moving on to make new friends,” Lyn Davis Lear said in a telephone interview, adding, “Norman’s philosophy was buy what you love, don’t buy anything thinking you’re going to make a lot of money.”

Norman Lear — whose string of hits included “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times” and “Maude” — mostly collected works from the 1950s through the 1980s and was particularly drawn to artists who blossomed in California, as he did.

“This is where he really flowered and was able to express himself,” Davis Lear said. “There was freedom about being in L.A.”

The Lears built a whole wall in their former Brentwood home to accommodate their Rauschenberg spread painting, Davis Lear said. And Norman gave her a painting by Mark Rothko for her birthday 20 years ago.

As for her late husband’s memorabilia, Davis Lear said she plans to sell that in future auctions.

The Christie’s sale includes David Hockney’s “A Lawn Being Sprinkled,” estimated at $25 million to $35 million, and Ed Ruscha’s “Truth” (estimated at $7 million to $10 million) as well as works by Ellsworth Kelly and Joseph Cornell.

“There is a pretty tight, fascinating link between the pictures and artists that Norman and Lyn gravitated toward and the shows he created,” Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st-century art, Americas, said in an interview. “They’re about big ideas like truth and memory and time.”

Davis Lear said Norman particularly loved Ruscha’s “Truth,” since that was such an important theme for him. “Everything he did in television and in politics was all about finding meaning,” she said, “what was true and what wasn’t.”

Norman Lear’s early purchases were guided in large part by the producer and collector Richard Dorso, whom Davis Lear described as an “art mentor.”

“They would go around to the galleries,” she said, adding that her husband “just chose pieces that he loved.”

Also for sale is Roy Lichtenstein’s collage “I Love Liberty,” which the artist made to help support People for the American Way, Norman Lear’s liberal advocacy organization.

Davis Lear said that she looks forward to having their artwork enjoyed by others, particularly the pieces they didn’t have space to display. “I can’t bear for art to be in storage,” she said. “I just think it should be out there and be seen.”

Proceeds from the sale will go to the Lear Trust estate, Davis Lear said, as well as to his children and the funding of future art purchases. “I want to buy new artists that we can fill the walls with,” she said, “because I think there is such joy in that.”

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