When is it appropriate to use AI? 🤖 (A bare minimum litmus test) ✨

I have lots of thoughts about AI, some of which are fairly clear, some less so.

But here are two principles I was thinking of recently that I think are non-negotiable when it comes to using AI, whatever your philosophical views of AI are.

1) Would you think it was OK in principle to delegate the task to another human being?

 

Here's a few examples:

 

Write a political speech. Write a best man speech. Data entry. Write a love letter. Write a social media post. Design your logo. Write a YouTube comment. Ghostwrite a book. Illustrate a book you wrote. Design stickers for you to sell on Etsy. Summarise the minutes of a meeting you were chairing. Write the captions of a video. Summarise an email from a friend. Book-keeping. Research your project. Write alt-text for images on your website...

 

Also, with each of these tasks, would you distinguish between a) delegating a rough draft (which you then take as a starting point and make your own), or b) delegating the entire task?

 

Different people will have different answers to each of these. What I'm asking, is what do YOU think is appropriate to delegate?

• If you'd be willing to delgate to another human, it may be appropriate to delegate to AI (other factors may of course mean it is not).
• BUT if you'd not delegate to a human, what makes it OK to delegate to AI?

We need to think about these things.

 

Would you delegate an illustration to brighten up a text-heavy blog post to AI? I just did. Not sure how I feel about that :-)

2) In a specifically Christian context, assuming your answer to my first question was yes, would it be something you were OK in principle with delegating to a nonbeliever? 

(I'm of course assuming a sympathetic non-believer who will do the task to the best of thier ability, not an anti-Christian troll!)

A few examples: 

 

Write a sermon. Write a prayer. Give you spiritual guidance. Design sermon visuals. Design church publicity. Write a Bible story book. Illustrate a Bible story book you have written. Advise you on the best candidate for a church job. Write a hymn. Write a tune for a hymn you have written. Plan a Sunday School lesson. Draw visuals for a Sunday School lesson you have written. Plan a church rota. Summarise the theological scholarship on a topic. Plus many of the examples in the first section...

Again, different people will have different answers to these. My question is what do YOU think is appropriate to delegate to a non-believer?

• If you'd be willing to delgate to a non-believer, it may be appropriate to delegate to AI (other factors may of course mean it is not).
• BUT if you'd not delegate to a non-believer, what on earth makes it OK to delegate to AI?

We really need to think about these things. 

Oh, and finally, if you have a chatbot that pretends to be Jesus, that is idolatry and blasphemy.

'Real People'?

Have just read this in Etsy's policies:

I don't get it. Etsy is very big on everything must be handmade or hand designed. Yet it allows you to outsource your design work to a robot? Hardly 'original items from real people'.

Writing a prompt is NOT being an artist. At best, it's being an art editor. Art editors do not claim they made the images they commissioned.

Colouring books for blind people

We were interviewed on YouTube!

 

Some searches are really hard to do on Google

  

I meant a young stork.

Easter stickers

I'm not very good at updating this blog with my actual art 🤦

I've recently got easter stickers printed.

First, some brand NEW designs, aimed at younger children, or new contacts who know very little about Jesus. Still the focus on Jesus' death and - especially - resurrection. Nice and cheerful and Eastery. Lots of eggs! But avoiding the wall-to-wall pastels and fluffiness that is characteristic of lots of Easter stuff.

 I also reissued my classic Easter designs as paper stickers. Aimed at primary school children. More depth on why Jesus died and rose - probably best for church kids who know the basics. Leaning into the sometimes ghoulish tastes of small boys💀!

 

 

I have other Easter stickers still available while stocks last. Find them all here.

Adult colouring book for blind people

I keep forgetting to post about my work here!

Warmish off the press...

This is a project I've been working on for a looong time.
An adult colouring book for blind and visually impaired people. You can find it here: www.kirstymca.co.uk/blind

The pictures are printed in raised ink by the very helpful West London Print, and are specifically designed to be as understandable as possible by blind people.

Also, I have scented crayons with tactile symbols on them, so people know which colour is which.

 

Leading a team

Read this in an article in an art magazine. But if you substitute 'artist' with 'team member' it could apply to pretty much any team, doing pretty much anything.

Numberblocks woz 'ere

I once read this quote by an author:

when you write your fantasy epic, stumble upon some attractive plotline and pursue it you almost inevitably find a little engraved stone. ‘J. R. R. Tolkien was here first’

~Chris Walley

As an illustrator of children's maths books, I can sympathize with this sentiment, though my plaque would read 'Numberblocks was here first'. 

We could give 1 a single eye? Numberblocks did that first.

We could give 2 glasses? Numberblocks did that first.

4 could involve square shapes? They did that first. 5's motif could be a star? They did that. 7 could reflect a rainbow in some way? They did that too. 8 could be based on either an octopus or a spider? They did BOTH (that's just greedy!) 

I can't possibly avoid everything they've done!

Lorem Ipsum is a Good Thing

When laying out a page design, if you don't yet have the final text it's common to use a dummy text in garbled Latin, which starts "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." (hence the name).

I've just been watching a very useful tutorial video on how to do some page layout stuff in InDesign. Very useful, but the narrator had a slightly monotonous voice, and the text on the page was - for no apparent reason - Alice in Wonderland. Guess which I was paying more attention to...

Adult colouring books for blind people

Work in progress...

Yes, believe it or not, this is a thing, but they're usually aimed at children.

 

So I'm working on designs which are clear and easy to understand for blind people, bold enough to colour with scented crayons if desired, but also more mature subjects than clowns and mermaids!

 

I'm not doing this on my own - I'm making prototypes and then passing them on to a blind friend to test. She didn't know what paisley pattern was like, or how big a peacock's tail is (and I've had to make it smaller than reality to fit in) before colouring these pictures!

 

 

In real life they will be professionally printed, and won't have all the uneven lines, spatters and smudges! But for now I'm using embossing powder, on lines drawn with refillable pens filled with a half & half mixture of non-waterproof indian ink and glycerine.

 

Maths Monsters

 Here's one of the promotional videos for the Maths Monsters books.

 

Unhelpful technical help

 "Browsers want you to think (rightly!) that site owners who can’t be bothered using HTTPS (it’s free in many cases) aren’t worth your time and certainly not your money."

WordPress 'support' article

If your article also explained how I could implement this in my site, it would be helpful. Maybe it's not always laziness, but lack of technical know-how.

On a similar note, it's amazing how many 'how-to' articles go: "It's really simple - all you need to do is copy this bit of code into the blah-blah-blah file gobbledygook xyz folder mumbo-jumbo" [location unspecified]

[Edit: I got it done, and it was extremely easy (simply moving a slider from off to on). What was not easy was finding out that that was what I had to do.]

Quote

 All the things that we create, whether you have a big audience, or whether you're just making stuff for the folks close to you. Sure - maybe those things you make will be forgotten. Or maybe the things that you create will get laid down as someone's long-term memory, and affect them a lot later in their life. So, make nice things. Try to give people something they'll be nostalgic about, not something they'll flashback to. You never know what impressions you might be making for the future. 

~Tom Scott

That's better

Just managed to get the I AM pictures in this post to show big when you click on them. Not sure what was wrong before.

I AM illustrations

Realised I hadn't posted this yet. Finished a week ago. Jesus' last three I AM sayings. (resurrection & life, way/truth/life, vine)

It was nice to illustrate some stories I've never done or seen in Go Teach before. I thought they explained complex ideas like 'abiding in Jesus' well. And we've never had a lesson that focusses so much on heaven before (plenty on how to get there, but not on why you would want to!). Although it's based on John 14, it also gets into Rev 21 themes.

Though with the current situation, when they'll actually get used is another question...

I tried to use complementary colours as I did last time, but I feel it was less successful - possibly because there aren't borders to bring out the colours. And I was doing it in rather a rush (partly my fault, partly not).

For your amusement, this is the original 'rough' I sent them, just to give an idea of content. A cobbled together mixture of my old illustrations in various styles, googled images, and clipart!

Watching a video while working

I do this sometimes (if it's a video you don't need to concentrate on, just glance at from time to time), but it can be awkward because you need to make both windows narrow, beside each other.

BUT I've just found a function in Firefox which allows you to pop the video out into it's own little window which you can place on top of everything else, and move around to wherever suits you.

That's handy!

Latest illustrations

Finally got these illustrations finished!

I'm really happy with them - not just "well, it'll do", as I feel some of my recent work has been. (Though of course I can still see bits where it could have been better). It's good to try new things.

click to see big

I took the time to shade them - not a lot of time, but makes a big difference.

My new 'inking' technique really worked well - I'll do that again. It completely missed out the middle step - so I went straight from the rough roughs below to final linework.

Not just quicker, but also gives a livelier effect. And since pencil's a more forgiving medium than ink, easier to get a decent result 😀

So the time constraint was a blessing in disguise, as otherwise I would just have done what I usually do.

I tried to hold each story together with a colour scheme - not something I usually do, but I thought I'd try it. Each lesson has two complementary colours, which I've tried to use quite a lot in the picture (not so bright, though!).

And, to finish it off, I added an overlay of one of the colours over the foreground and the other colour over the background. Tbh, I'm not sure how this works, but it subtly changes the colours and helps to separate foreground and background.

how I did it

showing the difference: foreground redder, background cyan-er

Not quite what I was looking for...

I was wanting a picture of a cute little middle eastern lamb, so I Googled it.

Not quite what I was looking for...

Though I guess that's how it ended up :-(

Fake inks

Working on a freelance project with a tight deadline that's going to be hard to meet.
I suggested I could just do finished pencils (quicker), but the art editor wanted inks.

Then, in the middle of the night, I remembered that Jason Brubaker just pencilled most of his reMIND comic, and then tweaked the levels in photoshop to look like ink.

After a bit of trial and error (I needed a much smoother pencil* than I usually use) this is what I got.

It's a small background figure, which is why the lines are so thick.

I think this is going to work!

---

* By 'pencil' I mean pencil tool in Clip Studio. I usually use 15 point 'chalk', with its standard settings, for pencilling, but for this I used a 25 point 'rough pencil' and put the texture density way down to 29.

Ecotank ink

My new printer has ink tanks, not ink cartridges.

• Better for me: last for ages, works out cheaper
• Better for Epson: because it's cheaper, I'll buy their own ink, not compatible
• Better for the environment: not wasting countless throwaway cartridges

Prints nicely, too.