The Me and You collection is an exploration of the multifaceted relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. The series, which consists of 20 watercolor paintings featuring colorful, abstract cows in cosmic settings, speaks of the potential of AI in being helpful and dangerous at the same time.
Central to the collection is the idea that the cows represent the spirit of AI. While cows are tame and extremely useful to humans, they can also be unintentionally dangerous and harmful by their very nature, being so large and heavy. The same characteristics can be transposed, in my opinion, onto AI, which packs useful and helpful elements into a possibly dangerous essence.
The sweet gaze of the cows, their vibrant colors, and the whimsical aesthetics evoke a sense of joy, wonder, and optimism about the possibilities that AI can offer. But these powerful, mysterious cows stare intently at us, study us, learn everything from us and, in some case, they can even be disquieting.
The process behind Me and You involved a creative dialogue between me and an AI model. The collection was created by submitting the first watercolour of the series as a prompt, along with a textual prompt, to Stable Diffusion in Blender. The generation of 20 images was used as source of inspiration for the next watercolour, which was then used as a starting point for the generation of another 20 images, to be used in the creation of the third painting, and so on. The process was reiterated until the 19th watercolour. The last one, used as the keystone of the collection, was made without any interaction with the AI and was painted using my fingers directly, to better convey the concept of a handmade human creation, and ideally connect it to the creation of an AI, trained with a mosaic of human knowledge.
In summary, the Me and You collection invites viewers to reflect on the potential of artificial intelligence to support, enhance, and transform our experiences, while being a possible threat. This is precisely why I strongly support the idea of doing everything in our power to keep the tame spirit of the cow at the forefront of AI development.