I thought I’d write another post about the use of AI. My last post on the subject focused on the creative process and the use of AI. This one is about the reality of AI. Mougee was asked if we used AI awhile back and the answer was an honest one. Yes. To lie about it or mislead by omission was never considered. We try to be a transparent company when it comes to our products and practices. People have a right to know what they are purchasing and who they are purchasing from. What I didn’t say when asked about whether we use AI, and this may have been a mistake, is that everyone uses AI, many don’t know, others just don’t want to know it, and some just won’t admit it.
I am not an advocate of the use of AI. The social and ecological issues raised by AI are important, and if you really get into the weeds, it’s downright scary. If I could make AI disappear tomorrow, my inclination would be to do it. But I may as well wish that people stop driving cars, the social and ecological implications of driving are also really bad. Reality is a bitch, and the reality is that cars aren't going away, and neither is AI.
I find that many people really have a limited understanding of what AI is and how it’s used. When I say it is everywhere, it is really everywhere. Where is it most prevalent? There does not seem to be a consensus on this because it is so new and growing so fast, but the three top contenders seem to be; the Internet, the entertainment Industry, and individual consumers.
The Internet is basically run on AI now. Everything from algorithms that analyse your Instagram usage to decide what content to feed you, to Amazon’s processing of buying trends in real time to decide what ads to show you, to online video conferencing that lets you change backgrounds, put on bunny ears, or take notes of your meeting. If you are on the Internet, you are consuming AI generated content.
The entertainment Industry. Probably the first industry to whole heartidly embrace AI. Movies are now made with a lot of AI. They can remove background images, add expressions to faces, even create full length animated cartoons without so much using a pencil. Music is almost all being produced with the help of AI. You can play a little riff on the guitar and ask AI to add a drum beat in the background and even tell it what tempo, what drum and if you want more than one. You can ask it to sound like EDM, country music, or in the style of a 1960s blue grass band. And the list and samples of how AI is being used in the Entertainment industry is truly endless. If you show me a Movie studio that doesn’t use AI, I’ll show you a Movie Studio that won’t be around very long.
Let’s talk about individual consumers. This I think is probably closest to home for many of us. Almost anyone with a computer has Chat GPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Claude or something similar. Even if they don’t, simply by using Google, any online search engine, help bots, or videos, you are consuming AI. But some people really embrace, sometimes to a dangerous extent. I know a guy who says hi to his AI chat bot, (he named him Kevin) first thing in the morning and says goodnight to him every night. A little creepy I think.
So let's talk about Mougee and AI. We have no ban on the use of AI by our artists, or for people who are entering our contests. The main reason we don’t have such a ban is because it would be impossible to enforce. This would be a huge win for liars and cheaters and would put us in the unfortunate position of being the AI police trying to identify what AI generated something that is impossible to know.
Let me explain it in more depth. In order to use modern printing, art needs to be digitized. For those that may not be aware of what that means, it basically means all the art is made of thousands or millions of tiny pixels; dots of light that can be any color. When you take a picture of a pencil drawing, the camera converts it into thousands of tiny pixels. When you ask AI to generate a pencil drawing, it creates a picture made of thousands of tiny pixels. If you zoom in all the way to the pixel level of either the photo of the drawing or AI generated image, they are made of the same exact stuff. It is impossible to know if one was conceptually generated with AI, or cleaned up with AI, or the colors were rearranged with AI. No way to tell by looking at it.
Some people think they can tell by just looking at the art, let me say from my personal experience- they can't. I had someone post one of my stars and say this obviously AI. They were wrong, it took me hours to make. She came out and said it was “obviously AI.” That’s so rude and offensive to me personally and as an artist. You simply can’t know unless you see it being made. We had a contest winner who was called out for using AI to make her design. She contacted us very upset that someone started this rumor about her entry, a piece she had been working on for months and she was scared we would cancel her entry. Of course we didn’t, we have no way of definitely knowing one way or the other, why would we try and guess? Imagine if we did and got it wrong? So we don’t make rules that we cannot fairly enforce. And in this case, that means living with the reality of AI.
Do we use AI more than other companies that generate lots designs? Probably not. Mougee has an extensive network of artists who have been creating great art for longer than AI as has been around. Artists like Chris Dyer, MorphisArt, Glass Crane and lots of others. Plus, probably 30-40% of our stars are made by me personally. I generate a lot of art and have been doing so for longer than most of you have been alive. It’s so cool to see a piece I made 25 years ago, be born again in a flow star. But I digress.
Do I personally use AI in my designs? Sometimes. An example I give is the five headed dragon on the Midway Spark. It didn’t originally have seven heads. It was an ink drawing I made that I really liked, and I was trying to see how it might work on a star. It wasn’t very symmetrical, but I liked it. I got the idea to turn it into a balanced multi-headed design. I uploaded it to Midjouney, I added a foot from another drawing I did, and asked it to make it a symmetrical design. I was blown away with what it kicked back. I imported it into photoshop and added background color and cleaned up a few things and wala, I love the result. Is it still my design? Of course it is. Would some people argue that it’s no longer my design because AI had a hand in it? Probably. But that’s nothing that I would ever let get in the way of creating beautiful things that I want to share.
Before
After
What about Mougee’s other artists? Some use a brush and canvas. Some are digital artists, or photographic artists. And some, I would bet use AI in their process, or AI may even be their process. I could never know for sure, and I see no point in guessing. Do I want people to use AI? I think it potentially presents a grave danger to our species, but I see some amazing things coming from its use as well. I guess my final decision on AI is that there is no decision. It’s here, and there is no stopping it, for better or worse.