Meet: Soul.
Lover of gaming, music, and exploration. Haitian, Jamaican, born in Queens, NY who hopes to live to the year 2100.
“I love going outside and sun gazing, just letting it hit my skin. I LOVE music and listening to music, and I really enjoy peaceful spaces.” —Soul
“For a long time, I really didn’t have the ability to visualize my creativity for myself, let alone other people. It always felt like I had all of these cool ideas, but I was never able to manifest them until now,” Soul says of the generative art experience.
“And now it’s consumed me,” Soul jokes. “If I’m not at work, or sleeping, I’m generating, and even being at work doesn’t stop me too much.”
Jokes aside, Soul says, “it’s given me an outlet and it makes me feel really free.”
Finding Expression
Soul says, “I struggled with expressing myself a lot growing up, so my only outlet was really listening to music. I was able to live in my own world and visualize it through music. Now that I have artificial intelligence tools, I can really express my emotions, and creativity through art, something I’ve been longing to do forever.”
“It just really freeing. I’m just really excited to when we’re capable of making videos with artificial intelligence tools. Then I can really go crazy with some of the ideas I have.” —Soul
Soul is finding exciting ways to connect with their audience on an intimate, emotional level. They say, “a fun thing I like to do with pieces I’m really connected with is put a song that matches the emotion of the generative art piece on the actual post, rather than the story. That way I hope the person who sees the post really feels the emotions that I feel looking at the art.”
Style and Soul
“I made [the piece below] a while ago. It’s a part of my quest to visualize my interpretation of a higher power. I come from a religious home, though I’m more agnostic nowadays,” Soul says. “There’s always a weird string that holds me to the idea that there may be a God. So, I think pieces like this really put me in a weird place, I don’t really know how to explain it.”
“One thing about my style is that it will probably never be consistent, but I always follow the theme of something ethereal. Something that I also find extremely important when putting out art is creativity,” Soul says. “I am all about trying to think of concepts that other people haven’t done before, and I really try to have my art reflect that.”
GET-A-PROMPT: Opportunities in Representation and Culture
The bias for euro-centric and white-skinned characters can be disheartening for many people. We love the ways people maximize the tools to celebrate culture and underrepresented populations. We also love Soul’s forward-thinking, solution-oriented approach to prompting.
“Being black, I try to make sure that I do my part to highlight black people in the ai art space. I think it’s cool that there are other people out there making an effort to represent their cultures,” Soul says.
"If you ever struggle making a basic plain black person, that’s not part of an ethnicity or anything like that, use ebony in your prompt. So, for example: ‘a portrait of an ebony woman from the 1850’s with Bantu knots and wearing a corset,’ make sure that the word placement is right though, since it will probably change drastically if you put ebony anywhere else.”
2100 looks bright.
“I don’t think [2100] be like anything we have like today. It’s even hard for me to really imagine what it would look like but if I really had to settle on an idea, I think we’ll have permanent homes on the moon, with early settlements on mars and a research colony on Titan/Europa,” Soul says.
“Back home on earth, I think we’ll have reached AGI (artificial general intelligence) and have technologies we thought would be in movies. Stuff like brain computer interfaces being commonplace, VR indistinguishable from real life, clothes that can clean themselves, there are so many possibilities.”
“I’ve built a lot of confidence in myself. I feel emboldened to try new things and I’ve realized I have a stronger desire to explore than I originally thought.” —Soul
“Right now, I mostly want to reach more people, hit that 10,000-follower milestone on Instagram. Maybe turn this into more than a fun hobby,” Soul says. “With more time, I’d love to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop, so I can edit my images a bit more, and I’d also love to learn how to animate my images more, to turn them into scenes.”
“Don’t get discouraged with the little bit of discourse out there, generative art is something that inspires people to explore their creativity.” —Soul