The popularity of AI-generated images has raised the question of whether such images can be genuine art. I'll let people smarter than me ponder this question. Here, I'd like to ask the opposite: When is art genuine AI art? How much AI is needed? Does any application of AI elevate the art to AI status? What if the only purpose of the AI is to introduce irrelevant and barely visible artifacts into an otherwise human-crafted artwork?

This project is long-form, code-based generative art, where every single iteration has been produced by a p5.js program entirely coded by hand. The code-generated images are then used as input to Stable Diffusion, which is tasked with reproducing the images as closely as possible (denoising strength = 0). In practice, this means Stable Diffusion encodes the images into its latent space and then reconstructs them from this compressed representation. This process results in images that mostly look like the input. However, upon close inspection, we can see small deviations and artifacts that are caused by the limited capacity of the latent space to encode any arbitrary image. Conceptually these artifacts are very similar to JPEG artifacts that arise when saving JPEGs at very low quality settings, though visually the two types of artifacts look nothing alike.

In addition to the latent space compression, I have applied an AI-based upscaling algorithm to increase the image resolution beyond the maximum output size possible by Stable Diffusion. This process adds additional latent space artifacts. These artifacts tend to affect the sharpness of lines or the detailed texture in some sections of the image.

I dedicate this project to THOTH, who asked me whether it is mandated that all EmProps drops be AI based. This project is my answer to this question. I'll let you decide whether I'm meeting the mandate.

Hand-crafted p5.js long-form generative art, latent-space compressed by SDXL v1.0 and subsequently upscaled 3x by R-ESRGAN 4x+. The p5.js images are not preselected but instead are generated on the fly upon minting by the EmProps platform.

Claus O. Wilke, October 2023 https://clauswilke.art