How ChatGPT is blowing my inspiration-brain

Artists see and collect ideas at every corner, wanting to paint every face on the subway, needing to capture the beauty of every withering flower. Inspiration can easily become an obsession that needs to be kept at bay to function in an overwhelming world.

Midjourney, an AI tool that creates digital images based on the user’s words, has been fun to play with over the last weeks. My mission is to create art using a human brain and a human body in a tactile experience of movement, paint and inspiration, so Midjourney doesn’t really serve me. I think visually, I don’t need AI for that. However, I don’t think in words.

This is where ChatGPT comes in. It’s an inspiration machine that turns thoughts into words. Words that fuel ideas.

ChatGPT has plausible conversations with its users. Note that it is optimized for plausibility, not for truth. This alone is a mindboggling dilemma with so many interesting consequences for our future. I dove right in and asked it about art, artists, and the art world, as well as philosophical questions about life and the future of humankind. Some responses made me forget I wasn’t talking to a real person. However, some answers were factually wrong. For example, it told me about a painter that had created a painting about a very specific topic, and it turned out that the artist is an author and had written a beautiful book about this specific topic. It was a plausible answer to my question but it wasn’t true.

After much testing I have found that ChatGPT will be a wonderful source of inspiration for my work. It told me various antique myths that involve gardens, we talked about religions and the human search for paradise. How all of this is connected to our current needs following the pandemic and the role of art in today’s society.

For philosophical conversations or when truth isn’t essential, this tool is absolutely fantastic. Now all I need to figure out is how to deal with all this inspiration.

Inspiration on the studio walls