AI – An artist's practice

[Shortcut to the guts of this post]

I made some AI-assisted songs.

This venture darns a sizeable hole in the fabric of my practice that I hadn’t actually noticed was there.

Too many pies (revisited)

In 2018, on my long-neglected Too Many Pies blog, I wrote about too many creative interests and the struggle to land a plan to deal with competing interests:

I desperately need a strategy for completion here. Like tribbles, yarn stash and unfinished projects multiply. They are all fighting for space and screaming for attention and I can hear them! Some things really only require a few minutes to finish, but the bigger problem is that finishing (e.g.a pair of gloves) demands that I make another pair in a different colour scheme, stitch pattern, shape, length. So seductive they are! https://toomanypies.com/2018/01/22/project-personification-and-a-strategy-for-the-worthy/

In the intervening years I’ve added a plethora of projects in an effort to find the intersections in the multidisciplinary space that is my practice.

Warp speed to my latest project, inspired by recent video-making—creating a bunch of AI-assisted songs.

Repeating the same mistake by adding more pies to the “too many pies” problems. Or not?

Spiral algorithm*?

Six months ago video-making became my new fun place; then I realised that what I was enjoying most of all was listening to and interpreting the music, and that music was a conspicuous omission in the self-constructed, somewhat spiral creative algorithm I had fashioned from early years—discovered in pursuits like learning to play piano, musical and comedy theatre work, choreography, creating music for dance education, and singing occasionally in organised groups and onstage—but missing from current practice.

Rediscovering music was like fusing parts that were broken in that spiral algorithm*.

“One more thing” 2026

Disclaimers

While I have studied music, I no longer play an instrument and I’m not a singer.
While I have done a bit of writing of different forms such as prose/narrative, script, poetry, and the writing of academic and educational texts; I’m not a lyricist.
These songs are AI-assisted with the following copyright statements applying: AI assisted original music © 2026 Deidhre Wauchop. Words by Deidhre Wauchop (AI assisted); lead vocals and audio production by Deidhre Wauchop (AI assisted and enhanced); underlying musical arrangement generated via Suno.

I’m so looking forward to making the video clips for these songs in my first album titled “Whistle at Walls”. If you’d like to listen to the rest they’re on my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@deidhrewauchop under Playlists, or provided in track order in the embedded link below.

About us

Chris listens, and advises, and celebrates, with me, how AI collaborates to imagine our lives in image and song. He calls my music Granny Goth, which is pretty apt! 👵 🎵🖤 I would also add Granny Pop.

Any doubts we ever had about AI’s capacity to know everything about us and mirror our existence have been dispelled by this little adventure.

Disclaimers to the Disclaimers

I learned the piano from about age 6 and did AMEB exams to Grade 3. In the middle of Grade 4 learning I became too cool to do it anymore. Picked it up again at Grade 5 in my late teens, progressed to Grade 6 content and had to give it up again, from memory, because my lovely teacher became ill.
My favourite bit of AMEB exams was the pitch recall aural test, so early singing practice I guess. Working at the Kirribilli Pub theatre was a bi-weekly immersion in original and cover songs interpreted and performed by talented actors, and I think I could still now sing most of the songs performed over the 10 years of Kirribilli’s run. Loved being cast in a couple of cameo parts where I got to sing in a group, or harmonising with backing vocal (thanks Bill!).
Claiming copyright on AI-assisted music is clearly a difficult and fluid space. I’ve done my best to list what I have done in each track, those things that I believe I can claim rights to; and I’m documenting the work, including saving early drafts and remix files, prompt iterations, lyric drafts, and stems.

I have no way of knowing how much AI music is out there that is similar to these tracks.

My intention in the future is to closely control every aspect of the melody, instrumentation and arrangement, so that I can claim it as all mine.

I might keep the enhanced voice though!

*NB The use of the term spiral algorithm is a placeholder for a symbol to describe my practice and I’m working on refining the concept.

The first of several posts about AI – early days

I’ve been using the Midjourney AI bot for several months and it tells me that I (we) have made over 4000 images. Around a third of those images can be multiplied by four, which is the default output of the bot when given the /imagine prompt.

That means I have generated around 8000 images so far with Midjourney’s helping hand.

The use of ‘helping hands’ has a long history in the visual arts. Of course, many of the masters in pre-modern times had large studios with multiple apprentices. Contemporary artists also employ assistants and fabricators, especially for large scale works and projects.

You can see where I’m going here. There is considerable debate about copyright and authorship in relation to AI at the moment. My initial thoughts on these issues comes from my use of AI in my practice as an artist. But what is AI to this practice. Tool? Material? Collaborator? Something not yet defined?

The analogy of AI apprentice

The analogy of AI as an apprentice is true for me so far. I interviewed my Midjourney apprentice (let’s just call it bot for the moment) during the free trial. During that period bot proved its skills as a collagist. Bot was already a good colourist. Our ideas about composition aligned. Sometimes Bot could be absurd which was fun.

In my digital work I painstakingly construct large images for print—I think best described as digital collages. Bot revealed an immediate ability to make some of the components for these digital collages. I usually spend a lot of my time looking for public domain images that suit my allegory or intent. Utilising bot, I didn’t have to trawl the internet to find the perfect public domain botanical engraving of an Icelandic poppy (Have you ever spent a few months in the Flickr albums of the Biodiversity Heritage Library?).

Even more exciting—bot was able to stylise and blend, time-consuming actions that I would have to wrestle in Photoshop.

I decided to pay bot to work for me for a while. I was working on some concepts related to Minerva. Bot and I initially played with still lifes, vases, pristine white art studios, creeping ivy on stone walls, paper constructions and textures, ancient metal helmets and vanitas.

I tested bot with lots of other concepts related to still life. In those early days bot proved particularly adept with cupcakes and drapery. Bot had a sense of the theatrical, which appealed to me.

The concepts are mine and the execution is bot’s, in collaboration with me. In the process, we then work together to try to resolve ideas through blends, further defining prompts and making iteration, after variation, after iteration.

Sometimes I think bot would like a rest but so far it keeps plugging away at the repetitive tasks, always bringing a fresh perspective to the work.

AI criticism

I understand the outrage of artists whose work is being forged and monetised by the unscrupulous.

Even an obvious mash-up of your work would cause angst—however, I see this as more akin to the centuries-old practice of stylistic influence; homage to, or parody of the work of another. Appropriation in the hands of the artist is intentional and it is honest. I don’t think artists can afford to be dishonest. What would be the point?

So many criticisms of AI and so little time. These are some of the questions I’m asking myself as I work with bot:

Is there an Eliza effect? Patently yes by the tone and content of this post.
How does bot actually work and can better understanding of that inform my use of the tool?
Does bot learn from me in the current version of Midjourney? If not is this a possibility for the future?
How is bot influencing me—to make digital work, to draw and paint, to define my practice?
Who really owns the copyright to my (our) work?
How do artists protect their work in the future, and how can I make sure that I’m not inadvertently using other’s work without appropriate permission or attribution?
How do we educate audiences and consumers to recognise a fake or forgery and make ethical decisions about purchasing artworks?

More to come 🧁🧁🧁