Artistry, Creativity, Generativity & Process

Design and art are going through massive changes as we begin to fine-tune our understanding of our creative roles and lives as part of a collective matrix of ideas.

Artistry is process. Not "a process" - it is process itself, the work is the process. Artists are not separate from this process as it is something they actualize inside their minds & bodies.

Nothing artistic or extraordinarily creative happens in a vacuum. As we live, breathe and evolve we work with each others ideas in new ways, making new visions come to life. This is how art modalities evolve, often with technology shaping the edges of what can be created.

Most of the work of artistry is unseen and may look like daydreaming or being in ideas.

Today this process of creating a new media work may include doodling, editing or prompting with a generative step or two, often early on in the process or at the end, in post-production. What was once an iterative process of making 10-20-30 drawings or doodles now may look like 100 generative approaches to the same idea or a step of refinement to upscale and improve the output before publishing. These refinement steps have been a part of media production for some time but are now taking new forms as generative media explodes in use.

Whether the media is music, video, games, visual 2D or 3D works - the process in artistry is more than just a step in a workflow. Artistry is part of refinement; fine-tuning of ideas that are more prolific and complex through paired programming with an algorithmic assistant in the workflow. We're flowing together in a jam session with a hybrid jazz band.

Artist works are valuable in part because they experience, experiment and create from vision.

Artists as working professionals live in the space between dualities and contradictions as emerging technologies and tools meet the creation of culture and modality. CGI and computer graphics as a field has been shaped by our ability to bend algos to learn and then shape new things such as hair or light bouncing off of reflective surfaces to create worlds.

This expansive capacity of new technologies can allow for more people to explore their artistic side. Suddenly we may see millions of new creators enabled to move from vision into production and completion for public sharing. New paired programming processes emerge.

Eventually the iterative visualization and refinement processes will be parsed by our AI agents as part of the workflows released by major companies, as generative plugins and tools have already been included in many major art and design software solution packages -- it's a quick step to automate functions of a creative workflow to agents who function like paired programming partners in production.

Building AI agents that we own, control and manage is the greatest challenge in the refinement process to come for artist creators - shaping our tools as artisans, rather than letting our tools and technologies shape us in ways that run counter to our own human vision and creative goals in life. These agents will be our assistants in editorial as technologies become more integrated and what is now considered "AI" will be a part of the web and communication systems as just another layer in a thick stack of data passing between us all over the world and beyond. Our finely tuned agents will help us model our own works as new products and distribution channels emerge through these integrations, just as many artists are already achieving by making custom models of their works to license and offer as open source tools for other creators coming to integrate the next layer of immersivity, interactivity, generativity and collective participation with the creative process.

Artists throughout time have created and shaped their own tools for artistry, and this moment in time is no exception as open-source tech, art and mediamaking collide.

Look for technologies that exist in service of HUMAN VISION, not the other way around. Access to collective intelligence is great -- and agency in the creative process is not negotiable for the artist whose livelihoods are built on producing their artistic visions.

There is nothing in generativity as a step that replaces the artist and their original ideas, iterative work, editing and curatorial vision to transform ideas into realized art works.

Humans are still the idea generators, the uniquely creative and artistic visionaries who use their tools to blend, bend and shape realities. Generative tools fill in from that start of vision. Prompts do not exist in a vacuum - there is an original source code or command given by a human to start the generative process.

Shaping iterative flow between us and our tools is part of the global safety movement toward reproducability and transparency required to build safer AI-integrated systems in the future. This work is happening on every continent, with the dedication of thousands of leaders in AI safety and responsible innovation focused on every step of the communications expansion process. Many of my friends and colleagues are deep in work on ecosystemic AI solutions that work in benefit with and together with human learning, driven by shared needs to understand the world around us in more cohesive and actionable ways.

We are moving toward existing within collective intelligence, not just using it.

What is currently considered "hybrid AI production" will be commonplace within a year or two as part of many existing media workflows as generative tools become more common in design suites from Canva to Adobe.

Generative Creativity does not replace artistry and process.

Creativity is abundant, everywhere.

Generativity augments our creativity but also does not replace artistry and process. It may shorten the time to media publishing completion, or it may lengthen it as infinite new opportunities can be generated in shorter periods of time, expanding ideation and worldbuilding capabilities for smaller teams.

Prior to 2020, generative media and the last few years of AI development, other forms of ideation including human & algorithmic steps were engaged in our film and other media works such as digital video & CGI. These tools are complex, expensive and challenging to learn, making these forms of artistry less accessible to beginner or less-resourced creators.

Digital and algo-driven media methods like procedural art and interactivity also include human artistry to create beautiful works. No artistic process happens in a vacuum and nothing in the CGI process is displaced by some people choosing to include a generative step in their creative process, even if the software that enables some CGI now includes generative tooling. Frequently the interactive and generative methods are complimentary, adding layers to the creative process to receive a wider range of works in a broader world to expand creativity rather than replacing creators.

