Another Reason Why Making Real Art Feels More Satisfying Than Using An A.I. Generator

Although I’m not sure whether I’ve talked about this before or not, I thought that I’d look at one of the many reasons why making real human-made art, whether with traditional tools and/or digital ones, feels a lot more satisfying to do than using an A.I. image generator.

If you do regular art practice, then experimenting with an A.I. generator (like I did for a few days much earlier this year) will be a bizarre experience. You can literally feel the difference. It’s like something is missing when you “make” art using a generator. It feels more like doing an online image search than actually “making” anything.

And, whilst I could talk at length – and have done in the past – about the detrimental effects that these programs can have on an artist’s confidence in their own abilities, I want to talk about one of the reasons why they feel so unsatisfying to use if you’re used to making real human-made art.

Ironically, real art feels more satisfying to make because it takes a lot more time to make than generating an A.I. image does. Yes, it’s technically impressive that computer programs can generate almost professional-level digital images in a matter of seconds. But the “slowness” of real human-made art – when even a “quick” piece of art might still take 10-30 minutes to make – has a huge benefit that makes it feel orders of magnitude more satisfying to make, even if it might not look as good as the program’s creations.

In short, making real art means that you have to focus on the present moment.

When you make a piece of art, you have to actually focus on making it. It’s a much more “active” thing in terms of your attention. It’s like how, when you play a videogame or read a novel, you have to actually focus on doing that thing. You have to actively process and imagine the things that you’re reading, or you have to actively play the game. Like these things, making a piece of art means that you have to actually focus on making it – because it won’t make itself.

Ok, with A.I. generators, the “art” they make does indeed make itself. But that’s exactly why it feels so unsatisfying. There’s no real focus or attention involved in it. You can just set the generator running in the background whilst you randomly browse other internet tabs or worry about the future or do something else. The short waiting period before one of these websites belches out a collection of images is pretty much designed to make you feel bored and to make you want to distract yourself in some way.

However, when you’re making real art, you need to focus on it. On what you are doing right now, in the present moment. Not in a stressful, intensive way but – like a novel – in a more relaxing “at your own pace” sort of way. Although I don’t “meditate”, I imagine that it probably feels similar to this (but more boring…). Making art yourself means that, if you want to actually finish the artwork, you have to focus all or most of your attention on the present moment.

And, when you focus on the present moment, it feels satisfying. Worries about the future disappear for a while, the constant “high-alert” feeling that lots of distractions can cause transforms itself into a more relaxed feeling of focus, time itself seems to mean a lot less than it usually does and everything outside of your immediate surroundings feels blissfully irrelevant to you. If you’ve ever read a really good novel or played a really gripping videogame, you’ll probably understand this feeling too.

This was something I ended up thinking about when I was trying to de-stress after a stressful, rushed morning. My instinct was to make some art. Since I didn’t really have the enthusiasm or mental energy to think of an original idea, I just decided to make a completely lazy and unoriginal practice painting. I found some Youtube footage of the rainy, neon-lit streets of Seoul and paused it during a cool-looking moment. Then I picked up a small A6 watercolour sketchbook and just spent about half an hour or so drawing and painting what I saw on the screen, before scanning it and improving the scanned artwork with digital tools.

The semi-digital painting I made certainly didn’t look as good as the picture on the screen, but that’s not the point. If I wanted a perfect, hyper-realistic image of a glowing futuristic building on the other side of the world, I could just have taken a screenshot. But, instead, I spent half an hour making an “imperfect” and “unoriginal” practice painting. Because the process of making it was the real reward. Because I got to spend half an hour focused entirely on the present moment, in a world where nothing except the source image and my sketchbook existed for me. And it felt relaxing and satisfying.

So, yes, making real art feels a lot better than getting an A.I. to make “art” for you precisely because it is much slower. Because it gives you time to focus on the present moment.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂

Some Thoughts About Small-Scale Focus And The Present Moment

Well, since I was still in the mood for “weird” articles, I thought that I’d talk about having a small-scale focus today. This was something I ended up thinking about after two experiences back when I wrote the first draft of this article in early June.

