DEEP DREAMED TALES

AI-generated poems and human-made drawings

This project continues my experiments with AI. I wondered, what if artificial intelligence and an artist created an illustrated book of poems? And what would be the result of this partnership? I started it in 2021, and it seems to have finished in 2022.

With the last project using AI, it appeared to me that I was losing my own style. The algorithm forced its own visual choices, making it hard to deal with. And although my friends reassured me that all my works had common ground, I did not see any future for me in visual generations. At that time, all artists who worked with these tools seemed to me the same as clip art. So I abandoned image generators and instead used text generators slightly unusually. This allowed me to push my style to the maximum and still achieve the project’s goal.

This time, the algorithm was the author of the poems, and I was a kind of illustrator of these stories. I provided the algorithm with the first words, which it then used to generate full texts. These poems are placed next to the images and sometimes on the picture itself.

The aim was to capture the state of the development of language algorithms at the time of creating these works. When you read these poems, there are probably more advanced models that write almost perfect text. But there is beauty in those mistakes that you will notice in the text, in wrong phrases, in words that do not exist. I deliberately left all the words in the original without changing anything.

And also, I hoped to understand whether artificial intelligence is really just a tool or maybe somewhere in the depths, there is a creative spark attributed only to humans.

Season I

I typed the first sentence that came to mind: “Thin Layer of Time”. A few minutes later, the algorithm returned me a short poem. It was weird and clumsy but had something fascinating. Strange words evoke feelings and imagination. I started to draw everything I imagined while reading. It seems the images appeared from the subconscious. I just had to translate them into pictures.

Season II

There was a break between the first and second seasons of the project for technical reasons. And this affected both the quality of the generated texts and the style of the drawings. In the second season, I used a more advanced algorithm and started making more detailed drawings. Some elements from my previous series moved into these drawings. It turned out a kind of mix of everything I did before, but at the same time, it has an entirely new look.