Some artists pick up new tools, others choose to paint or animate or create using other means. Our tools will always continue to evolve with our technologies and this is apparent in multimedia arts such as film or even in sculptural media such as glass. Technology shapes what is possible with the new media and the latest artistry is often a showcase for these new capacities. This has always been the way we work with new art and technology.

Artistry today includes all forms of human art AND what happens after a creative and/or generative process including curation & choosing, assembling, animating, editing, mastering, tweaking & making works that tell a whole story or concept. It may take large groups or teams to produce a single piece of work.

One element out of many may be digitally generated, procedurally generated or completely synthetic. In all cases, we currently have to tag these as "made with AI" despite being quite different in their artistic processes. There's no spectrum for hybrid production and creative methods and many would like to simplify these complex fields as simple binary yes/no check boxes. Today in YouTube, there's a checkbox if any aspect is simulated or generated, which almost every clip in this post will be checking. This may mean less distribution or visibility to other creative and artistic humans, especially those who may be interested in these topics.

Nothing in the creative process is easy. Artistry is, in part, making the creative work look simple or easy. Generative media appears to seem easier, so there's a sleight of hand that matches the magic wand and sparkles emoji of generativity....it looks like magic as it happens so fast without clarity into what's happening inside the black box. What comes out of a generative tool however is not art, it is an output of a data-driven process. It is also time-consuming and as we are finding out, compute-intensive as a creative process.

Creativity is what goes in to start: ideas, fragments, writing & prompts to start the journey.

Art is what you do with these elements to make it real, relevant and meaningful with other humans.

Generativity can be a step in a production workflow but is not the finished product; generative media is data augmenting a human flow state to expand creative capacity.

As a working artist I started out in painting and 2D fine art as well as a code and computers, exhibiting and demoing my first works at age 5-6. Over 40 years I've seen it all -- the work of making works of creative art & media can be a slog, like the writing or sculpting process or similarly the editing process; you know all too well the often hours of work that happen after a first inquiry in mixed media works, starting with bouncing ideas, sometimes with many humans engaged and not a single source of truth or ideation.

Fine art works take thousands of hours with many different processes.

Sometimes in digital art and media, entire bodies of work will just disappear!

Developing that body of "work" is where artistry is refined from ideas & elements into something coherent that reaches into people. Very few artists reach the world; most will be known in their own communities and to their collectors only as uniquely coherent for them.

Art rarely happens in a vacuum and creativity as human process inspired by other humans engage with each other through refining ideas is an evolving idea. The product of art is what we associate as a product of humans by nature of being refined by humans...but is this changing as we interact with simulated or generated works more now than it did a few years ago?

Is our perception changing to be some new hybrid of collective intelligence combined with many humans in collaboration? Are we seeing collective brilliance in new ways?

Reaching a symbiotic relationship with our technology and systems can allow for creative flourishing, assisted by tools but not shaped by them.

Every system that is not human lacks the sensory and intuitive living being capacity to tap into things that human intelligence can reach. Put it this way - the transformer wouldn't know what words to put together to get these kinds of visions to come to life. Humans are the idea generators that feed transformers to come up with visualized or realized concepts.

The perspective of any model or platform will differ from your own human perspective. What we currently have are art printers, replicators and other methods to bring our imaginations to life, but we lack the sensory intuitive layers in our AI to replicate anything close to human levels of creativity and artistry, in part because humans VIBE differently than machines.

We vibe differently now, and we're not yet symbiotic. Will we ever be?

That one question of symbiosis may be someone else's entire art & tech career.

Image, media or video generators are not artmakers, they are Generative Tools, like the digital machines in a toolkit. The relationship between us and these evolving tools will change as agents become capable of handling the tasks we're not able to slog through. Our layers of collaborative "trust" with these paired art tool-partners will evolve as we learn to lean on them to achieve very specific results in our interactivity, growth or creative output.

The people who paint, sculpt and capture stories are processing the world as artists, a human that has self-designed for creativity and artistry. This is human artistry.

The human is the artist in the scenario, and the same is true in generative media. When we generate media whether video, images or audio we get something that looks and sounds like media but is assembled data, not what we typically value and share as art, and this is reflected in the perceived value of these "artworks" as data products. They are assemblage works, hybrids by nature, turned on the digital lathe from chunks of data into something beautiful and worthy of sharing. The human is still the artist. The tool creates from the human vision.

Artistry is in what you humans choose to do with the data, tools and opportunities.

There is no function or measure for artistry in generative media tools or technology. It is by nature proliferation of iterative ideas, variations on a theme instigated by the human.

Prior to the generative media process of this decade, creativity would kickstart a process then there would be lots of experimentation, in which there was some artistry and some things that felt more like fumbling. Drawings would be tossed, even good ideas. The vast artistry involved in creating worlds and works like in filmmaking would happen at different points of the process, in the writing and editing room as much as in the camera or on a stage. Today, there's less paper wasted but perhaps more compute wasted in the process.

