AI-Assisted Art

I think it's going to make a serious dent in the stock art business. For less than the cost of a piece of stock art, I can get art that never existed before*, and is closer to my story. If I were inclined to use stock art, I'll look at AI art instead. But if I planned to spend money on new art from an artist, I think I'd do better to stick with that. You can converse with an artist and work through ideas. You can't converse with the AI (yet).

Some artists use the AI to start a project, and then apply their skill to take it higher.

*The AI art contracts I've read grant them rights to reuse the work or create derivative works. After all, if you feed the AI the same prompts, it's likely you'll get substantially the same results. Trying to prevent that would be hard.

I've just had a play with MidJourney and it's pretty amazing. The contest currently specifies that "Use of gray scale in illustrations and mixed media, computer generated art, and the use of photography in the illustrations are accepted." - I wonder if they'll adjust the rules with the growing visibility of AI, especially considering recent upsets.

I can see how it's a threat (and perhaps an insult) to visual artists who have devoted their lives and creativity to developing skills in drawing or painting!
I know several (well ... Facebook 'friends'), professional SF and Fantasy cover artists ... and they utterly hate it. Hate the very idea of it.

"No jihad but the Butlerian Jihad!"

At the same time, I'm a photographer and a big lover of digital art and Photoshop filter fx ... 
I'm old enough to remember it was a big debate whether using Photoshop wasn't "cheating" and being a "hack" ... and that debate has long since fallen into the dust bin of history. 

IMAGINE though ... What if these same AI's progress to the point that they can WRITE FICTION?

What's the expression? "IDEAS are easy ... WRITING is hard."

Imagine the garbage that will flood us when hacks can tell their AI "Write a story with Elves ... and talking manga ninja cats ... and put in  three hot sex scenes!"
And then have a cup of coffee and come back and that's been unleashed on the world.  🙁

Are they writers?  An even better example: an AI that is literally 1 MILLION MONKEYS at 1 million typewriters.  🙁

Give me SHAKESPEARE ... even if there's a Bubonic plague involved!

Posted by: @soulmirror

IMAGINE though ... What if these same AI's progress to the point that they can WRITE FICTION?

What's the expression? "IDEAS are easy ... WRITING is hard."

Imagine the garbage that will flood us when hacks can tell their AI "Write a story with Elves ... and talking manga ninja cats ... and put in  three hot sex scenes!"
And then have a cup of coffee and come back and that's been unleashed on the world.  🙁

Are they writers?  An even better example: an AI that is literally 1 MILLION MONKEYS at 1 million typewriters.  🙁

Give me SHAKESPEARE ... even if there's a Bubonic plague involved!

There are quite a few AI story generators. Similar to AI art, you put in a seed paragraph and they'll spit out some following prose. My sister (a professional writer) and I played around with SudoWrite to see how well it worked. It's useful in some sense to flesh out ideas ... characters, character names, plot twists. But the prose it spits out is pretty much useless. We were trying to create a campy sci-fi space pirate story, so nothing serious and silliness was a-ok. Even so, major editing required for it to make sense as a story (grammar was fine). But a scammer (lots of those in Kindle Unlimited) could crank out lots of words and skirt Amazon's minimal scrutiny to create books they can pay the bots to turn through and get page reads. It's not there yet for writing any kind of compelling and consistent story. I think the AI graphic arts are ahead of AI writing algorithms.

Here's an interesting article on it. It seems artists are worried about being ripped off and not being able to opt out of having their work sampled. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62788725

Posted by: @ease

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I've just had a play with MidJourney and it's pretty amazing. The contest currently specifies that "Use of gray scale in illustrations and mixed media, computer generated art, and the use of photography in the illustrations are accepted." - I wonder if they'll adjust the rules with the growing visibility of AI, especially considering recent upsets.

Yeah, so the contest does not permit use of A.I. generated art. 'Computer generated art' exclusively refers to art programs like photoshop/GIMP/e.t.c.

Trust me, on this one. Official wording coming out soon, I believe.

I think AI generated art is fascinating and it’s going to do interesting things to the art world but it doesn’t belong in a contest between human artists unless the point of the contest is AI art generation. I would not consider AI generated art to be my art no matter how many prompts I gave. I would consider it having a computer do a commission for me. There are short-cuts in all mediums and some artists use them, some don’t, but short-cuts are not the same as having someone else draw your idea. 

