Infinite Images and the latent camera

Spawning, a 21st century corollary to the 20th century process of sampling. If sampling afforded artists the ability to manipulate the artwork of others to collage together something new, spawning affords artists the ability to create entirely new artworks in the style of other people from AI systems trained on their work or likeness.

Memes feel an appropriate medium for experimentation in this context, as any single meme maintains it’s vitality from its ability to be personalized and perpetually built upon. Memes are cultural embeddings, not dissimilar to the embeddings present within the latent space of a neural network.

Larry Tesler’s pithy description of AI, “Artificial intelligence is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”, is equally applicable looking back to the birth of photography. Photography had also not been done yet, and was then (a phenomenon described as the AI effect) soon integrated into most artistic and industrial practices.

DALL·E represents a shift from... See more

To return to the original idea of extending a painting to reveal more of the scene, what might it mean to be able to produce infinite worlds from a single painting or photograph? This significantly augments the capacity of what we understand of generative art, when a coherent world, or narrative, can be spawned from a single stylistic or linguistic... See more

The same debates will rage about whether or not prompt based AI imagery can be considered Art, and will just as inevitably be relegated to history once everyone makes use of these tools to better share what is on their mind.

Like the introduction of the personal camera, it is easy to imagine a near future scenario in which all amateur and professional workflows across creative industries are augmented by these tools, helping people to more clearly depict what is in their mind through common language and an ever expanding training corpus.

this opens up the possibility for a new and mind-bending IP era of Identity Play, the ability to create works as other people in a responsible, fair and permissive IP environment,