Generative AI renaissance: What the Italian masters can teach today’s designers
Among the doom and gloom of AI risk, Clare Birch believes an increasing number of creatives believe new AI tools will enhance, not replace, human creatives.
In the early days of the Renaissance, Filippo Brunelleschi changed visual art forever. Brunelleschi – the humble architect who designed Florence’s Duomo – used his skill as an architect to formalise the principles of linear perspective, enabling artists to create the illusion of depth on a flat canvas for the first time.
Creativity thrives at the collisions of new tools and ideas. Without Brunelleschi’s mathematical tools, we wouldn’t have masterpieces like Da Vinci’s The Last Supper or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.
Among the doom and gloom of AI risk, value shortfalls, copyright lawsuits, and looming energy crisis, increasing numbers of creatives are optimistic that new AI tools will enhance, not replace, human creatives.
On SXSW Sydney’s Discovery Stage last month, creative technologists Associate Professor Ollie Bown (UNSW), Jessie Hughes (Leonardo.Ai), Eden Payne (Kopi Su), and Desmond Ang (Adobe), skilfully moderated by the National AI Centre’s Rita Arrigo, argued that the current wave of AI could in fact yield a new creative Renaissance.
“Bettering the slow work”
A quick glance at any recent fundraising rollup shows a swarm of AI companies whose purpose is to suck ever-more productivity out of the desiccated bodies of a commercial creative team or individual. Companies promise to generate the perfect ad or marketing campaign, automating and “supercharging” as much of the process as possible.
While no doubt useful, workflow optimisations won’t yield new Da Vincis or Raphaels. This is not the creative Renaissance we ordered.
UNSW’s Ollie Bown, however, is quick and fearless in refuting that future – the interesting part is “not speeding up the commercial creativity, but bettering the slow work.” In short, this is about augmenting the best of human creativity.
He would know. An academic and experimental musician, Bown is an expert in the slow, good work that drives forward the frontier of human knowledge.
He walks the walk—his lauded improvisational band, Tangents, played earlier in the SXSW week at Sydney’s Church Street Studios; Bown’s instrument of choice is “computer”.
To Eden Payne, the opportunity lies in how the models see us, and differ from us. “I’m very interested in how [the models] reflect our humanity back to us,” says Payne, showing images from her AI-centred installation she exhibited with creative digital studio Kopi Su last year.
“They have consumed so much of our internet culture,” Payne reminds us.
In one of the pieces, she prompts the AI to give “a suggested output from the tool I am working with”. It yields a not-entirely-disordered abstract image – floral if you look at it one way, a schism if you look at it another.
The opportunity is in the constraints
To Bown and Payne, this “bettering” emerges when artists work with AI as a new medium and artistic companion. AI is analogous to Brunelleschi’s mathematics of perspective – a key to a whole new depth of expression.
Yet the current generations of AI aren’t often so precise, or even so creative. They regress to the mean, sometimes even homogenising human creative output.
AI is a tool, not a replacement — and as with all tools of art-making, the panel notes, it demands skill, craft, creativity, and taste.
Artists should embrace its limitations as creative fuel, according to Hughes and Payne.
Payne likens the use of AI in deep creative work to DaFont.com. The site is a cornerstone of digital typography — beloved by high school students looking for a Greek-looking font for a history assignment and advanced designers who can make good use of its quirky fonts.
As Brooklyn-based graphic designer Noah Baker, known for his work with A24, Nike, and the New York Times jokes:
The growing voice of reasonable optimism
That AI is a tool, not a hard replacement, is an optimistic and growing voice in this discussion. Senior technology reporter Tegan Jones first wrote about it for SmartCompany in May this year, after Hughes delivered a similar message at Blackbird’s Sunrise conference.
In 2022, AI researcher and student-of-Bown Rodolfo Ocampo made the same points in a live demonstration of a piece of interactive generative art — also at Sunrise.
These artists’ optimism is a third way between the hyper-ambitious tech narrative of efficiency and the risk alarm bells rung by some researchers and engineers. It is, as Jones notes, refreshing. It demands nuance, and nuance is not native to our move-fast-and-break-things tech culture — but it is native to artistic culture. With artists like these at the frontier of AI use and interfaces, we might yet have reason to hope.
So Senior Designers (and creatives of all sorts): welcome back to Generative AI. We’re excited to see what you do with it.