That said, as an artist I don’t hate AI and I’m not afraid of it. I like the idea of both acknowledging that as artists we have our own skill-sets and styles and that we can be inspired by and learn from AI art.

I think the worry is that AI art basically scrapes the work of all the artists and then imitates them. A good example for worry is the recent DeviantArt change, which opted in everyone's art for their AI system (you had to choose to opt out, everyone is in by default, and every single piece has to be opted out individually), and their system allows for you to request art in the style  of a specific artist--which you can only opt out of by a submitted request that takes over a week to process--so suddenly, if you like the work of a specific artist who has spent years honing their craft and style, instead of going to them to commission work, you can just ask the AI for a piece, then pick and choose.

Using it beyond a few requests requires payment. That payment doesn't go to the artists.

The concern is that it will get better, and that the specificity of requests you can make will also. Past a certain point, this stands to wreck the viability of art as a medium in which people can earn a living. Not a concern for everyone, but definitely a massive worry for folks who are in that kind of middle, gray area of earning just enough.

It's not done yet. And if the tech owners can make money without having to give any to artists, they will try to do exactly that.

(edited:typo)

Posted by: @clfors

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I think AI generated art is fascinating and it’s going to do interesting things to the art world but it doesn’t belong in a contest between human artists unless the point of the contest is AI art generation. I would not consider AI generated art to be my art no matter how many prompts I gave. I would consider it having a computer do a commission for me. There are short-cuts in all mediums and some artists use them, some don’t, but short-cuts are not the same as having someone else draw your idea. 

That said, as an artist I don’t hate AI and I’m not afraid of it. I like the idea of both acknowledging that as artists we have our own skill-sets and styles and that we can be inspired by and learn from AI art.

I am absolutely of the same take. I often wonder what it might be in terms of cover and art that AI can come up for classics that we know from well known publishers. Recently looked at what DeepAI comes up with for Flowers for Algernon-it was quite stupendous

I think as artists we've all been curious about utilizing AI generated imaging, or for the writers chatGTP. I toyed with it when it first became available, but like most people found, it became obvious how damaging this could be and was going the completely wrong direction. I removed several of my artworks from the haveibeentrained resource. The entire code needs to be scrapped and rebuilt with foundation in ethical applications. I see huge potential for restorative and protective uses - but its purpose currently is to render human artists obsolete. So having stated that very obvious opinion, definitely would not support or have interest in competitions including AI artwork. 

Posted by: @aew

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So, with the huge visibility Dall-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion are getting, I wonder what is everyone's thoughts on AI (--assisted) art? 

 

I've been playing with MidJourney, using my old artwork as prompts to create a somewhat unique new style for myself, and some of the results are getting quite nice. But since I'm mostly a writer (and an artist a distant second), I'm not in touch with a whole lot of artists, so I wonder what the general feel is in the community?

 

I personally feel that what I've been doing is art in its own right, somewhat combining the art of the image with the art of the word. It feels more creative than photo-collages, but since it relieves the technical barrier to creating visual imagery (knowing how to manipulate paint or how to use Photoshop brushes effectively, for example), it also feels a bit less ... serious, or "professional"? I don't know how else to put it (despite claiming to be a writer first  ). 

 

What are your thoughts?

AI-assisted art is definitely a topic that sparks a lot of discussion and debate within the artistic community. These AI models can provide inspiration, generate novel ideas, and facilitate the artistic process in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Generative AI imagery is becoming more and more prominent. The more people who share cool pictures they saw that were created by generative AI, the more normalizing it is. I really do think lots of people don't notice or care when they see something that was generative AI created. They share it like any other neat meme they come across.

Most AI "art" generators are illegally trained on existing artists' work without their consent. Yes, there are some that are not.  If you, personally, desire to use AI image creation software, please do your research.  Although I recently saw some news indicating that Google’s AI image generator, which was toting it’s ethical training, turned out not to have been ethical after all?  So who knows.

While I do believe there can be ethical ways to use generative and other AI in the creation of art, most current uses are not doing this. Generative AI software is making plagiarism *too easy* right now.  I personally feel like treating AI generative imagery like a picket line, perhaps, might be a helpful way to hold off until the situation is less of a minefield.

(To those very few of you who are actually managing to somehow use generative AI art in a completely ethical way in your art process - kudos to you for not caving to the masses, and finding a way to make it work for you. I'm sorry I can't be more supportive to you right now than just saying that. I know it is possible, but most other people aren't playing fair and are thus ruining it for everyone else. I hope you're vocal about how your process differs from the others out there.)

