a god of war(s)
staring at rising peace
in a crystal globe
On a planet of hell-fire, lava lakes burn bodies, souls
—a god of war(s) sought solace in his glass orb,
watching destruction, seeing the people suffer
—was dismayed to see a goddess of peace rise up
with others through the columns of smoke, despair
—watched peace step back and turn ruin to light.
The light of hope froze the lava lakes, trapping the god
—so distant, so angry, so full of hate, this maker of war(s)
—now locked in rock so far away.
May peace prevail on earth,
as a deity who freezes the fiery wraths of greed and rage.
Author’s Note on AI
We have entered into an age of algorithm-generated art and text, apparently. While the tech-companies and media-reporters on these phenomena call them, collectively, “artificial intelligence” (AI), creators are concerned that they are plagiarizers. The methods used to “train” these algorithms involves using huge databases of images and texts, mostly gathered from the internet without the permission or knowledge of the creators of those works. Many, perhaps most, of these works are copyrighted. And the “intelligence,” which is very much “artificial,” uses these works to create their new works—using probability models to select words, phrases, and artistic elements in an order similar to those in the large databases on which it was “trained.” The methodology is complex, and some may argue that it is not dissimilar to human learning. However, the works the AI software put out cannot (for now) be copyrighted (as they are created by a machine), and may be plagiarism, as a pastiche of plagiarised parts or by using quotes without citation—without really having an “understanding” that it is “quoting” text or art work. Nonetheless, I have played with both text AI (Chat GPT®) and image AI (Midjourney®). The images above are a digital collage / montage using various images from Midjourney with two prompts I used in January— one asking for an image of Chaos dying, inspired by the book by Joanna Russ, And Chaos Died, and the short myth she gives as the source of the title; the other asked for a racially and gender diverse group representing life of the spirit and activism.
I saved two versions of Chaos and several of the diverse spiritual-activists, and use some bits and pieces from all. I also included background images and textures from photos of my own. I changed all of the elements in the work presented here through selection, cropping, and editing. I used Adobe® PhotoShop® to combine them using layers, filters, and adjustments. In this way, as I often do with my own digital photos, I created art (“digital landscapes”) from separate pieces. I see this process as similar to using Adobe® stock images as elements in Adobe® software to create new images, which I did in creating this issue’s cover art (under a limited license agreement). And the images I created, in the variations moving through the slideshow, are mine, I feel. This is an image the Midjourney AI produced for the title of the poem and images, which I came up with four months after starting this particular experiment:
using the title above as a prompt (28 May 2023)
This image is not mine, that is, it is not my art or what I imagined, though it could be said to aptly illustrate the title. It is not like other art or photos I have made. I would probably have to play and refine my prompt, which might be the “artistic skill” of using AI. The images above, I think, are recognizable as similar to other digital landscapes I have created for The BeZine or on Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, my blog-zine.
Contributor Ira Director has also used AI art in this issue. His perspective, which differs from mine in some significant ways, still arrives at a similar conclusion—AI is a tool that we can use. However, we will have to be careful in using it, and the legal framework for copyright is not yet adequate, nor the technology yet developed far enough for us to have clear ideas of where the boundaries of fair use of materials by the algorithms and their “training” mechanism and our fair use of the generated artwork will eventually be. For now, as editor of The BeZine, I will rely on transparency by our contributors and care in the use of AI. The images are AI, the text is my own (limited) intelligence.
using the (adapted) poem above as a prompt
(28 May 2023)
Here is a Midjourney AI image where I used the poem above as a prompt, with the dashes removed, as they indicate a command in prompts. I added transition words to act as connectors where the dashes had been, and after an attempt that seemed to focus on the first part, added "all of this" at the beginning.
©2023 Michael Dickel
The BeZine 