The Calgary Public Library’s artificial intelligence (AI) resident artist reflects on his work and the backlash that the position has faced as the term comes to an end.

Over the summer, Paul Freeman served as the inaugural AI Collaborative Artist as part of the library’s creatives-in-residence program, a position that began in late June and will finish the first week of September.

Marking the conclusion of his contributions, an exhibition of Freeman’s work will be displayed at the Central Library downtown. This will be officially opened with a showcase on Sept. 3, which the public is welcome to attend from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

During his residency, Freeman, a Calgary-born independent visual artist, has pieced together his art and hosted workshops to teach attendees how to create complex images using an AI generative fill software that he personally coded with Claude.

Generative fill is a tool popularized by Adobe’s Photoshop that lets users select a section of an image and add, remove, or modify it based on the prompt they provided. Due to the cost and processing time, Freeman felt limited by Adobe and decided to build his own.

This resulted in a program that does roughly the same thing but on a much larger scale. Freeman’s interface is an image grower that relies entirely on AI to turn text prompts into fully customizable individual tiles that combine into an image ranging from thousands to billions of pixels. 

He described the software as “AI to the max,” meaning it uses sources found on the Internet and assembles them to match whatever the user asks it to resemble. Freeman called it a “game” that requires the user to approve or reject parts of the generated variations. 

“I built all of this as a way of essentially moving the model, which always wants to go to the middle, to the edge. It always wants to make stock photos — these models are all geared towards pleasing,” he said. 

“Part of my game is: can I get to the outliers? Can I get to the margins, where I like to be anyway?”

Pushing the boundaries of what constitutes art

Freeman said that his style has always been avant-garde and began when he shifted away from jewelry-making and drawing while attending the Alberta University of the Arts in Edmonton. Here, he started experimenting with layering pictures using a colour photocopier. 

They were large-format memento mori pieces, which is Latin for “remember you must die.” The approach is used by artists to memorialize living beings, and for Freeman, this sometimes meant overlaying floral borders on pictures he had taken of roadkill.

However, the pictures he used were not always his own, and during this experimental phase, Freeman said he began to question what it meant to make original art and whether he fit the description. 

“I was very interested in that intersection of like, what’s making, what’s not making, how do you define making and authorship?” he said. 

“Eventually, I was just like, I don’t need to be worried about that so much. I know I’m original, so whatever that means, I know I’m authentic, so it just became a sort of assemblage.”

This proved to work out for Freeman, as when he graduated in 1998, he was awarded the Governor General’s Academic Medal for outstanding scholastic achievement. Six years later, he earned his master’s in drawing and intermedia from the University of Alberta.

In addition to his art earning prizes at several exhibitions, he served as the artistic director of the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts and was commissioned by the City of Edmonton to create sculptures for its new LRT station in 2022.

Shortly after this, Freeman began dabbling in using AI to create art, which he said started out of pure curiosity and has since morphed into its own style — one that mirrors his earliest conviction that he didn’t mind a “weird picture.”

Considering AI as a medium, not a threat

Now, four years after Freeman first experimented with using the software to make art, he said he was inclined to throw his name in for consideration for the position because of a conclusion he reached: AI-generated art captures people’s attention, which has become a rare commodity. 

“Is it possible to take the slopper, the slop maker, and use it to generate density in an image that will actually make you stop and look, maybe even make you want to come back and look again,” said Freeman. 

“That’s been the basic mission. Like, is it possible to make something good out of something bad?”

When the library announced it was accepting applications for the AI resident position on Instagram, the Feb. 27 post garnered hundreds of comments from creatives opposing the technology and its use in art.

This spiralled into a petition against the library, which received upwards of 1,300 signatures. LWC interviewed local artists who shared their reactions to the announcement, and both agreed it “felt like a bit of a slap in the face.”

In a February email statement, the library told LWC that the position is intended to help improve Calgarians’ understanding of AI, not to replace existing artists or their work. 

Namely, the program was envisioned to “explore the questions this technology raises in relation to creativity and art, using AI responsibly and ethically as part of their process,” read the statement.

Freeman said he understood why the announcement received the negative pushback it did, but noted that this is not the first time in history that the advent of new technology has made artists feel threatened. 

“Musicians yelled for about 100 years when recorded sound arrived. It took 100 years for musicians to resolve how that fits in their lives,” he said.

“Nobody thinks that anymore…I’m pretty confident that this moment is going to settle.”

As long as art generated using AI is original and intentional, Freeman said it is ethical, and stressed that it should be considered a medium rather than a method for replacing human creatives.

“The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I’m right,” he said. 

“It’s not a hammer — it’s paint. It’s just paint. It’s the coolest thing in the middle of the tool and the person.”