A while ago, early in my AI-assisted art journey, I wrote a piece called “Why Make AI Art?” I made it because I had become obsessed with the power of Sora, and was tired of justifying my AI-forward art to the community.
At the time, that was genuinely the question.
Why do this?
Why generate images when artists already exist? Why make cartoons this way? Why spend hours wrestling with a machine that sometimes gives your character seven fingers, two tails, and the haunted expression of someone who has recently seen God behind a convention's Artist Alley?
Why do I build in public - social cost and all - instead of getting along with the crowd?
I had arguments. Lots of them. Accessibility. Cost. Speed. Experimentation. The ability to make things that otherwise would have lived entirely inside my skull.
They were good arguments. Nobody listened.
I don't care about the discourse nearly as much anymore. Because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking why make AI art?
I got busy making it.
The argument became the artifact
Most of the things I know how to do, I learned sideways.
I rarely set out to master a medium. Usually I get interested in something, poke at it for a while, make a mess, discover one part that works, and follow that thread into the next problem. Curiosity becomes technique almost without me noticing.
That’s how I ended up making characters.
Then I wanted to see those characters in photographs.
Then I wanted them to stay recognizable from one image to the next.
Then I wanted to turn myself into them.
Then I wanted them to move.
And eventually I started building tools because the tools I had weren’t good enough, followed inevitably by building tools for the tools.
There’s a mechanical rhythm to this process that reminds me of a ratchet. You turn it. Something catches.
crrrink.
Keep the piece that worked.
Turn again.
crrrink.
Character.
Photograph.
Consistency.
Transformation.
Movie.
Tool.
Tool for the tool.
crrrink.
A ratchet doesn’t care about the motion that goes nowhere. It preserves the useful movement. Every turn locks in a little bit of progress, and then you get another chance.
That’s more or less how I work: try something, break it, learn something.
Keep the good piece.
crrrink. Do it again.
Eventually there’s a pile of strange little artifacts on the floor, each one evidence that the mechanism moved forward.
And somewhere in all that clicking, almost by accident, I’ve learned a medium.
So: see the work
TH4F can have manifestos. Clearly I am constitutionally incapable of avoiding them. But I don't want this to become another place where people stand around discussing whether AI-assisted creativity is theoretically permissible while nobody actually creates anything.
That's boring.
I would much rather show you the cursed first attempt. The work - the boring, un-glamourous work of making art - the work is the argument.
Every two weeks for the next two months, I'm going to put one furry-forward experiment on the table that I've created. Sometimes I'll provide demos.
An image tool.
A character experiment.
A haunted MUCK.
A furry video game recommendation machine.
A movie.
Some will be polished.
Some will be held together with tape.
Some may be so catastrophically wrong that publishing them becomes a public service.
Good.
This is not a portfolio
Portfolios are where you put the good stuff after you've cleaned the blood off. This is different. I want to show the process while it is still warm.
That matters because creative technology becomes much less mystical the second you can see somebody fumbling with it. People look at finished work and see talent. They look at process and realize: wait, I could try that.
Not everybody needs to make the same things I make. Please don't. The world contains enough chicken-fried possum lawyers already.
But maybe you see one experiment and think:
Huh.
I wonder if I could make my character do that.
And then you've got me.
Build weird things
Furry culture has always been full of this:
- Badges
- Zines
- Costumes
- MUCKs
- Webcomics
- Homebrew conventions
- Tiny games
- Animation tests
Even songs about foxes that absolutely did not need to exist.
People keep inventing new ways to make imaginary animals emotionally consequential. That's one of my favorite things about us. And I believe AI belongs in that workshop for exactly the same reason a sewing machine does: because somebody can make something with it.
So I'm done leading with the question Why make AI art?
I did. And I still attracted an audience doing so.
Now let's see what happens next.
~ Austen Tucker-Crowder