The muse comes and goes, whether synthetic or filming out en plein air.

Prompting today is in part a way to capture the muse and give it ideation and form.

I'm designing a home and natural building project using hemp materials currently, so my concept art will tend to come and go as I feel inspired to try new ideas. (PS you can vote up this project to receive additional support at https://artizen.fund/index/p/hemphome). As an artist who works between other studios I'm often allowing the muse to come in and work with me as time and opportunities align. This fluid approach to creativity is informed by the choice of tools but not completely formed or shaped by them.

Creativity in human process is all still happening throughout artistry today in the studio, but with an added step/s of prolific ideation where some ideas end up useful for the bigger story.

A film for example is made of many different scenes, some of which are creative and beautiful and others may be mundane or boring. Games and many media pieces published today are made by large creative teams working together to produce something bigger. There may be hundreds of scenes, and some of those scenes may be less artistic filler that's expensive to create and time-consuming but not valuable for the end product.

Whether a film is considered a work of art is in how those elements are assembled, edited and brought together to tell a story that's unique or amazing. The artistry is recognized by others, not self-designated. One particular scene might be considered artistic or uniquely of artistic value if it inspires other artists or anyone to see the world in a new way.

In this way, art is more about process and what it inspires in us than a final product, and thus art brings us closer to the creative spirit of people, inspiring new works. There's a virtuous creative cycle or circle completed together.

One fear heard when I speak out in public is that generative creativity interrupts this circle by inundating us with data and subpar, lower quality ideas instead of lifting us up & inspiring us to improve. So far BOTH seem to be happening at once. We're more prolific AND full of subpar ideas to toss, leaving humans with extra cognitive load. That feels overwhelming to many. There are entire books dedicated to improving the quality of your data and workflows.

Generative tools are nowhere near as valuable as a great artist in the creative process.

When we forget to pay and value humans in the creative process, the bond between art, media and humans forms differently - it feels devoid of life or soul. For humans it feels hollow or lacking in soul and many will reject it it the uncanny valley makes them feel uncomfortable in some way. The concept art here doesn't feel real because it isn't real, and for some people that lack of realness is not pleasant. Synthetic scenes or some processes like CGI create dissonance for humans who prefer to see the real world. Humans have different reactions to animation styles for example depending on their bias & experience; the challenges of CGI echo what generative media faces today.

Neither CGI nor synthetic toolkits replace the work of human creative people asking questions and refining work together. In some cases, generative synthesis can fool humans into giving their creative and critical thinking brains a break, a failure of human inquiry.

Quality of media often suffers when there are fewer humans questioning each other throughout the process, as creativity and artistry are both refined through collaboration with others. There are always human and other non-human inspirational forces at work in a creative process. With fewer humans in the room the outputs can be unreliable and may not achieve anything close to inspiring new art.

Creativity is the shared well where ideas come from, and that's still human.

Synthetic media engines are still nothing close to original concept machines. Generators are random AF, humans are not; we'd fire most generators if they were this chaotic on set. Most generative tools offer little control in their current versions. The next gen AI from Apple shows their future vision as media PAs, production managers and organization tools but this is 2 steps away for most AI product companies pushing digital assistant tools.

Humans are far more powerful as creative beings than we realize; we have a greater creative capacity and are more experimental capacity by nature, even if it does take us hours to paint or write a whole body of work. Humans are valuable collaborators for all sorts of tasks.

Some days we may want to offload boring tasks like editing to an AI like I should have done with this post. Other days our overloads and shortfalls are curatorial or related to decision making, not choices easily delegated to agents or algorithmic tools.

Humans have more going on than most AI can imagine or be trained to conceptualize.

Generative works are synthetic ideas that start without a soul - the way we give those works real meaning is to choose to imbue them with meaning when we spin it in the direction of the human artistic narrative.

Humans give work meaning, not the other way around...art doesn't define itself in a vacuum. The machine has no artistic narrative or goal in itself - the humans do - so any movement toward artistry is going to be human by nature, not synthetic. It's not in the nature of any current generative system to create anything related to real art; it's creating data for media, which is often just more noise or thousands of ideas to consider.

Given that the motivations of most AI teams will be profit-driven and not creative or artistic, we should not expect any of these companies to develop AGI that is more uniquely creative or values artistry as those capacities are rarely valued in humans.

Grow your own agents, ecosystems, tools and tech stack to suit your artistic vision.

AI public products are given benchmarks based on compute power, logic, proliferation and speed with very little thought to what types of sensory input or context, anything related to the intuitive and sensory practices that inform great art. That's not an artistic measure of success and the benchmarks are lacking for true creativity in most current AI R&D.

There's no benchmarks for soul, no understanding of intuition in human transformation.