One was when I actually remembered to do the classic Eckhart Tolle-style thing of focusing on the present moment (rather than thinking about the past or future). Like with most of the other times that I’ve done this, it was really amazing.

I could see visual beauty in the world that I sometimes don’t notice. There was this wonderful feeling of peace, a realisation that – for all of the problems in the world – literally none of them were in my immediate vicinity right now. That, in comparison to all of that, I was in paradise right now. A warm, adorable feeling of love filled my chest. A reminder of how reality itself is, in many ways, a work of art. The experience felt genuinely utopian. And this was all thanks to my focus – since it could have just been an “ordinary” moment if I hadn’t remembered to focus on the present moment. Yes, it only lasted a few minutes before I got distracted by something stressful, but it was still really awesome.

The other was when, whilst bored later that night, I stumbled across an official looped live-stream from MGM of four classic 1960s “Addams Family” episodes on Youtube. One of the episodes, which I hadn’t got round to watching on DVD yet, was one where the family’s Frankenstein-like butler – Lurch – accidentally becomes a pop-star. The interesting thing about this episode is that, although it implies a larger scale story, all but about one or two scenes take place in or around the Addams Family mansion.

Yes, a lot of this was probably just for practical and/or budgetary reasons. It is a television sitcom from the 1960s, after all. However, I later realised that it showed me something about that part of the past. The pre-social media age, the days when “mass communication” was restricted to just radio, television and newspapers/magazines. The “world” seemed a lot smaller. Even my memories of suburban Britain in the late 1990s/early-mid 2000s have a smaller scale to them.

At the time, and when I remembered it during the second half of the decade (when I was at university, had broadband internet etc...), this part of the past sometimes felt a bit limited and claustrophobic in retrospect. The rose-tinted spectacles of present-day “2000s nostalgia” can filter out a lot of stuff.

Yet, although a small-scale perspective can indeed be those terrible things, my experiences with the age of broadband internet, online news, social media etc…. eventually made me realise that there are good elements to it too. That taking a smaller-scale perspective every now and then can actually be a good thing. Not really thinking about anything that you can’t directly see right now. Briefly and temporarily treating everything like one of those videogames that saves system memory by only loading everything that is currently visible on screen (when it is safe or appropriate to do so).

And, as hinted earlier, this sort of small-scale perspective has been a constant for almost all of human history. Yes, there were sailors, merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, scholars etc… in the past – but throughout the majority of history, there were probably quite a few people who only really knew or cared what was happening in their small village or their local area.

A lot of this just boils down to “ignorance is bliss”, I guess. We’ve never been more well-informed about the world… but the news almost always focuses on the bad stuff.

There are “influencers” and “selfies” and conspiracy theories. Politics has become hyper-polarised, an endless culture war – unwinnable by either side. The liberating freedom that the online age was meant to afford just replaced local standards with those of the trendiest parts of Silicon Valley – one set of limitations swapped out for another.

And, yes, it isn’t all bad. It can make the world seem less claustrophobic. You can find all sorts of amazingly cool stuff and fascinating information on the internet. As a communication tool, e-mail is orders of magnitude better than the intimidating immediacy of traditional telephones and both quicker/cheaper than traditional letters too. The internet is a mind-opening “you are not alone” lifeline for anyone who doesn’t “fit in”.

You can find almost any piece of information that you want in literal seconds. Things like blogs still exist (I’m literally writing one right now), and there is a galaxy of culture and stuff like that which I wouldn’t have even known about were it not for this amazing technology. It isn’t all bad. Both you, dear reader, and I – the writer of this online article – would be absolute hypocrites if we thought that it was an entirely bad thing.

So, whilst taking a look at “the whole world” can be a good thing to do sometimes. Whilst “keeping up to date with the world” can actually be useful to an extent. Whilst its amazing that geographical distance almost completely disappears when you sit down in front of a machine. Whilst all of this stuff would have seemed like literal magic hundreds of years ago.

Whilst all of this has its good sides, there is still something to be said for taking a smaller-scale focus every now and then. Ignoring everything that isn’t immediately visible to you right now. After all, this is something we have anyway. We can only be in one place at one time. We can only ever see reality from the first-person perspective of literally just one person. A small-scale focus is literally part of being human.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