Warning: I drew the main image seen here all by myself like a big boy, but then I tested out using AI to refine the image so I wouldn’t have to redraw it a bunch of times. So there are AI images in this post. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you know me in real life, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to know that I’m over here working up a new tattoo design. I still have a lot of blank space to fill and all that. For this design, I’m trying to do something for my youngest, to represent her in the more family-specific tattoos that I’ve got going on.

I doodled a bit and landed on the basic image you see above.

This is nice, I think it’s super cute, but I also wanted to redraw it into a different pose. Something with more action!

Honestly, though, with everything I’ve got going on right now – I just didn’t have the motivation so I finally broke down. I gave in. I handed my beautiful doodle over to AI (ChatGPT, specifically) and asked it nicely to redraw it.

Cartoon butterfly in roller skates holding up hands in a heart shape. I’d like to see the same style/drawing but in an action pose like a roller derby jammer coming around the turn

It spit out this image in response.

I asked for the girl to be smiling and still holding her hands up in a heart shape. Round 2:

If you ask me, though, the legs are wrong. Or at least it wasn’t what I initially thought when I said “jammer pose”. I threw another image at the AI bot and asked it to reference that pose.

Finally, the AI bot gave me this:

I have mixed feelings about the process as a whole.

It’s pretty cool to see technology mostly do the thing. I asked it to refine my image and it did that, successfully. I don’t feel terrible since I did expend some effort to draw the original. So maybe it’s not so bad, this AI thing.

On the other hand, it’s a bit demoralizing to see the technology bring something to life that I would have struggled for a while to get to. The final image isn’t perfect for my purposes, but it’s pretty good and it took maybe 5 minutes to get there from my original drawing. I also know, deep down, that I didn’t need my original picture to get there. The final picture it gave me is quite a ways away from what I had originally drawn so is it really my idea anymore?

When does an idea stop being yours? How do you even know for sure that an idea you had was unique and yours to begin with? I guess it doesn’t really matter.

The AI exists because someone had a dream many decades ago. Year after year, smart people toiled away at little problems and built upon the work that came before them, and ultimately we landed with the current generation of AI. Something not quite sentient but fantastic at mimicking humanity enough that you couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was alive in some way.

We fed AI all our data, for better or worse, and look how it grows. All across the world companies are invested in this glorified digital assistant (so much so that I actually have a corporate goal on my performance review this year to “leverage the internal AI product” to produce code and/or documentation.) It won’t be too much longer before companies get even more bold and start replacing entire departments with these AI bots. (Ha, are you sure this hasn’t already happened?)

It’ll improve our lives in some way. Or that’s what the people on top will tell us. It’ll make us more efficient… collectively improved. More money will flow into our coffers and back into the hands of shareholders. We’ll achieve infinite growth once more! We’ll be more like the machine that doesn’t need sleep, food, or companionship. One step closer to removing that pesky problem that is humanity.

Oh well, I say don’t worry about it. This feeling I have right now… this is a critical component of my humanity and I don’t think the machines will ever really understand it. It’s a feeling best summed up by this other tattoo design that I got done a few months back:

In the end, I’ve got better things to worry about than stopping this train wreck from happening. Let it happen, see where the dust settles, and rebuild as necessary. Also, I have a design to finish because I’m ready to get this tattoo done.