Recently I’ve been obsessed with paint-by-numbers. There’s another blog post about it forthcoming. It's a compulsion I have to complete them, and an obsession with buying ones from our local auction house.
So, it wasn’t intentional when I bought an AI generated image in paint-by-number form.
Instead of returning the offending product, I ended up unwrapping it, not realizing it was AI until I got a full look at the image. I purchased the product through my phone after all, and I was deceived.
There were telltale signs that I would recognize had I just looked closer on my phone or on the box before I opened the package. Things like ... text that looks more like Elvish, nonsense edges to objects that blend into the next, digital artifacts.
But I continued because I felt like completing this would teach me something, both about myself and about art.
So...
What did I learn?
Well first and foremost I learned advanced techniques in hand eye coordination. Spend enough time on any one skill and your proficiency will improve.
Secondly, I learned that no one can make a good paint-by-number. More on this in a later post
Most importantly I learned that AI lacks any sort of logic or reason when it comes to organizing an artistic image. Because AI doesn’t compose original new images, merely regurgitates that which it’s already seen, there’s no internal logic or reasoning to the way an image is composed.
Take for example the general composition of the bookshelf given to us here. There are no titles, but lots of scribbles. And the flowers and plants that supposedly climb the shelves seem flat and disconnected to each other. There is a lack of internal logic, and no object seems to follow the same rules as the other objects.
I’m not saying the AI generated image is novel in any way. My human hand added more to the painting than a prompt ever could. I’ve put more human effort into something a human couldn’t even be bothered to create.
The AI Generated image also required a whopping 22 colors. The last complicated paint-by-numbers I completed only had 13. A simpler one had 5. Several pairs of these 22 colors were similar shades of pink or green that were hardly discernable from the other.
So I found myself filling in gaps and making editorial decisions as I painted. I chose to cover up some areas that were less than sensical - areas where colors split or merged. I tried to make the plants more sensible and follow patterns. I tried to make the text more text-like. But nothing can hide the fact that this painting is pure AI generated slop.
The only saving grace is it was painted by human hand, and for that I’m grateful for the opportunity.
In short, I hate AI generated images from Large Language Models*. They’re not art. And selling it as art is a false premise.
Art requires the human hand in some form, beyond typing a prompt into a plagiarism machine.
Are paint-by-numbers art? This is a question I will come back to. But for now, this particular AI Generated image turned into a paint-by-number hardly counts as art, and more as a human generated image.
*There are exceptions to this rule, but because completely original LLMs are few and far between, I stand by my blanket dislike for all AI Generated imagery.