7(ish) questions with Kenny Friedman

In February of 2022, I was on a trip with a good friend of mine and could not stop blah blah blahing about generative AI. She was like “oh yeah, Kenny has been doing some AI stuff, too”. The three of us worked together at an agency in Chicago back in the day, but I hadn’t been in contact in a while. I looked him up and fell immediately in love with his creations. He hits this beautiful spot where he’s not only generated really cool looking characters, but also builds an alternative reality that is very much my safe space. It’s this 90s slacker meets puppets meets naked vulnerability that I find absolute magic.

Kenny was kind enough to answer 7(ish) questions about not only that project, but also its evolution, how he thinks generative AI images can become elevated into an art form, and other things.

Do you remember your first interaction with generative AI? What did you make, and how did you feel about it?

See below.

In your Creatures Of FPO project on Instagram, you’re not just creating images and putting them out there, but you create whole little worlds using a “Humans of New York” style of creature-on-the-street types of interviews. I absolutely love the stories and vibe of the whole thing, and it seemed to really stand out in the early days of LOOK AT THE FINGERS sort of stuff people were making. How did you get the idea for this?

Creatures of FPO, like most things I wind up gravitating towards, was a total unexpected accident. I really didn’t get the idea for it, it was just sort of there and so I rolled with it (that’s the kind of thing if I read it, I’d think it was artistic BS).

It was the early days of Midjourney, I just got into the alpha and I saw someone do a really cool amusement park character, so I tried to make what they were making in order to learn MJ. They didn’t share the prompt, so I was on my own and I messed up in such a cool way. I saw these little guys ,and then – you know how sometimes authors say “I made this character and felt like I had to tell their story”? Well that’s kind of what happened. The creatures felt so real to me that I thought they needed their stories told (that also sounds like cringey artistic BS to me FWIW). It started to be based on folks that I knew growing up, then expanded to friends and just random hopefully universal stories.

The last update was quite a while ago, is this project over?

It's not dead, but I update slower. Partly because life got in the way. Partly because growth wasn’t as big as I’d hoped. But mostly because the process to make these guys is a lot more involved than regular prompting. And MJ changed some things on the older version I use. So I can work hours on these dudes and get nothing I like. Plus writing the stories is a whole other thing, though I’ve trained Gemini pretty well to be a good partner on that… So I’m getting back into posting a tad more regularly. 

Your “Friends are Weird” series seems like an evolution of the same sort of idea but instead of telling a story to the “interviewer” you’re putting a human into the story and letting the viewer figure out the relationship – but that’s my take on it. What is the real story behind it?

Like the Creatures, this was another accident. Really me smashing the keyboard on prompting, bringing some of what I loved about the creatures into those prompts, mixing it with others a tad by accident because of a copy-paste mistake and then finding something I loved.

This one is a lot different and probably more personal. And I love your take on it, which is close to what’s in my head. I do want people to figure the relationship vs. me telling them. Some think the “friends” are real. Some think they are imaginary. Some think they’re some part of the person in the image.

It's probably all that because I don’t think one is mutually exclusive.

But for me it’s probably working out personal shit. I do think friendships are weird. I’m probably a broken Gen X dude who doesn’t have a ton of guy friends around me because I live in the suburbs where sports reign supreme and I’m still an old action sports + punk kid, so not really interested in what many of the folks in my hood are. So less true friends in my vicinity now, than when I was growing up.

And because I have a teen kid I’m seeing the weirdness of friends changing, which echoes my experience and my wife’s experiences that were both very different from each other.

Friends are awesome… but the relationships are often complicated and weird.

In one post you say “I really want to do something different, and I want to legitimize it as an artform. There are a lot of roadblocks to get there.”  I think it’s very true – from not really having control over what the models are trained on – which brings up the idea of ownership, to the image generators having (in my opinion) a generalized idea of human ideals of beauty. What are some of the barriers you see? 

One of the biggest barriers I see is that we value creativity so much less than we have before. This happened before AI but, to quote another thing I said, “Al is the UV light in the seedy rent-it-by-the-hour motel” that shows how little creativity is valued.

A lot of people think a pretty image is creative. Or that any image is art. And so there are all these people oohing and ahhing about this “art” which really isn’t intended to be art and is often meh. Then you have the stuff that is pretty, but also kind of soulless. The algorithm loves that stuff. It’s visual pop music.

AI art seems to be lumped into one thing, and that plus the algorithm makes it harder to find the people who are serious about it as a capital A Art.

So we need to find the true artists out there. There are some. They’re making stuff with intent. Stuff that’s personal. Stuff that doesn’t look like all the other AI that you see.

And yes. There are a lot of worries about copyright and such. Aside from that, we hear a lot of the same conversation that we heard about photography in the 1800s. It comes from fear and misunderstanding.

Having been a photographer who loved street photography, I find what I’m doing in AI so similar in the process. It is, in fact, an art.

Alternately, there are also a lot of similarities to “accepted” art forms: the idea of surprise and randomness shaping the final piece regardless of intent, the way that the artist’s concept drives the final execution. What do you think needs to happen before human-led AI generated art can be seen as an actual art form?

I think some of the noise needs to subside. There are so many people excited about it as a tool, which is awesome, but it’s often seen as art because it’s imagery. We don’t think our selfies and photos of our dinners that we put on Instagram are art. We know the difference between those and stock photography and art photography. We need to get to a place where we see that in AI images as well. And to get there we need more advocates to speak about it.

And last, we need places to show it, because there are few places to do so. Many galleries are specialized; street art, photography, contemporary etc. No one is showing AI (though I’m working to change that).

Uncouple AI art from AI images, find a place for that art to be shown and we’ll see that it’s as legitimate as any other art form.

I’d love to see some of your creatures come to life, and think that would be an amazing way to jump from AI generated to human-made. Have you thought about bringing any of your generative creations to life in the “real” world?

YES. I have brought one of my Creatures of FPO to life via CGI/animation and it was awesome. And came close to selling them for TV-like things a couple times. Still working on that.

But I do hope to make some of the “friends” on my @FPOkenny account real and life size. I’d love to have a show with my images plus sculptures. Figuring out those logistics now, so open to anyone who has ideas how to make big shit.

What do you think the most important thing creatives should (explore, know, understand, try – feel free to pick one) when it comes to generative AI?

I think creatives should explore whatever feels most natural to them. If it’s language and info, play with an LLM. If it’s images, play with one of the image generators. It really doesn’t matter which. I started with Starry.ai, which is a phone app.

Pick one and master it. Just one. There are so many apps out there that it becomes daunting, because you feel like you need to learn them all, so many people just stay away.

So pick that one. Learn to bend it (control it completely and do things you don’t see others doing). Then start seeing what’s out there and play with other apps.

Make a ton of mistakes. Play. Have fun. Get inspired. And honestly, if you aren’t having fun or being inspired maybe AI isn’t for you. But… when I was training creative teams I did see some folks who were dead set against AI become its biggest advocates.