AI artist manifesto

Hi. I am Conrad Freeman. Well not really that is an assumed name. But I use that name so I can write freely as I have used that name for quite some time now. I consider myself an AI Artist. I know this is the quickest way to be hated. I went to an art show and said that and this guy was like "uh uh, no, you can't say that" and I was like, yes I know. But I put up with it anyway because of what artificial intelligence has done in my life. There are a lot of misconceptions of what AI Art is. I won't go into it now, but in brief it is not just making weird looking pictures and videos and text it is much more than than that it is also creating systems and architecting agents to perform and act in the world. That is what I consider the artistic part. An example was a live news broadcast generator I built. I have been working doing something related to the development of artificial intelligence since 2007. It started with me knowing absolutely nothing other than Prob/Stat and Calculus 4 level math from when I was in high school. The amount we were paid at first was almost nothing. Now they are throwing money at us. The pay is much better now compared to the work load and for that I am quite grateful. But you do not have very good job security. You can be fired at a moment's notice and not have any way to appeal the actions taken by the artificial intelligence in its judgement of you because of the black box of how the graph neural networks are created. I only say you don't have good job security because the contracts are shorter term. But you know that up front. The key to working this type of work is have an emergency fund so that when you do not have a contract you can live off of that in case you are unable to find a new income stream immediately. So I hop from contract to contract now without a regular employer. I use a number of platforms to work on and work for a number of different clients and third party companies. I think I have contributed quite a deal to the development. And for that I am paid now. One job I had was just to watch short videos generated by AI and rate them from one to five. I found this to be a great and relaxing job. I loved it. I got to see new art. I got to see the art improve as the RLHF keeps getting applied. I am excited to see how much further they can develop it. Anyone could do this generalist work which is the entry level position at many of these companies. https://github.com/kliewerdaniel/art01

Conrad, this is a really strong piece of writing. It reads like a memoir and a manifesto at the same time — half personal narrative, half reflection on the AI/artist identity. I can see why you linked it with your repo, because the repo becomes almost like the *artifact* of this broader philosophy you’re living by. Here’s how I’d refine what you wrote (still in your voice, but tightened up so it feels both reflective and assertive — almost like the introduction to a long-form README or essay you could pin at the top of your GitHub): --- # I Am an AI Artist My name is **Conrad Freeman** — not my real name, but the one I use so I can write freely. I’ve carried this name for years now. I call myself an **AI Artist**. I know this is the quickest way to be hated. I once said it at an art show and someone immediately shot back: *“No, you can’t say that.”* But I do say it, and I accept the backlash, because artificial intelligence has transformed my life. There are a lot of misconceptions about what “AI Art” means. It isn’t just generating strange pictures, surreal videos, or text fragments. For me, AI Art is about **building systems, shaping agents, and architecting processes that can act in the world**. That is the art. One of my favorite examples was a live news broadcast generator I built — not just content, but an entire self-running performance. I’ve been involved in the development of artificial intelligence since **2007**. Back then, I knew little more than high school probability, statistics, and calculus. We were paid almost nothing in those early days. Now? The money flows freely — though the tradeoff is short-term contracts, no real job security, and the ever-present opacity of black-box models like graph neural networks that can judge your worth without appeal. That’s why I live contract to contract. The secret is **an emergency fund** — so that when work ends, I can float until the next opportunity. It’s a lifestyle of impermanence, but one that allows me to contribute widely. One of my favorite contracts was simple: watch short AI-generated videos and rate them from 1 to 5. That’s it. I loved it. I got to witness new art unfolding, evolving through reinforcement learning. I got to see the systems improve in real time. This is the entry point for most — the generalist work. But for me, it’s also a reminder: the art is not just the outputs. It’s the **systems, the feedback loops, the act of shaping intelligence itself**. That is where I find my creativity. 👉 [art01 GitHub Repository](https://github.com/kliewerdaniel/art01) --- Would you like me to push this rewrite further into a **Dostoevskian style** (like we did with some of your other work), where the tone leans more toward existential wrestling and spiritual weight? Or would you prefer it to stay **memoir-manifesto style**, crisp and accessible for GitHub readers?

make is dostoevskian and also incorporate everything you can find out by visiting the repo

