Bloopers & News 02/14/25

Dall-E vs Dali

I am currently in Figueres, Spain, birthplace of Salvador Dali and home to the phenomenal Dali Theater and Museum. My mother and I spent three hours today meandering through the museum, which feels like a combination gallery/art installation/mausoleum. In fact, Dali designed the museum to be a surrealist piece of art in and of itself.

Me gazing up at a Dali mural.

AI was constantly on my mind. What would Dali have thought of it? He appears to have embraced technology. We saw an example of his “hologram art” and several sculptures and installations included computer boards (It’s easy to forget that Dali lived well into the 1980s.)

Don't these pieces by Dali look like they could be AI mistakes? (Especially the woman with light bulb hands.)

I suspect Dali would have liked AI in its current state of adolescence, where one is likely to get hallucinations and fails. The Surrealists famously played a game called “Exquisite Corpse” in which every person writes part of a story without knowing what came before it. Many of my experiences with AI have felt like this game.

Elsewhere in the art world, the big news is that Christie’s is slated to hold an auction billed as the “first-ever AI-dedicated sale at a major auction house.” All article excerpts are from Art News.

One of the auction’s headline lots is a 12-foot-tall robot made by Metri Labs that is guided by artist Alexander Reben’s AI model. It will paint a new section of a canvas live during the sale every time the work receives a bid.

Hilarious. And a gimmick that will be interesting only once, I suspect. The artist behind the robot, Alexander Reben, said, “AI expands creative potential, offering new ways to explore, remix, and evolve artistic expression rather than replace it. The future of art isn’t about AI versus artists – it’s about how artists wield AI to push boundaries in ways we’ve never imagined before.”

You can guess that as someone creating an AI graphic novel that I agree with this statement. Unsurprisingly, many people are up in arms about the auction, and thousands of artists have signed a letter asking Christie’s to cancel the sale. It reads:

Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrights work without a license. These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.

In response, Christie’s sent ARTnews this statement:

The artists represented in this sale have strong, existing multidisciplinary art practices, some recognized in leading museum collections. The works in this auction are using artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that the release of China’s DeepSeek in January disrupted the American AI market. I figured I’d better check it out because it’s my job to tell you all about this nonsense. And friends, it was indeed NONSENSE. DeepSeek’s image maker is called Janus-Pro and using it was like using Open AI’s Dall-E nearly two years ago.

It was frustrating that it would not create the images as I envisioned them, but there was a lot of entertainment in the mistakes. Lately, OpenAI and Midjourney have become very good at following directions, but the images have become bland and homogenous.

Here is where Dali comes back in. Before we arrived at his museum I thought, “I am really looking forward to laughing and being delighted by what I see.” I love that Dali is always having a laugh, mixing the profound with the profane, and making no apologies that he wants to entertain his viewer.

The grand atrium of Dali’s museum. He threw in everything, INCLUDING the kitchen sink.

My big question about the future of AI and art today is: How long will it take for AI to “play,” to experiment intentionally in new and unexpected ways? Can it understand satire well enough to produce it well? (My experience so far is a big no.)

To make a long story short, I have some excellent bloopers for you today.

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Nailed It (the Janus-Pro cut)

I needed an image of me, Roberto, and our pug running out of a library in fear. First one is good, except for the whole extra arm thing.

I told it to give the woman only two arms and it listened! It also invented a new lady problem I call “Pug crotch.”

Next it was time to surround us with menacing men in suits. The scary men look terrific, however Roberto and I became one. I call it “Robertolyn.” So romantic, ya’ll.

Janus-Pro continued to have problems differentiating between me and Roberto. This next panel was supposed to be us and the dog huddled in fear. I could really use a shave.

It seems very inspired by The Substance. The Pugstance?

I love how worn out and hopeless we look in the next one, as if Janus-Pro could sense my exhaustion with its results.

I have become so frightened in this scene, I have decided to snack on the spare pug head I always keep in my purse.

As always, thanks for reading, and remember that I love to hear about any of your own AI adventures.

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