It’s hard to invent something new in the art department. Sometimes it seems that there are no more new styles to create, no new techniques to discover. Yet, contemporary artists still manage to surprise us. Thanks to social media and the World Wide Web, it’s easier than ever for artists to share their creations with the rest of the world.
The art project “Super Wrong Magazine” hosts a vast selection of works from artists and the creator of the page as well. How is it different from other art projects? All the images feature something unusual, something captivating but bizarre at the same time. Hence the “wrong” in its title.
More info: Superwrong Magazine
The Instagram page “Super Wrong Magazine” is an art project curated by an artist named Vincent. This Frenchman created Superwrong in July 2017 “to exhibit visual arts with a pop vibe based on a ‘wrong’ flavor.”
As of December 2023, the page has over 700k followers. The project features works by artists from different countries and backgrounds. Superwrong is proud of its devoted and multicultural community. One of its main goals is to give a platform to passionate artists with distinct styles.
The creator of the page regularly posts their own art on Superwrong as well. Their personal project is If Only AI, a page for digital visual art created with the help of artificial intelligence. The artist describes it as a “merge between art and AI.”
Vincent has already garnered some attention from the press for his project If Only. He started the account only in June 2023, but already has over 60k followers. The artist told Parametric Architecture that he uses the program Midjourney, and that working with AI helped him to express his vision.
Most of the stuff on If Only AI features architectural wonders as well as satirical portraits of famous people. There’s one question that the creator is itching to answer. “What is absent from our reality that I would love to see come to life?”
Based on this thought experiment, he imagines innovative scenarios and audacious architecture and pushes the boundaries of what we understand as art.
You’ll notice that a few of the entries on this listicle are AI-generated art too. The technology for AI art moves very quickly. What was impossible yesterday might be perfectly doable today. Missing fingers in AI-generated images might soon be a thing of the past.
How does AI art work? Similar to other AI-powered systems. It uses a vast database of existing art to create new content. An artist types in a prompt using an AI generator, and the program then uses that prompt to generate images. Some other AI art tools besides the already mentioned Midjourney include Adobe Firefly, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
How can machines differentiate through millions and millions of images in their data sets? Well, they’re all annotated so the machine can recognize between an apple and an orange. While we as humans see the distinction between the two visually, a machine needs a text reference.
As recently as September 28, OpenAI announced that their DALL-E is accessible to all. Jacob Vaus writes for Built In that compared to other AI art generators, DALL-E is more about having fun.
It’s not as cerebral and artistic as its counterparts. This program still struggles to generate human faces clearly and does better with pop culture icons.
Stable Diffusion operates with a more interesting twist. While you can write a prompt of what you want to see, you also need to put in a negative prompt. The latter is what you don’t want to see.
Such a system is bound to give the machine a clearer picture of what to generate. It sounds funny, but when you tell the program to generate an image that is not “low quality” and “ugly,” you do end up with a nicer picture.
Lastly, Midjourney. This image generator runs through Discord. It’s different from other generators in its generating process as well. You can watch how the program does its job in real time, somewhere around 30 seconds.
The results are not photorealistic and not very well suited to trick someone visually. However, out of the three, it works best for creating intriguing art.
Whether AI art is actual art is still up for debate. A professor and director of undergraduate studies in Harvard’s art, film and visual studies department Matt Saunders told Forbes that he doesn’t have a fixed opinion on the topic.
“Art means what we ascribe to it. It can be a provocation, but it is essentially always part of a conversation. Many artists are already using the inventions (and provocations) of AI in works of great substance, but of course the artists are still the ones bringing it into the room. If things change, maybe that will change too.”
