As AI debate swirls, artists are torn between embracing it and trying to break it - The Globe and Mail

An image generated by DALL-E 2 from information submitted by artist Rebecca Brewer.Rebecca Brewer/Handout The Vancouver artist Rebecca Brewer is a painter; they apply oils to wood panels to create dreamscapes that hover between the abstract and the representational, offering a low viewpoint or hallucinogenic take on tangled images that might evoke the forest floor or the ocean depths but can't be pinned down. Inspired by the 17th-century tradition of sottobosco, still life paintings of undergrowth, Brewer brings attention to the overlooked or hidden, and lets the viewer glimpse images in their figures the way one might see shapes in clouds. To make work for their recent show at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver, they wondered if some artificial intelligence might help conjure up these surreal images. "I started to fool around with the Open AI tool DALL-E, developing ideas for the show," they said in a recent interview, explaining how they fed descriptions of the effects they had wished to achieve in previous paintings into the program. I could get to something quite similar to what I had in mind." Brewer resubmitted versions of the best AI-generated images along with new prompts into the program and eventually incorporated a few examples into their new works, projecting the computer-generated imagery onto panels and then painting them. Sabrina Ratté's exploration of the blurred line between tech and humanity is making her an art world star "I felt I was very creatively involved.