"Using AI in my work doesn't make it easier, just different. You could say that, from a pragmatic point of view, AI speeds up much of the creative process. However, mastering AI takes time and research. Like any new skill, it takes time and effort to learn. When you open a new program, you don’t automatically know how it works. I have a background in 3D and also work part-time as Digital Innovation Lead at Mijksenaar, a wayfinding design agency in Amsterdam. Technology has always been a big interest of mine, so for me, using AI in all these types of work is a way to get out of my comfort zone and learn something new. The fun thing is: the more experience you get, the more you can control the results. Every tool you use affects the outcome. You’re an artist and curator at the same time.
“Fishing for beauty: that's what using AI in design comes down to.”
The entire process is like fishing for beauty, but with the aid of a little helper. You still never know exactly what you’re going to end up with. To limit the range of possible outcomes, I train my own AI models. I make sure they are specialized in a certain topic and can do one thing very well. For example, I have one model that makes faces the way I want, another one that creates flowers the way I want, and a third model that combines those flowers and faces exactly how I have it in mind.
Could one model do all that? Sure. You could argue that a service like DALL•E or Midjourney, some of the best-known AI services, combines the best of all worlds. Those services have a wide range of knowledge and are trained with an enormous set of data and images. The downside is that they are restricted by someone else's choices and are bound to produce "generic" outcomes. For an artist, that's limiting. When I make something using those models, it’s not authentic – it’s not me. I want to maintain my artistic integrity and build as much as possible from scratch, and then give that to the model to work with. For example, I worked as a 3D artist for eight years. During those years, I built a large portfolio of works, which I used to create many different datasets. Then I trained an AI model using that selection of my own work, and I described the works to the AI model. Subsequently, it started drawing things the way I would draw them myself. This way, I use as much as possible of my own artistic vision rather than works of another artist which someone else downloaded from the internet and included in a generic dataset. Of course, there is still a part of the model that is created by someone else. For instance, the way it identifies subjects like dogs and houses is preconceived. But when I train it myself, it doesn't look at millions of Google images of dogs; instead, it looks at the couple images I created and fed it. However you use it, your starting point should always be the purpose of the model.
What do you want to use it for? Deciding what data to put into it is also important, and it helps to have some experience to anticipate results. The technology is new and solves some problems, but it also creates new obstacles. So it's not necessarily more efficient. Nevertheless, the design industry is on the verge of something new and exciting. For some, that’s a scary thought. But I'm not afraid of the technology, maybe just a bit concerned about how people use it. For now, it will mostly help industries and empower individual artists, small indie teams, and also large studios to create new exciting things. Like I said: it's a tool!"
