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Reticent Reproductions

Assignment Description: Black Box: This project is about using black-boxed artificial intelligence to assist in creating an artwork or design artifact. Black box software is software where the internal functionality is not known, which is the case with most commercially available software that is not open source. There are also many pre-trained machine learning models that are also black-boxed because the end users/researchers do not have access to the training data. The goal of the project is to offload some key aspect(s) of the decision-making process to a piece of software that you do not understand or have control over.

“Reticent Reproductions” utilizes Open AI’s ChatGPT 4o mini general purpose Large Language Model (LLM) to describe works of 2D visual art. These descriptions are then given to Adobe’s Firefly Image Model in Photoshop, using the Generative Fill Function to create images from GPT 4o’s text. The combination of these two models “recreates” the artworks described. 

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ChatGPT 4o mini and Adobe Firefly team up to recreate visual artworks, from ubiquitous to obscure

 

The images produced ranged from fairly close to the original to full-blown Bullshit, a term I will be using throughout this project. Where a “hallucination” requires some kind of understanding of the truth, bullshit is a construction that is present as the truth without regard for the consequences. The works below showcase the prompt used in ChatGPT, the response from GPT, and the Image generated by Firefly side-by-side with an image of the original artwork. I have also included personal notes and thoughts about each work, and its generated counterparts. The ways in which these two systems recreate artworks illustrates the limitations of the use cases of AI to be a consumer and creator of art, as well as the consequences of automating many, or any, of the steps of the creative process.

Black Box -Maxine Vollertsen – Reticent Reproductions

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Maxine Vollertsen

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