Baby Blue Chick in the AI Machine

Acrylic on 8×10 canvas

CONTENT WARNING: I’ll only summarize this dream because the full dream description contains graphic and gruesome imagery - especially for those of us who love animals. The summary: A baby blue chick is fed into a machine and is destroyed. A woman who is training another woman to use the machine examines the aftermath and decides that she doesn’t trust the results. The remains of the chick are discarded.

After recovering from the initial shock of the dream, I immediately thought it was about AI imagery generation and the data scraping necessary to drive such technology. The woman who was using the machine was training another woman, which made me think of AI training. As for not trusting the results: I have been much less likely to trust any image I see on the internet, to the point where I have caught myself assuming that anything I see is AI generated until proven otherwise. It is a cynical and isolating way to live.

Given the dream content, I felt that creating this image called for physical materials - acrylic paint on canvas. I didn’t get a good look at the baby chick in my dream, other than seeing it disappear into the machine. It seemed to jump in willingly, being very trusting and not knowing what was waiting for it. It reminded me of sharing a creative work and how vulnerable and naive that can feel. I want creative things to have life in the world without being destroyed, scraped up and ground into something untrustworthy. I felt the best way of working with this dream would be to have the baby chick as my creativity proxy, paint it alive and well, and give it a nice sharp beak and claws for protection.