I think the three most important skills for artists are curiosity, initiative, and the ability to observe. Screw creativity, no one has any clue what that means and it’s a by-product of curiosity anyway. And skill is important, but that can come over time.

You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.

Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.

Here’s a “thread” I wrote back in October, in the pre-ChatGPT era, right when everyone was freaking out about AI art, and I’m pulling it out again to add some commentary on which of my thoughts have shifted and which I still think are relevant.

Contrary to popular belief, no, you cannot learn everything from the internet, especially if it’s a niche discipline. If you want to learn about something in depth you’re going to have to talk to people and read books and look at other ephemera and do some trial and erroring eventually.

This is why libraries are so important!

I certainly can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars tracking down obscure books just out of my random interest, but a lot of the time cities or universities will have them, which is so cool.

One thing I’ve learned about my own artistic process is that I can force myself to finish work, or I can experiment, but I can’t do both at once. If I force myself to finish something in a short amount of time, I can do it, but only by leaning on the skills and habits I’ve already developed and not straying too far our of my comfort zone.

But experiments? Those get finished on their own time, because my brain needs time and space to figure out how to stretch itself. You can’t complete an experiment using only approaches you’re already familiar with. Whenever I work on something that’s more of an experiment it needs quite a bit of time to breathe. It’s hard to make a plan for finishing something that doesn’t know what it’s trying to be yet.

Today I learned something really cool, which is that while English is a stress-timed language, where each word has a stressed syllable, French is syllable-timed and has almost no stress at all within words. This explains why French words tend to sound weird to me when said in English – because in English, there’s a need to assign a stress. In French, it might be cli-ché, but in English, it’s cli-CHÉ.