In this final part of Don’t Paint What You See, I turn to the generated puppet characters I used in my introductory video. They helped tell my story, but making them left me with questions about authorship, ownership and the creative labour behind the tools.
My background in graphic design and illustration made digital processes familiar territory. I was already comfortable handing tedious tasks over to software. Yet generating characters outright in GPT is different from asking a program to trace an image I had supplied.
I could have illustrated these graphics myself. I could also have told the story without them. Saving time was part of my decision, but so were curiosity, experimentation and wanting to explore how these technologies could help me introduce the complex theoretical ideas in my literature review through visual storytelling.
That is where the tension sits. I benefited from the convenience while remaining concerned about how generative systems were developed, whose work informed them, and how creative skills and labour might be valued as these tools become increasingly familiar.
Copyright enters this discussion, but it cannot answer every question I have. Permission to use an output does not settle how I feel about making it, or reconnect it with the human histories behind the system’s capacity to produce images.
Across these three videos, I have followed ambiguity from the studio, through community responses, and into the technologies supporting my practice. I have not resolved that ambiguity, but I can now describe more clearly where it arises and how it shapes my decisions.
Next, I’ll turn to appropriation in the arts, followed by the readymade and the relationship between choosing and producing. These histories offer another way to examine the questions emerging in my studio.