At Xamk’s Creative Industries Research Unit, a partner in the HER TECH project, we often work at the intersection of creativity and ICT. A recent use case of creative technologies offered the opportunity to work on illustrations for a client.
An artist was hired to work as project trainee in this small illustration project. They took on the part of a lead artist under the guidance of creative specialists and the external client. The artist was tasked with finding solutions to utilize AI during the creative process. The project’s schedule was tight and the deadlines were strict, so the project also investigated how AI could facilitate the creative process.
ChatGPT was used by the artist during the cursory research of the project, as the artist was not native to Finland and the country’s general infrastructure. The artist used Midjourney to help create colour palettes that were to be used in the illustrations. The initial sketches and the final illustrations were done by the artist, and no generative AI was used in the finished artwork.
Given the present situation regarding the presence of generative AI and artificial intelligence in general, the discussion about the topic is very polarized. In a hectically evolving world, it is imperative to find these small glimpses of insights and knowledge, especially regarding the future of the people who work at the intersection of creativity and technology.
During this illustration project, many valuable thoughts were uncovered. While there are certainly doubts about using AI in creative processes, for example, regarding the ethics and artists’ rights, but in this project, it was underlined that experimentation with AI will by no means undermine the artist’s own illustration pipeline, preserving the art as an artisan work made by human hand in the end.
Image by @Freepik
