Artists using artificial intelligence as a creative partner

Editor’s note: This story is part of the annual Mosaic Journalism Workshop for Bay Area high school students, a two-week intensive course in journalism. Students in the program report and photograph stories under the guidance of professional journalists.

James Morgan began his creative journey into artificial intelligence as a joke. Now it is a significant part of his creative process, making him part of a now growing group of creatives who are now using AI in their art in new and inventive ways.

Morgan, an artist and a professor of digital media at San Jose State University, has spent the past few years experimenting with AI in art. He first got into it, he said, when he “made a joke about wanting to make an opera.” A friend was creating software to make music, so Morgan was able to use it to generate melodies in the style of the great Giacomo Puccini. He wrote lyrics to be translated into Italian and eventually created Arido Taurajo, an operatic short taking place over a video game.

Morgan’s journey with AI continued when he spent a year during the pandemic doing photography in Michigan. He put almost every photo into a computer model just to see how the program might replicate his work, and looked closely at what it generated.

“I started falling in love with the aesthetic of it,” he said. “I think they’re beautiful. And I also really liked the way that as an artist, I can control the images that come out by controlling the images that go in.”

The program functionally has Morgan’s eye as an artist, generating a potentially infinite number of images that he could hypothetically have taken. Because all the images put in were used with his consent, it is vastly different from other models trained on work from artists who never gave their permission. So what does this mean for Morgan’s model? In his view, the program can almost be treated as an artistic collaborator or a partner in a larger project.

Julian Zamora, a digital artist and arts educator, shares this view of AI as a partner. The work of Zamora, who uses they/them pronouns, is heavily influenced by their Chicano culture and often plays with the concept and perception of gender.

Currently, they are working on a new series of dithered halftone prints that will be “generally abstract imagery with bold colors that represent traditional Mexican folk art.” The halftoning, a technique in which dots of different sizes are used to convey different shades and images, will allow the prints to resemble textiles.

Zamora says that their art “end up resembling planets or celestial objects. It’s supposed to evoke a sense of connection, while the art is open to interpretation.”

While experimenting with AI, Zamora will refine prompts until they are pleased with the result, and then digitally overpaint the image to bring it in line with what they had wanted.

Zamora also has used AI to create reference photos and to explore the different directions that they could take with their art. They also explained more gentle forms of AI, with uses people might not even think of. The drawing app Procreate, for example, will track the flow of a line being drawn, and then use AI to predict how the artist likely intended it to look, leading to a cleaner-looking image. Zamora also feels excited about AI’s potential to make art more accessible, allowing those who might not have the training or skill to express their creativity.

Riley Mendoza, a recent San Jose State graduate, used AI models to create a volume of love poetry.

To do this, she pulled lines written by a program that writes books in the style of H.P. Lovecraft, the famed 20th century American horror author. She then fed these into LyricStudio by WaveAI, a program that generates song lyrics, picking out lines and nudging them into a specific artistic direction.

Mendoza edited and compiled her favorite poems into a book, “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” with images that also were AI-generated. It is now available for purchase online at loverakaru.square.site.

By speeding up creative processes, AI can lead to greater inspiration, Mendoza said, adding that she was sometimes surprised by what the models would come up with.

“It’s kind of interesting to gain outputs that you would not have thought of on your own,” she said.

Julia Dang is a student at Los Gatos High School in Los Gatos.