I am not an artist...

...by profession, despite an unceasing attraction to the domain; I have a lifelong love of digital art, and have been aspiring to make pictures with computers (in some form or other) since at least primary school. It was my 'dreaming of becoming an artist' (but having a science-biased educational path) that got me 'into games'. Today I'm practiced in Affinity Designer, Photoshop and Blender; with full competency at creating and manipulating both real-time game assets and static images. I can draw and  sketch. I can also ideate and work up in vector, 3D and a 'painterly' style using digital tools. A practiced photographer, I can also balance, master and adjust an overall image aesthetic to a high standard.

As of mid-late 2022 the world has changed. With the advent of (and incredibly rapid improvement in) casually accessible AI image generation software, anyone might claim now to 'be an artist'. The technical aptitude required to turn out any kind of passable image has effectively been reduced to typing a search term. As a visual technologist, I'm personally 'all in' to this new art form. The raw output however, whilst incredibly competent in 'execution', almost always needs some form of sympathetic repair work by a human; it's within this domain that I'm now regularly dabbling. I want to say that I'm 'augmented by AI' in my latest output, but there's no escaping that for most practical purposes it's the other way around: I'm conceptualising, prompt-engineering, upscaling, then fixing and further refining the AI output - *I'm* the augmentation.