Nicolas Tilly on how constant curiosity drives his experiments with generative ai

Nicolas Tilly is a Paris-based interactive media designer and teacher. He talked us through the increasing role ai is playing in his practice, and how he’s used exactly.ai to create an illustration infinity grid.

I've been an interactive media designer and creative developer for fifteen years, working on websites, video games and mobile applications. I'm also a teacher and researcher in media design at The Orléans School of Art and Design and ICAN (Institut de Création et Animation Numériques). When I was young and first starting out, I began with websites. The website is a medium where you can combine graphic design, motion design, interactive design, visual arts – there are technical parts and visual parts that must work together. It’s a great platform for strong digital design.

I graduated from art school in France, then went on to do a master's degree in digital design at ENSCI in Paris. After my studies, I quickly started working, which helped me to understand the creative challenges in the professional world. I had many different jobs, from web design to photography. And I’ve continued independently learning and training throughout my career. Above all, I'm extremely curious and interested in the many aspects of my design practice, such as code and AI, as well as staying on top of today’s tools and current aesthetics. I start every working day with an hour compiling links from the web and social media, pulling together things I find interesting – this is perhaps the most important aspect of my creative practice.

Constant curiosity and open-mindedness helps to renew oneself, so you can remain open to the many changes that society, and therefore creation, produces. I read a lot, mainly books on concepts and theory. Our world is complex and so is creation, so maintaining a career as an artist requires a high level of engagement in many areas.

There are so many tools available to designers today, which inevitably means that my profession is evolving rapidly. I've always tried to understand and participate in the major changes taking place in the creative industry. Tools are a central part of my practice; I’m always questioning how I can use them. My role as a teacher also allows me to keep up to date with developments in the profession, and to understand how today's young people see technologies such as AI. For two years now, I've been working with AI tools every day to familiarise myself with them.

As designers we face many challenges, from maintaining high standards in projects, to keeping abreast of changes in society and being able to include as many people as possible in projects. Women are still less visible, even if things are changing for the better. Another important challenge we face is ensuring we don’t jump blindly into digital technology without understanding its issues and consequences. The question is: do I dive in now, or engage with a specific mindset? This can be quite complicated, because my job requires expertise in digital tools. It also means drawing with a pencil on a sheet of paper is always a good idea!

I'm quite familiar with AI because I'm very interested in video games, and there’s been a conversation around AI in video games for a long time. As soon as mainstream AI came along, I was curious to try it. I use Midjourney, ChatGPT, Runway, Stable Diffusion, Dreamlook and of course exactly.ai! I discovered exactly.ai at a conference given by French designer Étienne Mineur. He uses AI a lot, with methods close to mine, so the tool seemed immediately relevant to me.

AI provides a form of discovery that interests me a lot. It allows me to think differently – to be surprised by the results. Most of the time I wouldn’t think of the kinds of visuals that AI generates. There's also the question of time, which is always a central problem in creation, and AI allows us to save time, particularly when it comes to designing visuals but also when writing code. I was extremely impressed by exactly.ai’s accessibility, interface and the overall experience. I had the impression that the designers using it were doing very interesting things.

I collected a large number of drawings to train my model. As a designer I’m always drawing diagrams and sketches; small ideas for interfaces or typography. My idea was to extend these drawings to other variations. I compiled the images, cropped them and then combined and harmonised them by training the model. But I also had a conceptual question: if the model is trained on preparatory drawings, what status will these generative drawings then have? Can we imagine new preparatory drawings? If so, for what kind of future projects? I really enjoyed playing with these ideas.

I decided to publish all the images I’d generated on a website, because that's what I specialise in. I wanted to share the visuals, so I created a site where you can consult all the images. I also wanted to use this opportunity to have a fairly large number of images and to challenge myself to classify them and lay them out – creating an interface for consulting and navigating through my experiments with AI. The site exists today and is called d[IA]gramme – I would say I made 80% of the images using exactly.ai. The crazy part is, I’m not sure I could have produced these images without it. It’s special in that way.

The simplicity of using exactly.ai is the best part. I also really liked the fact that image generation is done in a large canvas, breaking the routine of dialog interfaces like Midjourney or ChatGPT. I compile images on exactly.ai for several days, and the canvas feature allows me to continue experimenting with the images after they’re generated – you have all the images on your desktop or tablet to refer to. I found this approach very creative, and perfectly suited to a designer like myself. The infinite grid layout of my d[IA]gramme website even mirrors the way I arranged the images using my exactly.ai canvas.

I find this field exciting because it comes at a time in my career when I can exploit its full potential. I'm not at the beginning of my career, I've already got quite a few years' experience under my belt, which gives me a good understanding of what I want to do today. I have to admit that the last few years have been very creatively stimulating.