AI and Me

And why I'm on Substack...

Ok, I’ll try to let up on the nest jokes, but I can’t promise I’ll be perfect. I’m very new to all this, so I don’t really know what to put here. I want to explain why I’m here and what I’m doing. But I don’t know if that’s interesting to anyone. It’s kind of a long story and maybe it’s really boring? I’ve seen people’s introductions on other platforms and sometimes I think they’re really witty and they make me want to get to know the person better, and sometimes they kind of make me roll my eyes.

Maybe that’s just me? And rolling my eyes at them was not the nicest thing to do and proves that I just wasn’t being my best self? So I guess I’m just going to say what I intended to say and I’ll risk the eye rolling. Of course, if this already sounds dicey, feel free to bail out now.

I’m going to start by saying that art has always been a huge part of my life. I started drawing as soon as I could hold a crayon. That was a long time before I learned to write. I don’t know how long, but I was slow at learning to write because it turned out I was a wee bit dyslexic. (That’s probably a detail you didn’t need to know. Moving on…)

Anyway, art was a big deal from my earliest memories. But art wasn’t the only deal in my life, far from it. I grew up as the youngest in my family. I had two older brothers, six and seven years older than me so there was quite a gap, and my parents were in their forties when I was born, so they were sometimes not much younger than some of my classmates’ grandparents, which was kind of odd.

So everyone in my family was a lot older than I was, which was especially noticeable when I was little, and they all knew vastly more than I did about everything. That “everything” covered a huge range of topics. It might be said, kind of but not exactly joking, that pretty much no matter what the topic was somebody in my family was familiar with it, and might even be expert on it.

To give a couple of examples, my dad was a civil engineer who was an expert on pre-stressed concrete. And my mom was considered something of an authority on East Asian art and art history and was called in to train docents at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. (Her best friend was one of the leading authorities on Korean art, too.) My mom also lectured at local schools on everything from astronomy to Egyptology to paleontology to the history of Native Americans in California and different species of butterflies!

My dad, in addition to being an exceptional civil engineer, was a brilliant photographer. He was also an expert cabinet maker and carpenter who put himself through college by building houses.

My two older brothers were both what you’d call card carrying geniuses. I say that because of the scholarships they were awarded. One of them was mostly focused on math and physics, and the other one on literature and art, but they both aced their SATs in both areas so that was mostly a preference, not a matter of capabilities.

I’ll add two examples here. In high school, my oldest brother had to write a term paper on something to do with ancient Mesopotamia. I forget exactly what; Nebuchadnezzar, Gilgamesh, something. He went out into the garage and whittled some dowels into styluses. Then he wrote his paper on 6 letter-page-sized clay tablets in cuneiform! He took them to school in a box, wrapped in burlap, and handed then in.

The teacher (I was told) opened the box, unwrapped the burlap and just stared, dumbstruck. Then my brother (with a shit-eating grin) handed over an envelope with his paper, neatly typed up by our mom. I assume he got an “A”? (Those tablets were in our attic for years. Sadly, I don’t know what happened to them or I’d post a pic.)

My other brother, when he was 12 or 13, got this analog “computer.” It was intended to show how computers worked. It ran off marbles in place of electrons. It had these little flip things labeled with “1” and “0” that acted as logic gates. You programed them with pins. Then you ran the marbles through and the gates flipped and you read off the output in binary. I thought it was cool the watch the marbles run through it. My brother used it for calculations because it was more fun than a calculator.

I could go on, but this is the sort of thing I grew up with. You could definitely call it an intellectually stimulating environment!

If no one in my family was familiar with a topic, we probably had a book on it. It was said, and I don’t think it was far from the truth, that we had 10,000 books in the house. I never counted them but there wasn’t a room that didn’t have a whole bunch of books and we lived in a pretty big two-story house, so I think they would’ve fit.

Our living room, which was the largest area in our house, was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves all crammed full. There were bookshelves in what we called the family room, and in the dining room and even in the kitchen. Under our long breakfast bar, there were bookshelves. Every bedroom had bookshelves, every closet had books in it. Even every bed had these large flat boxes full of books under them. Those were mostly for paperbacks.

