AI Emotion

Generative AI is a new medium that is struggling to find traction within the art world. Part of the problem is that medium is too instant and too full of the unexpected while drawing heavily on existing art in way that aggrieves many current artists. As a medium it is a direct reflection of internet culture. In this project I asked Midjourney v4 to create a series of ‘art pieces’ based on Planchette Emotions; Anger, Anticipation, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness, Surprise, Trust. These are fairly abstract concepts which AI can struggle to understand.

Initially the results were incredibly banal: screaming bald white men for anger, attractive fair skinned women wander forests for Joy, and lots of mangled text for the abstract concepts like trust and anticipation. By limiting the prompt more interesting results were produced. Adding art, abstraction, painting, and similar terms to the positive side of the prompt while adding text, figurative, people, stock imagery, and similar terms to the negative side produced images more akin to actual art. The images then form a body of work that has a medium specificity that can make AI image generation a little more engaging. It produced images that are an averaging of internet and wider culture for these basic emotions.

Unedited Prompt Results