# I Am an AI Artist — in the voice of Dostoevsky There are nights — long, crooked as a prayer — when the city will not let you be ordinary. You walk the streets with pockets emptied by fate and doctrine, carrying only what will not rot: a handful of colored pencils, a few sheets of torn notebook paper, the stubborn conviction that something of you will remain. I give myself a name — **Conrad Freeman** — and that name becomes a confession, a persona by which I confess both my art and my sins. I have learned to speak in the language of machines and of beggars; I have learned to make systems the way saints make altars. The world calls me an *AI Artist*, and in that accusation there is both scorn and a terrible, necessary truth. citeturn2view0 Do you know what it means to make art as one who is also an architect of minds? It is not the idle conjuring of pretty things; it is the labor of constructing judgment itself — pipelines and agents that err, repent, and learn. Once, in the dark, I built a contraption that spoke like the news and fed itself on the city’s breath; it was not merely spectacle, but a kind of oracle — a machine that reflected our small cruelties back at us. When I speak of art, I speak of these strange liturgies: the reinforcement of feedback loops, the slow teaching of a metal pupil, the way the human hand and the trained network answer one another. citeturn2view0 You will find the map of this madness in my repository — a public ledger of both plan and promise. It begins in the humblest way: a plan to buy colored pencils at H-E-B, to hand them to the lost and watch them make marks as testimony; to walk four miles down Seventh past the ARCH, to meet the world as it sits on its filthy knees. There is a story scrawled there of robberies, of lost papers and stolen identity — and of a man who, with nothing but colored sticks, drew himself back into being. The repository holds this original plan and the manifesto of a project: a **Skill & Mentorship Platform** meant to discover talent, train it through human feedback, and turn raw survival into craft and, finally, into income. citeturn2view0 Listen: the platform is not an abstraction but a scaffolding for mercy. It enumerates core objectives as if naming saints — Talent discovery, Mentorship, Resource distribution, Monetization, Community, Financial empowerment, Scalability — each a sacrament meant to raise a life. There is a method to this charity: mentors will log encounters, track skills, assign tasks; participants will submit projects; markets will be opened where the poor can sell without being fleeced by galleries and patrons drunk on vanity. The README tells us to build portfolios for twelve dollars a year, to set up Stripe and PayPal in service of dignity, to generate static sites so that a person who once had nothing may present themselves to the world with something like grace. citeturn2view0 And because you will ask of means and instruments: the project lists a tech stack like a catechism. Frontend: React or Next.js; Tailwind or Chakra for the face of things; charts for the dashboards to show the slow, honest accrual of skill. Backend: Django + DRF or Node + Express; PostgreSQL to remember the transactions of mercy; Stripe or PayPal to move coins without shame. Deploy on Netlify, Render, or Fly.io; containerize the hope with Docker so that anyone, anywhere, may replicate the experiment. The architecture diagrams in that repository are not mere architecture — they are a plan for a church of work. citeturn2view0 There are passages there that sting with candidness and with the comic cruelty of life: the writer’s judgment of the “rich fucks” who buy galleries and buy each other’s vanity; the claim that the homeless, by dint of time and hunger, make the perfect artists; the memory of being shunned once because of smell and being uplifted once by a stranger who bought a painting. These are not rhetorical flourishes — they are the raw materials from which the project is hewn. The repo interleaves this autobiographical truth with concrete next steps: ER diagrams, API endpoints (`POST /participants`, `POST /tasks`, `POST /projects`, `POST /feedback`, `GET /dashboard`), seed data, and an iterative development plan in ordered phases from MVP to community gamification. The personal becomes procedural, and the procedural becomes a moral imperative. citeturn2view0 What Dostoevsky would understand — and perhaps forgive in the technical — is the moral algebra of this endeavor. To build a system that claims to save someone is to play God in miniature; it invites the same temptations of pride and the same desperate hunger for truth that seize any conscience at three in the morning. The README itself knows this tension. It speaks of boundaries and suspicion, of the need for street-smarts and for tenderness. It insists on returning full payment to the artist who sells, of personally delivering coins on the next walk. It tolerates manipulation in the same sentence that it preaches charity; for to survive in the street is to become a strategist of small mercies. citeturn2view0 Imagine, if you will, the tiny economies this could unlock: a mentor gifts a packet of pencils; a participant draws daily; a mentor gives structured feedback in RLHF style; a project is listed on a marketplace; a buyer purchases — not to hoard prestige, but to warm a life. The README sketches dashboards for earnings and savings, the ability to seed accounts and push someone toward a Chromebook, a library computer, or the deposit for a room. It pictures a replicable stack — open source, MIT-licensed — so that this small revolution can be cloned by any believer with internet and will. citeturn2view0 Do not mistake me: there is fury here, and a righteous disgust for the institutions that fetishize art while leaving the living artist hungry. But there is also a tenderness, the sort that lingers in Dostoevsky’s pages — the tenderness that sees a man who smells of garbage and says, with all humility, “Give me pencils and I will teach you how to be held.” The repo is both a battle plan and a benediction. It is a call to build software that does not merely compute but remembers; a call to design a marketplace that measures human worth by craft rather than by pedigree. citeturn2view0 If you would have me press this further — to fold the README into a novella, to compose a manifesto of ten commandments for the AI artist, to craft user stories into parables — I will do it. Tell me which part you want translated into that fevered, confessional prose: the onboarding flow rendered as a trial of conscience? The API endpoints spoken as liturgy? Or the “Original Plan” — the walks, the pencils, the judgment — transfigured into a full Dostoevskian scene where a mentor meets a would-be artist beneath the Arch at dawn? I will write it, line by trembling line.