by Darla Gallentine

As Silicon Valley locals, we see daily the evolution of technology in our lives and many of us and/or our friends are entrenched in the design of it.  It is awe-inspiring in many ways, a little intimidating (scary?) in others, and always life changing in some form or fashion.  We’ve seen AI pop into many areas over the past few years, from video games to medicine to driving a car.  And so, we wondered…can AI be creative?  Can it be MORE creative than humans? 

Every year the Modern Quilt Guild (MQG) hosts a Community Outreach challenge at the big modern quilt show known as QuiltCon.  A color palette is chosen by the MQG and local modern guilds around the world embark upon brainstorming, designing, and constructing a quilt for the show.  As the modern guild representing the techiest area in the nation, Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild always strives to create a quilt that in some way represents our roots. 

This year our design committee convened on Slack.  Of course, we want to use a tech platform to plan our techy quilt!  The palette was introduced (an array of purples, yellows, and blue-greens) and it was the perfect base for a California inspired design!  In Silicon Valley we are surrounded by mountains, close to the California coast, and blessed with amazing sunrises and sunsets daily. 

We set off on a brainstorming expedition.  As you would expect, many of our guild members have a background in engineering and so the conversations immediately went to technology in quilting.  We decided to feature Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our plan and we pitted it against the good ole human brain. 

The five largest circles in our quilt were designed by AI, including the middle block and the 4 larger corner blocks.  AI was instructed to create a “modern square quilt block using lines, angles, curves to depict an abstract or literal representation of the ocean mountains, sun using Bella solid fabric in mauve, prune, dove, pond, teal, canary, saffron, hometown sky”.  We used starry.ai to generate 8 images, 5 of which were then assigned to design team members to create in fabric.  We then offered the same prompt to each of our members with pieces of each color of fabric.  Almost 40 members designed smaller blocks using their own creativity to come up with a design. 

The layout was chosen as the MQG theme this year was SYMMETRY.  We landed on radial symmetry as this was a great way to highlight each of the blocks on its own while keeping with the provided theme. 

We hope you enjoy this piece as much as we enjoyed making it.  The guild consensus is that human creativity still trumps AI in the art space.  Do you agree? 

Hmmmmmmm, maybe I should’ve used ChatGPT to write this blog post…