An AI Haunting

In continuation of my Halloween-themed AI musing: When does AI-generated content become something more than novelty? My thoughts on the matter continue to evolve, but during this early stage of experimentation my initial question was: does it become something meaningful when it amounts to something greater than the sum of its output?

To try it out, I ran with an idea not too dissimilar from my previous Halloween-themed design post. Because of the limitations of AI at the time (specifically Midjourney 3), I thought something cryptic like sigils or runes would be a fun way to work with the moody aesthetic I liked without having to confront issues of realism or specificity. But just generating abstract symbols in itself was not enough.

They needed to have meaning, and that meaning needed to come from intentionality, and that required text. Taking the experimental project to its next extent, I used an LLM (Chat GPT) to generate a whole system of divination symbols and meanings inspired by Nordic and Anglo-Saxon runes, among other sources, mixing-and-matching text to symbols.

I recently even went so far as to reinterpret the card names and meanings by uploading the images to the latest version of ChatGPT to directly interpret the symbols in order to assign more contextually relevant meaning and 'guidance'.

I designed the card branding in Illustrator, iterating numerous single- and double-sided compositions with different font treatments until landing on this design, shaping them into a more cohesive and comprehensive product.

While not super sophisticated or original, this was at least becoming something more than the result of just entering a prompt and pressing a button. I felt it was starting to demonstrate a level of creative judgment and curation, combining the creative use of images, text, design, purpose, media and tools.

My goal was to print up a few sets of cards that could be drawn and played like a simplified version of tarot. I wanted the title and image to be evocative, with supporting copy offering conventionally generalized (and randomized) guidance. It's not deeply thought out (or designed for that matter), but hopefully good enough as a case study.

For me, this tool has ignited a creative fire that was large enough to help me put many of my initial fears and reservations aside. And I found the more of myself, my skills and ambitions I brought to it, the more empowered I felt. I have since developed far more complex projects (and potential products) leveraging my passions for visual, narrative and game design. I'll be sharing more on one of those (and the spookiest one) in the next post.

However, this still does not take away the existential fear I continue to feel about the potential negative impacts this technology can have at the social (industry harms), national (false information) and global (climate change) levels. But understanding how it can empower me as a creator has at least given me the feeling of a little more agency at an individual level.

Like many, I doubt the genie is going back in the bottle but I hope if enough of us can find ways to make the tool meaningfully beneficial to us, we can help balance some of the negative, superficial, and very short-sighted ways it is currently being employed that do not.

Thoughts? Stay tuned for one more spooky AI post!