Interaction Design School of Design
Rona Luug
I am an illustrator and designer with an interest in exploring creative processes involving AI. My goal is to push the boundaries of art creation in an era of advanced technologies and examine how our perception of art is shaped by both visible and invisible human labor.
My honors project is a collaboration and dialogue between myself and The Machine, drawing parallels between teaching and training, producing and automating. By compiling a dataset of handmade drawings and presenting them alongside computer-generated outputs, I aim to highlight the labor involved in creating AI art. This juxtaposition invites viewers to reconsider their assumptions about AI-generated art.
Teaching the Machine
Teaching the Machine is a collaborative project involving drawing and training a diffusion model. The outcome is a collaboration between me, and artist, and the machine, an artist I have “taught”.
The process involved creating around 600 handmade drawings and compiling them in a dataset. The content of the drawings was mostly inspired by what I most enjoy drawing, as I feel that is what defines me as an artist the best. The drawings were duplicated and added to around 100 scans of drawings from my childhood, which in contrast to the new drawings are mostly done in colour. The result of the training expresses this glimpse into my past as an artist by incorporating splashes of colour in the otherwise black and white results.
The final exhibit showcases both the process and the outcome, emphasizing the significant human effort involved in creating AI art. This contrasts with the common perception that generating AI art is as simple as clicking a button after entering a text prompt. By partially obstructing the view of the final generated drawings, I direct the viewers’ attention to the physical dataset, highlighting the manual work that underpins the creation of art in collaboration with artificial intelligence.
