As the world’s premier board game critic, the question I receive most is “So, are your parents, like, verbally disappointed, or are they more of silent letdown people?” Number two is “Do you intend to use A.I. generated text and images so you can focus on the important stuff, such as getting your family back to work at the steel mill?”

A luddite at heart, I’ve spent my fair share of time kicking against the future. No more. Today, I’m ready to unveil the steps I’m taking to embrace artificial intelligence art.

#1. We’re Getting a New Mascot

You may have noticed some changes around here. For a long time, I used Botticelli’s portrait of Thomas Aquinas as my site’s identifying icon. A while back, I commissioned my friend James Mathias to create a version of the Angelic Doctor that would truly be my own. I hated it. The articulated fingers. The emotive, amused sneer. The pudgy legs creasing his habit.

So I used the power of artificial intelligence to generate my own mascot. “Chibi Thomas Aquinas,” I prompted. The result was the utterly perfect image you see above on the right. Observe my creation’s mass produced bobble, its alien stare, its cronenbergian hands. I stared at this homunculus and thought, “I made this. Like raising a child from clay and my own breath. The extent of my artistry is not limited to the equivalent of entering a phrase in a search engine. I am now as great an artist as James Mathias. Nay, as great as Botticelli. At least.”

Then a second prompt was entered into my own search engine, the one I call a brain. Why not explore the depths of my newfound artistic genius? I typed “space-biff!” into the bar. The combined combed internet made the same assumptions a bunch of you dorks have made over the years. Rather than referring to the crumpling hull of a destroyed space-battleship, or perhaps one cyborg-man slugging another in the mechanical jaw, I had created Biff from Back to the Future, in space. Briefly, I quailed. Is it possible to conceive of something beyond the bounds of consensus? Can the future of human art not be better than the eventual greyscale of a billion billion composite images scraping one another for content? Isn’t art meant to be a human endeavor? The answer resounded between the calcite confines of my skull, like the bars of a prison cell rattling open, setting me free:

No.

#2. We’re Generating All Content Via A.I.

My process has always been arduous. While playing a board game, I snap a few pics with my phone and instantaneously zap them over to my desktop. Later, I crop those images into rectangles. I then spend about an hour, maybe two, hammering out the text of my article like a highly evolved monkey at a highly evolved typewriter. All told, I’ve wasted, oh, two hours and fifteen minutes of my day. Those are minutes I’ll never get back.

From now on, all text and images on Space-Biff! will be generated with the assistance of artificial constructs that function as John Searle’s Chinese room with no actual semantic understanding of what they’re saying — which means any rude comments must now be directed harmlessly at a robot rather than at me. In fact, one paragraph in this article was composed via a chatbot, and I’ll bet you can’t find it. Meanwhile, the above images were an image generator’s depiction of popular board game Settlers of Catan. Pretty good!

Settlers of Catan is one of my favorite board games and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun strategy game with plenty of replay value. The game has simple rules but offers lots of strategic options as players build their settlements and acquire resources from around the island of Catan. It’s easy enough for kids to learn yet deep enough for experienced gamers to enjoy. With its modular design, Settlers can accommodate up to 4 people or be adapted for more or less competitive play depending on your group’s preferences. Overall, this classic game provides hours of entertainment and is sure to become a family favorite!

#3. You Know Who Needs to Be Taken Down a Peg? Artists.

If there’s one group of people I can’t stand, it’s artists. They make everything worse. Creating things that make me question my straitjacketed existence. Walking me hand in hand through the unbearable weight of my mortality and the ransom of the soul. I detest their enrichment. You know who leads a simple, fulfilled life? Children. Children in coal mines. Their fingers calloused, their lungs already spotted with the blackness that will lay them tenderly down. They sing in the mines. Not songs we would recognize from the top forty, no, nothing sonorous or rhyming, those are artists’ lies, but the dirge of those who know the value of an honest day’s work. That value is fourteen dollars. Redeemable at the company store for replacement galoshes, SpongeBob lunch pails, or artificially generated artthings.

Artists never did anything for me. They never made my life worth living. They didn’t put music in my ears while I traveled, vibrancy in my eyes in my moments of distress. They never unclenched my belly when I was mourning. As far as I can tell, all they did was ask for money to fix the problems they invented. Not like artificial intelligence engineers or Jeff Bezos.

Well, the turntables have come round the bend. A.I. art is the liberation of the ten-thumbed, the aphantasians, those of us who want to claim the title of Creative because we typed five words into a text bar and intend to enjoy the brief window before all these A.I. companies start charging an arm and a leg. Your time’s come, artists. Space-Biff! has joined the revolution.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)