We had this big semi-finished attic where my electric train was set up. It was large enough one brother set up a shooting range for his BB gun. (Many little green army men paid with their lives!). There were a bunch of metal shelves up there that were full of books. They also held a collection of National Geographic’s my parents inherited from my grandparents that covered about 40 years.

When my dad passed away from cancer, way too young, my mom decided it was time to downsize and that meant clearing out some of the books. She started donating books to school libraries all over the world. I think there’s some libraries in Africa that are almost entirely stocked with books my mom sent them. This went on for about 10 years, and when she finally had to move into an assisted living facility, we still had a huge number of books to donate.

I don’t think I really appreciated all this when I was a kid the way I should have. I’m not a genius. I do all right but I’m nowhere near the level my brothers were at. I’m mentioning all this because it meant that growing up, my interests were pulled in all different directions. My brothers knew what they were good at (pretty much everything) and what they wanted to do.

I was good at art and I was decent at other things — what we called “science” when I was little — and I loved history, which everyone in my family did, and I had no real idea what I wanted to do.

As I got older, I worked my way through the “oligies”: geology, paleontology, biology, zoology, anthropology; and astronomy, chemistry and even astrophysics. Except for astrophysics, which was a fail, I was at least a little competent in all of them. That didn’t help me figure out what I wanted to do.

The two things I was really good at were art and history, though not art history, which ironically didn’t interest me much. So when I was getting close to graduating from high school, I had to make a choice.

History, as much as I love it, did not appeal as a career. It meant getting a doctorate and teaching. I suck at teaching and I had no desire to do it, and I wasn’t too sure about spending years getting a PhD either.

My art teacher, whose name was Ms. Sargent (no relation to the famous artist, I assume), really wanted me to go into art and I was offered scholarships at two pretty prestigious art colleges. But what exactly was I going to do with an art degree? Starve in the dark, as the ancient joke for my youth said? That prospect didn’t seem very appealing either.¹

In the end, I decided to do something in the STEM field. It wasn’t what I loved the most, but I didn’t hate it either, and it promised stability. The most important thing to me though, was that I didn’t end up working on overpriced junk that people didn’t need. I wanted to do something that would help make people’s lives better in some way. Of course that sort of job pays a lot less than making overpriced junk that no one needs; about half as much actually. But as they say, money can’t buy happiness and it also can’t buy peace of mind, and that’s what matters most.

What I ended up doing is neither here nor there for the purposes of this introduction, so I’m not going to bother with it. It was challenging and it had its rewards, but I promised myself I would only do it until I felt I’d achieve the stability I wanted, and then I would switch to doing my art, and see if I could make a living with it.

And that’s what happened, but not the way I intended. After an extended period of serious overwork, my system collapsed from exhaustion. I spent a few months nearly bedridden which gave me a lot of time to think and what I thought was that this was a sign it was time to switch careers.

So when I could, I went back to work part time and started the process of transitioning to doing something with my art. I took up photography professionally, learned website design and maintenance, some coding and how to run a server, and did graphics and graphic design.

Then I went to work for some adult sites that were founded and run by queer women for queer women. This is the part of my story where people tend to freak out. Because the art I most prefer includes erotic art, and photography, and came to include videography. I love making art that is beautiful, sexy, and above all healthy, and all-woman.

No, I don’t have anything against guys but I’m just not wired that way. I probably have to say that or someone might get the wrong idea. Of course by saying it they might get the wrong idea anyhow. Oh well...

Anyway, working for those sites and one site in particular allowed me to express that side of myself with a freedom I’d never had before. And I really liked it!

But times changed (I’m not going to dwell on how) and sites like the one I worked for became less viable. I had to figure out other ways to make ends meet and I did. The sites went away one by one, and the coup de gras was delivered by COVID.

COVID nearly delivered the coup de gras to me too. Near the end of the first wave, I contracted a life-threatening case of it. I spent two months in the hospital, a month of that in ICU, survived three near-fatal episodes, and then spent another 3 months in Post Acute Care learning to walk again.

I’m damn lucky I got COVID when I was young enough to survive it but more than anything the credit goes to the excellent doctors I had, and especially the amazing caregivers who took care of me when I was in the hospital and rehabilitating. Thanks to them I recovered nearly 100%.

