AI Art: Frankenstein's New Monster
AI Art: Frankenstein's New Monster
The reckless renaissance
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.
- Frankenstein (1818)
In third grade, a friend gave me a book that would change my life: Raymond E. Feist’s Magician: Master. This would start a lifelong obsession with all things fantasy, swords, and sorcery and an obsession with writing fantasy books and making my own maps. I finished the most almost-publishable novel, The Chronicles of the Sunken Moon, in 2017 during a solo trip to Croatia at a resort full of elderly British sun-bathers. I reread it once, twice, decided I hated it, and shelved it.
No one reads anymore anyway, I reasoned. Who was I writing for? Headed into a new year, I remembered the obvious: we write for ourselves. As eighty-five year-old Ridley Scott recently said in a formidable New Yorker profile, reflecting on the commercial and critical failure of 1982’s now cult classic Bladerunner:
I learned that the only opinion that matters, when all is said and done—even with failure in your face, and you’re lying on the mat, crushed—is, What did you think of it?
I went through the graveyard of manuscripts on my hard drive and exhumed Chronicles of the Sunken Moon. Even if people don’t read - or is that a coping mechanism? - I had to complete the project for myself. An almost-finished book is a broken promise and an open wound.
With the relentless focus that has fueled so many different creative projects over the years, I edited ten pages for forty minutes before finding myself on the design tool Canva using the AI image generator to see what all my fantasy settings could look like. If no one read, maybe a picture book would be better. Thus began my unholy experiment with the first episode of Chronicles of the Sunken Moon: visualizing the first chapter of the book when an exiled man from the Sunlands ends up at the Temple of the Sky an ocean away, looking for a cure to a disease he got in a brothel. The High Priestess tells him that to get the cure, he first has to kill a witch known as the Star Keeper.
Cool, huh? Now comes the art:
(or read the prequel to this piece AI: Abomination or Blessing first)
Who could resist diving further after this result? The minutes became hours of focus. Prompting and prompting, cutting and pasting, I became Victor Frankenstein: feverishly working to stitch together a vision from the skins of so many others. And, like Frankenstein, the creation of the monster inspired a new sense of potential and power but still seemed uncanny, unnatural. Fellow pompous artists friends who saw the images you’re about to see reacted with disdain and disgust, over and over, that I would so callously use what they recognized as a tool for artistic plagiarism. But it looks cool. Right? Isn’t that all that matters?
Is AI art giving us monsters or a miracles? What would Frankenstein say?
Novel Necromancy
I had two impressions when reading Mary Shelley’s Frankstein (1818) for the first time:
All sciences should go back to being called “natural philosophy” because that is an objectively cooler term.
Victor Frankenstein’s primary feeling for his reanimated creature is not fear but disgust: the monster is murderous and scary but, most unforgivably of all, gross.
During the creative process, Frankenstein’s fever in creating a new life consumes any fear or doubt. It’s only when the monster is complete, with a life of its own, does he recoil. His creation consumes his life. We love what we create: we despise it when we find out it creates us back, without permission.
Working late into the night on my graphic novel, generating and galvanizing, turning my words into art with lightning, it was impossible to stop. As Frankenstein would say:
I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
Feverish with the ecstasy of my discovery, I worked late into the night. As our friend Victor F. might describe it:
Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.”
In reverse-engineering the graphic novel through a graphic novel template and creating art with an AI generator, the excitement of exploring a new medium, I became numb, immune to sympathy or guilt and burning with the certainty that AI would become art, one way or the other. The old mediums are in decay. We don’t need to deny it. Like Frankenstein would explain it:
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy: but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body.
The cynicism became confidence: No one made money from the mass market of creativity anymore. Maybe the art world is begging for a renaissance that comes in the way of a new medium.
As Frankenstein would put it:
I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.
It is a curious and powerful phrase that guides Frankenstein’s philosophy when he says, “The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.” In this statement, our mad scientist claims we must accept what we can’t change: we can’t change destiny, but we can change how we define it by changing our perspective and our feeling about it. But, in seeing his monster come to life, Frankenstein can’t help but only feel disgust where passion had been. That disgust causes him to abandon his creation. His monster gives chase and murders his family and friends, one by one, in the rage at being abandoned.
What disgusts us we deny and what we deny dooms us: whether monster or machine. Artists have been here before: Amazon killed publishers. Napster killed CDs. Spotify killed iTunes. In each of these revolutions, everyone could see it coming, but no one wanted to face it. AI is here. But rather than excitement, we feel fear, uncertainty, and a keen sense of moral conflict. This is common among artists: a 2023 survey shows that 74% of artists think AI is unethical and 54% say they’re worried about how it will affect their livelihoods.
This could be the chance for artists to figure out how to accept something and ride the wave, rather than, as usual, go flailing and splashing into the undertow. When Frankenstein flees the lab, he’s followed by his monster anyway. Shouldn’t artists lead the AI revolution? Shouldn’t we help decide how to make this a renaissance and not an apocalypse? What if new media is automatic alchemy, but the story is still human?
I’m not sure about any of it, either, but I do know one thing: content has long been infinite. There has to be a way to use AI to make art that still matters but can connect to more people in better ways. That’s the real challenge of any medium these days: getting people to care enough to just pay attention to it. AI can’t solve that for artists, but what if it could help? Or is that just mad scientist talk?
I think the real challenge for any artist is to continue making art DESPITE the fact that few people seem to care (or even know) what you're doing. There is no such thing as a sure path to success with art, whether we use AI to "assist" our creations or not. If it gives you pleasure and feeds your passion, that has to be enough because otherwise, you're worrying too much about the court of public opinion to make something true.
Would love to read the finished "Chronicles" - in novel or AI-genned graphic novel format 😎 An interesting experience, and expertly analogized 👌 Ol' Victor and his monster are still rock-solid metaphors, any time the perils of creation need examined.