Prompt Chosen: Have the lake and its marine life consume Innisfil as an underwater utopia and functional
Society. Living and farming as the people do. Have marine life fishing and baiting the locals.
Title of work: First We Must Dream
What inspired you to choose this prompt?
I chose the most complex and evocative prompt available to produce a commentary on the inherent shortcomings of the machine learning algorithms behind generative AI.
I created digital painting, which means that I have taken an electronic brush into my human hand, and painted with pixels on a tablet screen. The technology is just a tool that enables me to save on the cost of paint and canvas.
I have created a thoughtful interpretation of the prompt provided. The look and placement of each figure is carefully designed. Every fish is based on a local species, native to the area. The background references an actual location in Innisfil, which I took time to visit and document. A common palette and playful, dreamlike story is weaved through the overall composition, uniting these seemingly disparate elements together.
Generative AI image software is fundamentally incapable of intention or interpretation. It can only reproduce elements of the images on which it has been trained. A ”training” which involves throwing combinations of pixels at the proverbial wall, scraped from the works of living artists whose individual human visions have been reduced to empty datasets.
Throughout history, people born into positions of power have always coveted the skills of artists—and simultaneously hated that we’re human.
They’ve hated that artists are capable of forming our own opinions, and critiquing the world around us. That we are the songs, the imagery, the language of revolution.
They’ve hated that we, like any other worker, have human needs like rest, food and shelter. That we cannot mindlessly produce, instantly on demand at any time.
Where human artists usher in new eras, generative AI is the artist of stagnation. A world where nothing can get better, because we no longer even dream of change.
Nicholai A. Melamed
Nicholai A. Melamed (they/them) is an immigrant artist of mixed Jewish-Ukrainian and Jewish-Qartveli (Georgian) descent. As a queer, transgender artist, many of their projects center trans protagonists on a path of reconciliation with the spaces they once called home. They also speak to the interwoven topics of disability justice, sex-positive approaches to queer intimacy, and issues of class-based poverty viewed through an intersectional lens. Their work is an ongoing exploration of resilience at a crossroads. Somewhere defined by lack of belonging, that nonetheless preserves a gravitation all its own.