I don't want to see AI generated imagery right now fullstop.  Perhaps in the future generative AI art will be completely ethical, or at least much less unethical. At that point maybe I won't mind seeing it. But right now, the more I see AI imagery crossing my feed, the more I feel like nobody cares about artists anymore. 

I have seen many varying arguments about why not to use AI.  I’ve attached some screenshots.  Other things to think about are the carbon footprint.

If you want to learn more about what's going on in the F/SF art-world right now, read some of the many social media posts by major artists like Karla Ortiz who are thick in the Anti-AI-Fight right now and go from there.  Also I ran across this link but haven't looked it over much yet: https://www.createdontscrape.com/about

Posted by: @tashari

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Generative AI imagery is becoming more and more prominent. The more people who share cool pictures they saw that were created by generative AI, the more normalizing it is. I really do think lots of people don't notice or care when they see something that was generative AI created. They share it like any other neat meme they come across.

 

Most AI "art" generators are illegally trained on existing artists' work without their consent. Yes, there are some that are not.  If you, personally, desire to use AI image creation software, please do your research.  Although I recently saw some news indicating that Google’s AI image generator, which was toting it’s ethical training, turned out not to have been ethical after all?  So who knows.

 

While I do believe there can be ethical ways to use generative and other AI in the creation of art, most current uses are not doing this. Generative AI software is making plagiarism *too easy* right now.  I personally feel like treating AI generative imagery like a picket line, perhaps, might be a helpful way to hold off until the situation is less of a minefield.

-- attachment is not available --

 

(To those very few of you who are actually managing to somehow use generative AI art in a completely ethical way in your art process - kudos to you for not caving to the masses, and finding a way to make it work for you. I'm sorry I can't be more supportive to you right now than just saying that. I know it is possible, but most other people aren't playing fair and are thus ruining it for everyone else. I hope you're vocal about how your process differs from the others out there.)

 

I don't want to see AI generated imagery right now fullstop.  Perhaps in the future generative AI art will be completely ethical, or at least much less unethical. At that point maybe I won't mind seeing it. But right now, the more I see AI imagery crossing my feed, the more I feel like nobody cares about artists anymore. 

I have seen many varying arguments about why not to use AI.  I’ve attached some screenshots.  Other things to think about are the carbon footprint.

-- attachment is not available --
-- attachment is not available --

 

 

If you want to learn more about what's going on in the F/SF art-world right now, read some of the many social media posts by major artists like Karla Ortiz who are thick in the Anti-AI-Fight right now and go from there.  Also I ran across this link but haven't looked it over much yet: https://www.createdontscrape.com/about

That first screenshot says it all really. If you need to be an artist to get decent art out of AI, then you don't need the AI anyway.

So as a very amateur author trying to generate some buzz or notice of my writing I used Wix to make a very amateur website.  I used their ai art to compliment the pages and stories.  They are not quite what I want but they dress up the site.  If I were to publish I would want to work with a real artist to get better quality/more like what I have envisioned.  So I think if you use the art and do not charge for it, the ai art seems ok. I don’t get paid for my writing yet so I can’t justify paying an artist to make me the art the way I would like it to be.  If I am ever fortunate to earn money with my work then I would likely go the route of paying an artist.

@rmichaelb It's great that you would like to hire an artist and to pay them - but if you can't afford to yet you should find other *legal* ways to show art on your page and not AI.  

Posted by: @rmichaelb

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So as a very amateur author trying to generate some buzz or notice of my writing I used Wix to make a very amateur website.  I used their ai art to compliment the pages and stories.  They are not quite what I want but they dress up the site.  If I were to publish I would want to work with a real artist to get better quality/more like what I have envisioned.  So I think if you use the art and do not charge for it, the ai art seems ok. I don’t get paid for my writing yet so I can’t justify paying an artist to make me the art the way I would like it to be.  If I am ever fortunate to earn money with my work then I would likely go the route of paying an artist.

By using AI art on your site you already have used a real artist, only they weren't asked about it and you didn't pay them. 

AI art is theft, simple as that. Unethical, out and out theft. 

There's plenty of free use art out there anyway, why use AI art?  

"Judge Says Artists Can Sue AI Companies for Using Their Work"

https://hyperallergic.com/943250/judge-says-artists-can-sue-ai-companies-for-using-their-work/

And from Karla Ortiz:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/4ZrsZz2Ub14SperU/?mibextid=oFDknk