What started out as a curious observation – an image, absurd and reversed, resulted in “cats in the sky, birds below”, a surplus of legs where symmetry once lived (link below). A surrealism not of dreams but of glitches. Inspired, yes, by AI – though not made by it. And yet… What if I had used AI?
In this chaotic theatre of expression where even the paintbrush questions its purpose, AI is no longer the assistant but the stagehand sneaking into the spotlight. Uninvited to the audience, awkward for the cast, yet intriguing – to me at least. Its creations are stitched together with uncertainty – too many fingers, floating forks, and eyes misplaced like the dehydrated memory of a night out.
Hands, for instance, – the bane of all AI image generation, not hands, but hand-like appendages – seven-fingered gestures, hands fused mid-wave, the kind of anatomical errors that scream either nightmare or masterpiece – depending on your inclination to accept discomfort as a form of art.
It doesn’t stop there. – Shadows fall where they shouldn’t, faces begin but never finish, chairs dissolve into walls, a world where permanence is optional and physics is a mere suggestion. This isn’t just error, because it absolutely is, but it’s also dissonance. It feels like dissociation wearing a filter, and somehow… it speaks.
There’s something deeply human in the inhumanity of it all.
Uncanny is a word thrown around by those unwilling to admit how much closer to truth these distortions often sit, and isn’t that what art does? It unsettles, it reveals, it cracks the mirror you didn’t know you were looking into.
Why does it matter?
Cogito, ergo sum.
Descartes wielded doubt like a chisel until he carved certainty from the block of reality: “I think, therefore I am.” But what of what we see? And worse – what of what seems real? When AI can imitate form and fail at function, it becomes an echo of something familiar, like déjà vu in visual form. Close enough to pass, broken enough to whisper, “this isn’t real, but are you?”.
It’s in that fracture – between what we know and what we almost know – that meaning leaks through. Art is not about precision, it’s about friction, and friction AI provides in generous measure.
So then, is it art? – or is it the pretence of art performed by an algorithm dancing in borrowed shoes?
Perhaps, in art, the discomfort is the point, perhaps all great art is a little bit dishonest, because nothing is as honest as dishonesty. If art is meant to reflect us, then these imperfect imitations – these corrupted reflections – are more honest than we care to admit.
And if that makes you feel something, then yes…
This is where I should point out that whilst I did attend Art college, my views completely flew in the opposite direction of everything I was being taught, and I felt somewhere, somehow, for me at least, art had lost its raison d’être.
My dream growing up was to produce something meaningful, to make something that could be felt, be it pain, grief, hope, you get the idea. But I quickly learnt that art today is actually just a sponsorship, a status, a membership, where boring people point and scoff about the people outside using cream and jam the wrong way round on their scones. Justifying their superiority on the gatekeeping of ‘meaning’ that they, and they alone, can value.
So, and I’m sure you will, take my opinions with a pinch of salt. Art is stuff that makes you feel. Whoever wielded the paintbrush is irrelevant, so long as it speaks to you, for art, like the love and hate it tries to capture, is in the eyes of the beholder, and one of the few things in life that really is, all about you.
:: REFERENCES ::
- cats in the sky, birds below – The Art of Absolution
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