Tag: ai

by jad

I Grieve The Son

This photo is mostly generative AI. I found a tiny thumbnail of a time before core memory, a mere 960 x 899 pixels and 336 kilobytes of perhaps the most important document in our possession, and ran it through Photoshop’s “generative extend” tool, because I barely recognized it. It was already uncanny. There’s my mother and father, but who is that child? I asked mom and she, with a slight hint of urgency, solved the mystery: “Habibiii it’s youu.” It just didn’t look real. Even the kid looks mildly suspicious. So, I ran the generative fill again and again until … Continue reading “I Grieve The Son” →

by jad

Behold

I took these on my walk to work on Good Friday. Their existence was realized for me because of that context—I hadn’t even noticed that fledgling blossom I’d been walking past all week until that moment, when it revealed its full glory and called me by name to say: “behold.” That’s one way we make “art.” We see two needles in a cup of water and we say: Behold! Instruments of the Passion! We see an American flag with an upside cross painted over it and we declare: Behold! The veil is torn. I didn’t make any of these things; … Continue reading “Behold” →

by jad

What is Artifice?

I’ve been thinking about “AI” and “art” and “photography” and the slippages people makes when discussing where these concepts coincide and where they do not. It frustrates me to see the conversation around the place of technology in art-making being swept up in outmoded generalizations around what “is” or “isn’t” art when the ethical anxieties that AI brings up are better addressed at a more granular level: what is or isn’t an artifice? At what point does the maker end and the mechanism begin? I took these photos in 2008 on what we’re now calling a “digicam” of some kind. … Continue reading “What is Artifice?” →