Josef Dreisörner: AI Art Pioneering the Future of Creativity

Josef Dreisörner is a photo and digital artist from Munich. He started working with analog black and white photography 10 years ago. His tool of choice was a very unusual camera. It was a Klimsch Praktika repro camera, built in 1957, a large-format camera with an image format of 50x60 cm. His work was traditionally carried out in the studio and darkroom. Josef Dreisörner appreciates the creative process that goes hand in hand with analog film. Although this is time-consuming and laborious, it leads to excellent and incomparable results if done carefully. His preferred subjects during this phase included portraits and still lifes.

AI applications about to revolutionize the art world

Some time ago, Josef Dreisörner also started working with AI art. AI applications are currently revolutionizing the art world. Almost as if by magic, computer programs can create impressive works of art at the touch of a button. For Josef Dreisörner, who had previously used the stylistic means of classic black and white photography and darkroom work, the change could hardly have been greater. He came up with the idea of devoting himself to AI art by chance. He had just completed a series of six pictures with his large-format camera and then asked himself how an AI would interpret the same motifs. The results are quite impressive.

Self-portrait of a robot

The pictures show robots that are clearly recognizable as machine beings due to their construction, but also unmistakably display typical characteristics of a self-aware personality. One of these pictures shows such an android standing at an easel and making a self-portrait of itself with a paintbrush and ink box. Another picture shows an android dressed in a kind of saint's robe, with a miniature figure of the iconic "Robocop" at his side as a stylistic device. Josef Dreisörner describes this as a variation on the classic image of grace from the Middle Ages. A third image shows an apparently male android handing a red rose to a female cyber being.

AI is by no means competition or even a threat to established art

For Josef Dreisörner, AI in no way represents competition or even a threat to established art. He sees AI as merely another tool, just as a camera is a tool in the hands of the artist. AI can help him to translate his ideas into images and thus communicate them to other people. Contrary to what the term suggests, Josef Dreisörner does not believe that AI is intelligent. It is currently nothing more than a dumb computer program that generates an image with input commands.

In the end, creativity still lies with the artist

The current uproar surrounding AI thus seems comparable to the revolution that Photoshop caused in the art and photography scene 20 years ago. However, even Photoshop has not made classic realism in photography obsolete. This is therefore not to be expected from AI either. According to Josef Dreisörner, it also takes a lot of work to get an AI to produce exactly the result that he had previously imagined in his mind. In the end, creativity still lies with the artist. However, this only applies to sophisticated art. Josef Dreisörner does not deny that AI today represents enormous competition for established graphic designers in the field of simple graphic representations. He could imagine that AI will completely replace the human factor in this area in the long term. However, this does not apply to creative art.