THE BIG PICTURE

Al image generators are here to stay, and human artists have nothing to fear.

- PAUL FORD

IN 1992, THE poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It’s a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects— orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicufia. Her Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff” is what it sounds like. Her Short Talk on Trout” is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book’s introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.” Right about when she published that, the internet started to take off.

Fast-forward 30 years and one of the latest ways to avoid boredom, at least for me, is to stay up late and goof around with Alimage generation. Tools such as DALL-E 2, Mid journey, and Stable Diffusion can be instructed, with textual prompts, to produce ersatz oil paintings of dogs in hats in the style of Titian, or simulated photos of plasticine models of astronauts riding horses. When I first started playing with Stable Diffusion— which is open source and very fun—I was reminded of Carson’s talks. I went back to them to figure out why. Pretty quickly I realized that the resemblance had something to do with form.

Everyone says content is king, but the secret monarch of the content economy is form—constraints, rules, minima and maxima. You grow up learning form. A high school essay is five paragraphs. Sitcoms leave eight minutes in the half-hour for ads. Novels are long. Tweets are capped at 280 characters.