Exploring AI-Assisted Art: Irene Muehldorf's Creative Journey and Insights

DDG: Can you share a bit about your background (profession, ambitions, family, location, etc.) and what led you to engage with AI-assisted art creation on platforms like DDG? It is up to you to what you want or don’t want to share, including your real name, gender and/or location.

Irene Muehldorf:

Hello, fellow dreamers! I’m a translator with a U.S. background based in Vienna, Austria. While I also studied art and enjoy creating art, translation became my bread-and-butter job. I appreciate the ease of AI art as an outlet for my creative energies. The option of using style transfer, image-to-text prompts, and pure text prompts to make AI images allows me to combine two of my favorite things: language and art – using words to evoke a mental image, and transforming images into AI art. Here’s a dream based on a photo I took in my yard of a floral motif, one of my most frequent subjects. It’s part of a series of trees in bloom:

DDG: What motivated you to start creating art with AI assistance? Are there practical reasons behind your engagement (work, marketing, professional art), or is it more of a hobby?

Irene Muehldorf:

My younger son, who was studying visual computing at the time, introduced me to AI art when it was in its infancy and only allowed for style transfer and low-resolution output – but was awe-inspiring nevertheless! After playing around with various websites, I have remained faithful to DDG, first supporting the website via Patreon and now as a subscriber. Over six years ago, DDG gave me the best results for transferring a Klimt-inspired style to a series of churches I had photographed. The quantum leaps AI art has made since then are simply amazing! I redid my entire church series as AI art matured and hung prints of the series in our living room. Here’s an example from my reworked church series:

Irene Muehldorf:

While I have also created gifts of art commemorating special moments for friends and have produced some minor marketing leaflets, I spend by far the bulk of my time on DDG making dreams just for the sake of the pleasure they give me. Returning to the idea of creating images of churches with a series of fantasy churches as the abilities of DDG widened to include text prompts, I made the text-to-image dream below – it’s my computer screensaver and makes me happy every day: “fantasy Baroque church”

Irene Muehldorf:

Devising text-to-image prompts forces me to patiently and precisely formulate the concept in my mind’s eye for the generator to implement my vision. Perhaps AI artists use a different, more abstract skill set than artists using traditional art tools: They stick words into the generator’s black box, and abracadabra, seconds later, an image pops out. The power of words! This is the common denominator of my profession and my passion for AI art.

DDG: How does creating AI-assisted art make you feel, and what surprises you the most about the process? Describe your journey and experiences with AI art.

Irene Muehldorf:

Engagement with AI art has given me the opportunity to find out about various artists and styles, to find websites offering public domain images especially for style transfer, and to take photos of my favorite motifs as base images. Research to create digital art has taught me so much!

The breakneck rush of the pioneering days appears to me to have given way to a more quiet, everyday pursuit of making AI-assisted art. As DDG has changed, so has my use of the site. The feature I find most rewarding about the steady development is the introduction of ways to communicate with the community, which used to be possible only within the Deep Dreamers Facebook group.

In my experience, dreams always come out as a surprise. It is always a special pleasure when a dream appeals to the community on DDG, lets viewers smile or astounds them, or allows a deeper meaning to be inferred.

This surprising piece resonated well with fellow dreamers:

DDG: How do you perceive the seriousness and authenticity of AI art? Is it a true art form? What are its unique aesthetics compared to traditional art?

Irene Muehldorf:

To my mind, AI art is quite definitely a serious form of art. AI art pioneers such as Harold Cohen, Mario Klingemann, visual artist and creative coder Manolo Gamboa Naon, to name just a few eminent artists, signal that AI art has carved out a rightful spot in the art world and is here to stay. AI art is not the lazy person’s quick fix to create a Mona Lisa without being able to paint. Much rather, I wholeheartedly concur with the deep, thoughtful analysis of many aspects of AI art in https://deepdreamgenerator.com/blog/ai-art-and-concept-of-beauty. As the article puts it, “AI has the potential to become a valuable tool for artists, enhancing their creative process rather than replacing it.”

