AI Art And The Remix Culture
“Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas”
- Austin Kleon
Remixing has been an important part of the music industry, starting with the rise of DJs in the 70s, and popularized by artists like Kanye West and Chris Brown who have made versions of songs better than the originals.
But the remix culture is not just specific to music, it permeates most of the internet through channels like YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram.
What is remixing?
“A piece of media which has been altered from its original state by adding, removing, and/or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, books, video, or photograph can all be remixes. The only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new.”
— wikipedia
It seems to me that AI art is the perfect remix machine.
The AI Art Remix
AI tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are built by scraping millions of images, then teaching algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style.
The models are trained to recognize artist styles and reimagine new mashups from those styles.
