Drawing a Dragon - An AI Conversation

AI Creation

 

Smaug from The Hobbit movies

I asked ChatGPT to draw me a picture of a dragon. It gave me the first one above. I initially thought, aha, I have caught you plagiarizing, because the image reminded me immediately of Smaug the dragon in The Hobbit movies.

But upon looking at pictures of Smaug online, as you can see, the AI did not plagiarize. That is not the dragon from the movies. Besides, the dragon in The Hobbit movies would have been made with computer generated stuff, CGI, and apparently the animators drew inspiration from bats, alligators, and lizards for different features.

And a dragon is a dragon. It's sort of like drawing a human and expecting it to look like, well, a dragon. Obviously when I said, "draw me a dragon," ChatGPT was going to come up with some kind of dragon looking thing.

The fair use - or not - of art and literature in the LLM AIs is a complex and interesting topic. What happens when machines begin to read, remix, or even generate creative work?

People who support AI - and I suppose I would be one of them, because I see it as a tool - think the use widens the creative field. In other words, it gives a writer or an artist a bigger scope. I may not have read War and Peace, but maybe there are drips of it that I could have, or should have, used in my own work, some syntax or rhythm, maybe an idea or offshoot. And the truth is, no one can read every book or see every work of art. AI can sift through vast bodies of literature or art history, revealing patterns and influences that would take humans years to uncover.

Given that, AI can create new forms of expression: algorithms can generate images, stories, or music that I might never think to create, offering fresh textures and unexpected combinations.

For people who don’t consider themselves artists, AI can act as a collaborator—helping them sketch, draft, or experiment without the pressure of perfection.

If you look at it like this, AI isn’t replacing creativity; it’s expanding the toolkit.

However, AI is trained on existing works. It doesn't come from nothing. And it's not trained only on existing works that are out of copyright. If it were, it would all sound like Henry James or Charles Dickens. AI is trained on everything from The New York Times to the latest James Patterson novel.

And if that's the case, is the output really original? What does "original" mean if the work being spit out has its basis in Shakespeare and Nora Roberts?

Many artists worry their work is being used without consent, compensation, or even acknowledgment. That's valid. It takes a long time to write a book, to draw a picture, to engineer something.

It didn't take long for me to recognize a ChatGPT piece online. Especially in earlier models, the pattern of language was something I quickly caught. The way it used commas, or em dashes - which I never use, I just use a dash because em dashes take an extra step and I forget what it is - led to a lot of little essays that basically all read the same.

Newer models are not quite so predictable, but the methodology is still there if you look for it. Those cute little stories on Facebook that have some little "awww" moment or heart-jerking end-line? All the same thing.

We’re in a transitional moment with AI. Look again at the two pictures. They both were created with computers, but one, the one from the movie, was created with real people doing an awful lot of work to make up a realistic looking dragon. And ChatGPT in about a minute, maybe less, coughed up this lovely little dragon picture that immediately made me think "movie" and then look to see if that were indeed the case. 

What do we value in art? Is it the final product, or the methodology? Imperfections, the lived experience, the point of view - all of this matters in a piece of creation when humans are behind the effort.

I'm not so sure that has any effect on the things an AI spits out.

The conversation isn’t about choosing sides so much as deciding what kind of creative ecosystem we want to build. 

Like most things in art, the tension itself might be part of the story.