Blurred Lines

What does ‘handmade’ mean? To the purist it might mean that only hands were involved in the making of the thing in question. For a wood engraving to be handmade or hand printed does the whole process have to involve nothing but hands? No tools? Or can we assume ‘handmade’ allows for the use of hand tools? But then what is a hand tool – something you can hold in your hand or does it include something heavier such as a press that is operated by hand? Can we allow semi-automatic or fully automated machinery to print our blocks? Do the hands have to belong to me or can I allow someone else's hands and tools to make my work? Does any of this really matter?

The line between handmade and machine made has blurred, sharpened and shifted throughout human history. As soon as our ancient ancestors created tools we have gradually come to rely on them and they have become extensions of ourselves. From William Morris to The Luddites, there has been a growing trend to question the extent to which we let these tools affect our lives and the things we make. 

This debate has recently become a whole lot more complicated with the addition of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) to our collective toolbox. More accurately called ‘machine learning’, the software learns by being fed with huge quantities of data (such as text, images, medical records, etc), and once it has been ‘trained’ it can be asked to respond to prompts. However you will be pleased to read that currently they can’t think for themselves in the way we can… not yet. But this isn’t stopping the current A.I. software from being used as a tool to aid humans. It’s already being used to diagnose medical conditions, recruit employees, help police with surveillance, and answer your questions when you contact an estate agent.

It is no surprise that image generation and ‘art’ is now in the crosshairs. New iterations of A.I. have been fed and trained on millions of images, publicly available on the internet, which has given them the ability to generate unique images. With a simple prompt the software will provide you with an image (and a collection of variants) which it has created based on what you asked for. One such example is DALL-E which describes itself as ‘trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs’. I asked it to give me an image based on the prompt ‘A traditional wood engraving print of the English countryside’ and you can see the results ***overleaf***. 

It is clear from this example that DALL-E still has a way to go until it understands the difference between a wood engraving and a fuzzy sketch. If anything, this example demonstrates the nuances of human creativity. So I don’t feel threatened yet by A.I. and its potential to replace me. However, it is always evolving, and is learning from the images we unwittingly provide via our websites. Like many A.I. programmes, DALL-E uses the images available on the internet as a reference for its own creations. This is raising questions about consent and copyright, because although we are all influenced by other artists, the A.I. software doesn’t necessarily know what is acceptable. It might just copy a particular element of one of your engravings, or it might be used to copy your entire style. Solutions are being developed though. Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herdon have created a search tool (www.haveibeentrained.com) so you can find out if your work is amongst the 5.8 billion images used to train popular A.I. art models. As far as I could tell none of my work has been used. However I did find engravings by other, more well known, SWE members, so perhaps obscurity is working in my favour this time.

Not all artists are seeing this new technology as a threat. Mario Klingemann and Anna Ridler have been training their software with specific sets of images to control its outputs. And if sales revenue is anything to go by, the art collective Obvious recently sold their A.I. generated Portrait of Edmond de Belamy at Christies for $430,000.

Whether A.I. turns out to be a force for good or bad is yet to be decided, and like most things, the truth will be somewhere in the middle. Some professions will undoubtedly be threatened or even replaced. Artists will likely see it as another creative tool, while others (many among our readership) will ignore it entirely and stick with their hand tools.

I wonder how long it will be until an A.I. generated ‘wood engraving’ is submitted to the SWE Annual exhibition.