Some insist that the purpose of art is to create something novel, unique, and unprecedented, and that AI models are only able to generate something expected. Yet by blending very different concepts, I think that AI models can indeed create something completely new – a bit like fusion cuisine, which certainly has its merits and justification. While the engine may recombine available data nearly infinitely, it purportedly cannot imagine concepts beyond the scope of the training images. So AI art’s creative potential appears to be limited to the unpredictable combination of existing data, from which by definition it is unable to create fundamentally new concepts. Artists may, of course, let AI-created elements inspire their own original art. And artists are capable of recognizing where a novel combination of data might spark a paradigm shift in art, a completely new perspective: This is the intrinsic nature of creativity.

Here’s to fusion dreaming, a dream from my eat your veggies/juicy fruit series:

DDG: Can AI extend the capabilities of an artist, or does it risk replacing the artist altogether? Discuss the necessity of manual and human-originated art in the age of AI.

Irene Muehldorf:

Some differences between AI art and traditional art are the slower versus faster speed of creation as well as the personal involvement and control over every step of the creative process versus throwing concepts in the AI black box blender and waiting to see what emerges. My AI images always come out with unexpected or bizarre objects, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. Such glitches may not be welcome to artists who want to remain in control, but I consider some of them enriching.

DDG: Do you feel that your AI works authentically express you? Are they your own artworks, in the same sense as a painting is an artist’s own work?

Irene Muehldorf:

AI art is biased by the bounds of the images used to train the neural networks. Many of the dreams produced on DDG seem to me to exhibit a preference for conventional beauty standards. Human figures pop up out of abstract patterns; faces are generally young and pretty. My favorite motifs do not include human(oid) figures, so I get the impression that I sometimes have to work against the network data bias to create landscapes, nature subjects or architecture in line with my envisioned outcome. So especially when the resulting work expresses the thought or mental image I wanted to convey, I certainly consider the dream my own artwork.

Other dreamers seem to share this feeling that a dream is their own work. Whereas the community seems to have gotten used to DDG’s “Try” button, as long as the dreamer using “try” gives a “like”, people react very negatively to the use, or theft, of their images: That’s ample proof that DDG artists consider their dreams their “brainchildren”.

To substantiate the impression that AI is my own work, here’s an image based on a photo I took and styled in DDG:

DDG: Reflecting on your experience with DDG, what aspects of the platform stand out to you as particularly meaningful or unique?

Irene Muehldorf:

I have followed DDG’s journey for many years now, and have enjoyed the ease of access and uncluttered page structure from the very beginning. I find other AI art engines more confusing to navigate, which inhibits my creative drive. I commend the platform for introducing features that allow dreamers to create increasingly larger, clearer, and more detailed images. Higher quality comes at a higher cost, of course. DDG has grown from a niche start-up to a commercially viable enterprise, so I understand that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. A major bonus is being able to contact the DDG team; I applaud the team’s handling of various problems, such as unauthorized sales of dreamers’ art on online platforms, or energy refunds. My hope for the future is that DDG continues to evolve and to actively engage its community.

DDG: In terms of collaboration, have you worked with other artists or AI on projects?

Irene Muehldorf:

Collaboration is an intriguing thought, and something many dreamers welcome on the DDG platform and in the dedicated Deep Dreamers Facebook group in the form of challenges. Such events all take place online, though – I’ve never met another dreamer face to face. That could be quite exciting!

DDG: How do you keep yourself inspired and motivated to continue exploring AI-assisted art?

Irene Muehldorf:

To expand my skills, I enjoy reading articles, researching artists of all stripes, looking closely at art methods and styles – doing everything an interested professional artist would engage in along the lines of lifelong learning. The AI art world is developing at a dynamic pace, and the discoveries I make inspire me to integrate new elements into my AI art efforts. Even just scrolling on DDG and looking at fellow dreamers’ art, plus commenting and receiving comments, is wonderful motivation. Also, I try to use my daily energy points every day and to publish a dream every day or every two days, which serves me as a short-term goal. Finally, being in nature and walking my dogs sets my mind free and sparks ideas. The last dream I’d like to showcase epitomizes my inspiration from nature: