“If Only AI”: 50 Interesting AI Pictures

We previously covered Vincent's other project, Superwrong Magazine. While Superwrong features works from other artists and creators as well, If Only is strictly a personal project. It's a page for digital visual art created with the help of artificial intelligence. The artist describes it as a "merge between art and AI."

Vincent has already garnered some attention from the press for his project If Only. He started the account only in June 2023, but already has over 60k followers. The artist told Parametric Architecture that he uses the program Midjourney, and that working with AI helped him to express his vision.

Most of the stuff on If Only AI features architectural wonders as well as satirical portraits of famous people. There's one question that the creator is itching to answer. "What is absent from our reality that I would love to see come to life?" 

Based on this thought experiment, he imagines innovative scenarios and audacious architecture and pushes the boundaries of what we understand as art.

We asked Vincent to tell us more about the inception of If Only Ai. "I launched my artistic alias ‘If Only’ in early July 2023 after months of self-taught training," the creator says. "The idea behind this project was to share with others the extent of my ideas and concepts that I had accumulated over many years."

The person behind If Only AI looks for creative incentives everywhere. "My inspirations are diverse: my desires, dreams and nightmares, architecture, travels." Interestingly, he also gets inspired by brands and advertising. "With a background in marketing, I love imagining and visualizing what brands could do in terms of scenography, events, textiles, etc.," the creator adds.

As we already mentioned, the main tool in Smadja's arsenal is the generative AI program Midjourney. "I work exclusively on Midjourney and, more recently, on Magnific AI to upscale my images," the page's curator says. "In reality, there is no 'recipe' process. Similar to design, there are many different paths to achieve a satisfactory result."

The creator takes us behind the scenes of his process. "Before starting to prompt, I idealize in my mind what the expected result would be," he begins. "Once imagined, I dive into production with perseverance to achieve what I envisioned at the beginning." Vincent emphasizes that perseverance is key to his creative process.

Naturally, the ability to input good prompts doesn't come overnight. The image-creating process therefore can be arduous. "The biggest challenge on Midjourney is adding fantasy to an existing place, product or subject. To be honest, it doesn't always work," the creator is honest. "I have developed techniques to get as close as possible to reality with my creativity as makeup."

Overcoming these challenges is what Vincent finds the most rewarding throughout his journey as the curator of If Only AI. "What I love most about my creative process [is] battling with Midjourney," he claims.

"Many things do not (yet) work on Midjourney. But when I manipulate my different techniques to do what is basically not possible and achieve the expected result, it's a joy."

And here we find ourselves pondering the most burning question: what do we as a society think of AI art? Is AI-generated creativity legit? Is it an art and design killer? We asked Vincent's opinion on the topic. And he has a very open-ended answer. 

He says he simply doesn't engage in such conversations with critics and doesn't have a formal answer. "Art, in my opinion, is a very personal perception. AI is, for me, a liberating tool for creativity – but is a creative person a creator? I leave you to ponder on that."

Some artists have nothing against AI-generated art. They think it will only propel old-school artists to greater heights by making physical art more special, unique and desirable. Others believe that the pressure of existing AI-generated images might improve the personal style in their art.

However, some artists have a more bleak outlook. Artist and critic Eric Wayne likens this moment in time to when Microsoft's Deep Blue defeated Chess master Gary Kasparov. 

"I still hold onto the notion that someone could certainly use AI in a very individual and creative way, but that just trains the AI, in which case the AI then shares that same capacity to use against humans, so to speak."