I say nearly because COVID left me with what I’ll call two legacies. One is a pretty impressive scar down my front from an emergency surgery (one of those near-fatal episodes) and the other is I suppose the main reason I’m writing all this, because it relates directly to my art.

Pardon my French, but an infection is serious as I had fucks you up. And the legacy of that is some neurological damage that has eroded my fine motor skills. My handwriting was never good but now it’s almost illegible, even to me, unless I write slowly and carefully.

For my art, it means I can no longer paint or draw with the precision I used to. The art I do is what a pompous asshole in the local art community once called “slavishly representational.” Yes, I believe in rendering what I see as closely as possible. A gallery owner where I explored getting my painting in said my work was “beautiful” but “did I have anything more controversial?”

WTF! What does that even mean? I’m not sure I wanna know. (I’m “post-Mapplethorpe,” and I’m not even going to think about it…)

Modern Art, whatever that means these days, I find alienating and depressing. It’s not that it’s unnatural, but that it’s anti-natural. I believe that the popularity of Modern Art, and especially its prevalence in public art, has a lot to do with (or is symptomatic of) the societal problems we face. That’s another topic which I may or may not end up discussing at some point.

The bottom line is that I no longer have the fine motor control to do the art I want to do. And I can’t do photography anymore, because when I no longer had the need — or opportunity — to do that professionally, I sold off all my equipment so I could get by.

I love Nature, the Natural World and natural forms. I love mountains and deserts and forests. I love the Ocean whether she’s tranquil and pacific or in a majestic rage. I love sunsets and sunrises and thunderstorms and magnificent trees and delicate flowers and big cats (and little ones!), and most of all I love women.

To me, women embody and epitomize everything that is or can be Beautiful and True. Beauty is not to be confused with what people might call good looking. Beauty is an act of will that expresses, and is expressed by, wisdom and intelligence, and Being with a capital B. The ancient Greeks believed beauty was a gift of the Gods and therefore divine, and they weren’t wrong.

The reason I do art is to try to represent that divine nature and say something about it that is Meaningful. (That goes for mountains and forests in the Ocean and sunrises and sunsets and flowers and big cats and little ones and all the rest too.)

Of course I fail. My talent isn’t that great. The best I can do compared to the reality I see is like a little guttering candle compared to the noon-day sun. But at least I could light some little teeny tiny candles. Post-COVID, I couldn’t anymore.

That required an adjustment and I tried to make one. Mostly I tried to lose myself in history, and I did to a degree and I discovered some really cool things, which I will talk about in this space.

But then something happened in the art world — more specifically in my art world. Generative AI. I’d known about Gen-AI for a while and been pretty negative about it. I still have some significant reservations about it, especially when it comes to young people, and that’s yet another topic for another day.

What matters now, is that thanks to a wonderful person and her art, how I looked at gen-AI changed. Instead of seeing it just as a potential social problem, I came to see it as an avenue for doing art, or maybe I should say assisting me in doing art, in a way that made up for my degraded fine motor skills.

Gen-AI art is a long way from perfect. As most people know, it can’t tell the proper number of fingers and it’s pretty hopeless when it comes to toes. That’s not the point; there’s PhotoShop for that. (I can still use PhotoShop effectively.) The point is that with its help, I can light some teeny tiny candles again. And that’s a big deal for me.

I will wind this up with one final thing. I love doing video. I always have, but when I did videography before there was no way we could do anything like what I really wanted to do. Anyone who has done videography at something close to the professional level knows how much work goes into it, how much time it takes, and how much it costs. And if it’s erotic, how much greater all those things are.

Not all the video I like to do is erotica — not even most of it — but regardless of that, so much was beyond my reach back when I did it. Now, AI video has been improving at an amazing rate. At least that’s how it seems to me. And while I still can’t do the videos I’ve dreamed of doing (except for maybe a couple), I can get closer with AI than I ever could doing what you’d call shooting real video in the real world. And I think that is pretty cool also!

