People debate if AI art is real. Here’s how it’s changed my life
This First Person column is the experience of Lucas Orfanides, who lives in Sackville, N.B. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
In Grade 7, the week before Family Day, we were assigned an art project in class to make a painting on a dinner plate as a gift for our family. For most of my classmates, this was no problem. Some painted portraits of their families. Others did decorative designs with the word “family” written across the top in vibrant colours. I remember one girl in the class painted her family crest on the plate.
Then there was me — unable to paint even a basic family picture. Every attempt to make a brush stroke ended up missing. I remember vividly picking up the brush and trying to paint a straight line and it went all over the place in a zig-zag.
It wasn’t because I wasn’t trying hard or didn’t care about making something for my family. I have a condition called dysgraphia, which affects fine motor skills.
While dysgraphia affects up to one in five people, my case is particularly severe and makes tasks such as painting, writing and even tying my shoes next to impossible. Even typing this column is difficult. I wrote it using voice-to-text software.
While that art class wasn’t the first time I was unable to do even basic art, it was the final straw. I decided to give up on visual arts like painting or drawing.
After all, what’s the point if you can’t even draw a line or sketch a recognizable stick figure? How much art can you realistically create?
Of course, my family understood. They have always been my biggest supporters —helping me by scribing for me in math because its notation is hard to type or use voice-to-text for.
They didn’t hold it against me, but I was still hurt that I couldn’t create anything nice or artistic for them. I felt sad that I couldn’t participate in something as visually artistic while my friends seemed to have so much fun creating their paintings.
Still, art remained a part of my life. Even though I couldn’t create art, I still appreciated other artists.
I had been a lover of art ever since my parents took me as a child to the local art gallery on my street that contained the works of many famous Canadian artists, including Group of Seven member Frederick Varley. Fun fact, he lived in my hometown of Unionville, Ont., for many years.
Seeing the emotion many of his works and others displayed were able to get out of nature made me envious and want to be able to do the same, although that seemed so distant from reality.
As an adult, I’ve learned to adapt and accommodate my disability. For example, I still to this day rely on Velcro and self-tying laces for my shoes rather than laces.
Although I accepted my reality and have no intention of becoming a professional artist, I still feel it would be nice to have art as a way to pass the time or express my emotions.
Then, a few years later, in June 2023, as Artificial Intelligence systems like ChatGPT started to gain popularity, AI art also took off. In my Grade 11 philosophy class where we discussed art and the benefits and challenges of using AI to create art, I shared that I wasn’t able to create traditional art because of my disability.
The teacher introduced me to a new AI art model from the makers of ChatGPT called DALLE.
At first, I played around with it a bit, not expecting much. I made some interesting images but nothing that felt particularly authentic.
However, after an hour or so, I realized that by changing the prompts and asking it to create images in certain styles or manners, I could generate pieces that closely resembled what I envisioned in my head.
Although slightly off, they were still pretty close. Suddenly, it clicked: by refining the prompts, I could creatively express my ideas through AI art models.
Social media has been flooded with artistic profile photos made by mobile apps like Lensa using artificial intelligence. But for some in the art world, it raises ethical and legal questions, and has even led to the loss of paid work.
Over the next several months, different competitors entered the scene, opening up endless possibilities.
Over the past 18 months, I have used seven models to create countless pieces, each involving multiple iterations to express myself and create art that is genuinely meaningful to me.
For example, my Instagram profile photo is an impressionist-style piece reflecting my love for the arts and my favourite team, the Toronto Blue Jays.
I love now having the ability to spend hours refining words and styles to create the exact piece that I envision. Seeing the tangible results of something in my mind actually in front of me gives me a sense of freedom to express myself in a way that wasn’t possible before AI art.
While it’s valid that people are arguing about whether AI art is real or not or the ethics of how it compensates artists whose style it mimics, for me, these are beside the point.
What matters to me is that it allowed me to express my emotions visually — a way I’ve wanted to express myself for a long time.
Every piece I make feels like a chance to finally express my views, stories and feelings in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. I’m grateful for the creation of these models and have the ability to express myself.
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