Beauty in the AI of the beholder

Mar. 17—The Baker Early Learning Center hosted a student art sale and fundraiser cake raffle on March 3, with several beautifully made cakes up for grabs, but the main attractions lined the walls as students put up their proudest artworks.

Among these were selections from the school's Creative Club, a kindergarten group organized by muralist and instructor Andrew Gettle of Baker City.

The Baker Early Learning Center (BELC), which includes preschoolers and kindergartners, includes the former North Baker School at 2725 Seventh St. and adjacent modular buildings.

Gettle's students were joined by a new participant, even younger than the tykes — by several years, in fact.

The creative club's art came in two parts, one made by hand with paint, markers, scissors and love.

The others, inspired by the students' original works, were made by generative art AI (artificial intelligence).

"I think the kids are going to freak out," Gettle said as he set up the displays at the learning center.

The east wall was festooned with the kids' original works.

The west wall, meanwhile, featured the art dreamed up by AI, reimagined from smartphone photos of the students' creations.

While parents were quick to claim their children's art, there was some fair clamoring for the AI creations.

There's an obscure movie quote, from Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973) that's apt to the struggles of both young artists and those who set out to discern the differences between human and AI art:

"Supposedly, you really can't tell, except by looking at the hands. They haven't perfected the hands yet."

While Crichton's theme park rampage set the stage for both the Terminator and eventually Jurassic Park, the AI artwork at BELC was benign.

And, like robots and dinosaurs, the kids love it.

"We made each of these from photos of the kid's art and a prompt, usually a couple words, like the kid's name or the animal they drew," Gettle said.

Seen side by side, some of the shapes take some squinting to see the parallels between the two creations. But the colors always give them away.

Gettle said all but two of the nine AI pieces sold at the March 3 event, some bought by the very kids whose art was the inspiration.

The two that didn't sell still went home with the student on whose art the AI piece was based.

The sale cleared just over $1,000, with the money going to field trips and other enriching activities.

Artificial intelligence and art

Though computers have "generated" art for decades, the advent of AI art is relatively new, with apps such as OpenAI's DALL.E 2, Wombo's Dream and Davinci.ai stirring up into the mainstream in the past two years, especially as the technology develops. It works in layers and painterly stages, allowing it to stylize the outcome to almost any genre, from warm and fuzzy Jim Hensen puppets to scary and skeletal H.R. Giger aberrations.

AI art comes with some controversy. Its influences, after all, are real people, and in modernity having a popular visual form also means that real artists can sometimes be in competition with themselves as machines take and run with their years and decades of developed style. Even sculptors, singers and actors have had reason to glance over their shoulders as the technology expands into turf they've monolithically occupied for thousands of years.

But AI can also illustrate what a young artist can strive to achieve, a reflection of what a mature creative can do with time and a love for the process, and in this case it was invariably going toward a good cause for deserving kids.

Gettle, who was also recently voted into the city's Public Arts Commission, said he's looking into adding AI art to the approved apps for BELC students, making the technology available on a permanent basis.