The Hidden Doors AI Can Open
Not chasing perfection, but chasing what humans couldn’t build alone.
Dear friends,
I scrolled to the bottom of my Midjourney account and found loads of scary and weird images. Most of them were somewhere between H.R. Giger and Nobuyoshi Araki.
What I found interesting back then was how unexplored the aesthetic felt. Suddenly we can generate images and compositions we hadn't even thought about before. I wasn’t trying to create photorealistic or perfect images, I wanted to explore a world that wasn’t accessible to humans until now.
Looking back at those early AI experiments, you can really feel the alien, the inhuman. Now most tools are about mimicking reality. Perfect faces, cinematic lighting and realistic movement.
That’s generally ok, but for me not very interesting. As an artist, I want to explore something else.
I’m happy I had the chance to work on the Telfar Remix project, where we mixed AI with hand-drawn images, and also the exhibition at Kraftwerk, where we used quantum noise to generate videos and sound with a custom AI system.
These projects opened the door for me to work with AI in a different way: not as a shortcut to create something fast, but as a way to discover something new.
I think with AI, we now have an entity that thinks differently than we do. So why not use it to create things that are different from what humans would come up with?
A good example of this is AlphaGo playing against Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world. Go is an ancient Chinese strategy game that is much more complicated than chess.
AlphaGo wasn’t trained by showing it human games, it was only given the rules of Go, and then it played millions of games against itself.
In one match, it made a very strange move in round 37. Everyone thought it was a mistake. But it turned out that this move was exactly what made AlphaGo win the game.
And this is what excites me, AI can come up with ideas that our brains wouldn't even consider.
Of course, I still use normal AI tools to make my life easier. But the interesting part, especially for creatives, is using AI to access spaces that were closed to us before.
Well… That was that…
Thank you for reading!
Much love,
Marius
PS: Sorry for the images today. But that’s how it all started.