The very, very last thing I’ll mention, I promise, is music. I have no musical talent at all. But sometimes I like to write lyrics. That goes along with the fact that sometimes I like to write poetry. But I’ve never had any way to set my lyrics to music and see how they might sound. Now we have AI music sites, and one I recently discovered is really very good! Suddenly my lyrics can be set to music and that also has opened up a whole new set of possibilities for me, because my favorite type of videos to make are music videos!

So now I can make music videos using my own AI-assisted art and my own lyrics set to music that at least I wrote a prompt for. And it’s all based on generative AI.

It really is a Brave New World out there. It’s scary in some ways and exciting in others. But to return to what I said a few paragraphs ago — to me, it’s all about being able to light some itsy bitsy candles.

That’s what this space is for, that’s why I’m here, and that’s what I want to share. With anyone who’s interested.

So welcome to my little candlelit nest; my Safe Haven for art and erotica and poetry and maybe some writing and whatever else I come up with.

So that’s it; pretty much my life story. If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll stay awhile and check things out and enjoy yourself enough to make it worth the time you already spent here.

Time is the greatest gift we can give each other and I want you to know how much I appreciate yours, even though no words I have are in any way adequate to express that.

So thank you, with all sincerity, and if there’s anything I can do to make your stay more pleasant, please let me know.

Blessings,
Robin

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1. Oh! Footnotes! Now you’re in trouble because I love to digress! ;-)

I want to add this footnote to explain some more about the environment I grew up in, especially in regards to art, since it’s so radically different than I think things are now. I’m not going to say exactly where or when, as that doesn’t matter (except to say it was in “suburbia,” not a city). What matters is what’s changed and it’s changed pretty fast, I think. Of course, I also suspect this was pretty unusual then? Maybe even really unusual? But I didn’t know that then, as it shaped how I view important things. This is what happened:

My junior year in high school, we are assigned a project in my art class. It was sort of a final and the results were to be displayed in the school’s main hall. It was to do a life-sized self-portrait. We got these sheets of art paper about 7 or 8 feet long and 4 feet wide for it. I had pretty severe social anxiety in my teens, so this was about the worst assignment I could get. I couldn’t get away with turning in a blank sheet, saying “That’s me wearing a wearing a white bedsheet in a snow drift.” (I hadn’t heard that story then, anyway.) But I did the next best thing: me in a cloak with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down to hide my face. (I don’t think my teacher was super-impressed.)

There was this girl in my art class. She was tall, slender, blond and pretty. She was also talented. She and I were probably the two best artists in our class. I don’t remember her name. We weren’t friends and we hardly ever talked. If anything, there was a mild rivalry between us. I painted in oils. She did mostly water colors. Charcoal and chalk versus pastels; pen and ink vs pencil, etc. You get the idea.

Anyway, she turned in her life-sized (that is, 6-ft tall) self-portrait. It was a nude — full-figure, full-frontal, living color, quite realistic. Well done. Breasts, nipples, pubic hair all visible, in a dancing pose, hair all wild, wearing an metallic eye patch with spiders and scorpions on her body (but not censoring anything).

She was 16.

What did my school do? They hung it with all the others in the main hall with all the other self-portraits. No one freaked. No one called the cops or CPS. We weren’t raided.

It was art. It was fine.

Yeah, it was a little out there. But it was fine. Art was about expression and if that’s how she wanted to express herself, present herself — even at 16, which was old enough to drive — it was okay.

They treated us like “young adults” I guess you could say. They trusted us and gave us room to explore and grow. And do nude self-portraits.

I think back now and my mind boggles. I can’t even imagine the shitstorm that would erupt if a 16-yr-old girl did that now.

When I hear about how teens are treated these days, in the name of “safetyism” I remember her. I remember those days and and I don’t wonder why so many younger people are so messed up now, caught in what seems to be a permanent state of arrested development, anxious and depressed and turned inward, especially teen girls. I’m not old, but it makes me feel ancient, or even alien.

That’s a digression and sad one. But it has something to do with my doing the art I do and why I want to share it. It’s my homage to bygone days when coddling was not the rule, when accepting risk was part of growing up, not something to be hidden from at any cost.

But that cost is massive. And we’re all paying it. I’ll shut up now.