What is AI Art? : resource links
I’m looking for the most thought provoking articles and videos on AI art. Do you have any favorites? Also looking for articles that describe the industry. For example how does it work? Do you know Midjourney has not shared information on what data set they use to train their model? Do you know Midjourney is on its way to being the largest consumer of GPUs at Google cloud in a year. Did you know Midjourney is privately owned and profitable?
Articles
Podcasts
Generative A.I. Is Here. Who Should Control It?
“Stable Diffusion, we took a 100,000 gigabytes of images, 2 billion images, and we use this great big supercomputer to squish it down to a 2-gigabyte file. It now runs on an iPhone, and it’s a file that can create anything.”
Videos
The AI that creates any picture you want, explained
“It’s almost impossible to overstate how far the technology has come in just one year” ( and the rate of change is increasing )
Controversy
Against AI: The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs
"The dream of getting a job as an AI soothsayer who through loving cajoling pulls the most beautiful image out of the machine is shortsighted the AI‘s are just as good at generating strings of text as they are at generating images in your rush to prompt you failed to notice that you were training the next part of the AI the one that knows the combine taste of millions of the most tasteful people in the world this is clearly signaled by programs like midjourney which permanently and publicly archived every single piece it generates including the prompt used when you prompt you are shouting your inner heart into a new data set for the AI‘s once that date is that reaches critical mass they won’t need you to tell the AI what to make."
- Steven Zapata
Rebuttal : The Most Common Arguments For & Against AI
From a Facebook post:
Jan Carson Weatherby
The tide may not have hit your shore, but we are already awash in AI imagery. I am looking for the headline announcing AI has eclipsed the entire human-made art catalogue, it’s happening that fast. I would not be surprised if it hasn’t already happened, and we just haven’t noticed.
How will we change as a result? Speaking for myself, I am already finding myself judging a lot of human works as inferior, if only for the fact that AI already seems to out-imagine us with results so tantalizing as to be spiritual. Algorithms aren’t limited by our human reference points, and so are capable of easily creating works that defy our comprehension. They also don’t have our time constraints, and so never get “tired” or “lazy.” And, finally, they produce top tier work in mere seconds.
Now let me ask you two questions:
1. Are you thinking of becoming an artist?
2. Why?
These are important questions to ponder, perhaps now more than ever:
One possible effect of AI is to make human work irrelevant. Another is to make it more precious. Either way, the ground has shifted, and there’s no going back. And you must decide — where do you stand? This is not a call to tribalism. This isn’t about us vs them. It’s a call for clarity, for no art is art without it.
The license for the Stable Diffusion Model, on which a lot of other platforms are built, mandates all work created with the model is "public domain." What will this do to the value of art? Apparently the US Copyright Office has decided to allow copyrights simply because AI is not human. Morally, ethically, creatively, the issue remains an open question. There's no doubt, though, that many AI art "creators," including myself, do feel ownership of "their work." Especially if they paid for it.
But what happens to the value of a copyright, when I can prompt an AI to iterate on your idea a MILLION times? Say you prompt the Mona Lisa, a global, historical art “hit,” then I feed your image into an AI, and generate a million derivative versions with differences so small it’s hard to tell them apart? Which image is the “original?” And more importantly — who cares?
Alternately, what happens when an AI can file its own Copyright claims without your help or supervision. You could end up paying twice: once for the creation of the work, and again for copyright control or use.
What happens when AI meets the block chain and every single work generated by an AI automatically registers an NFT?
And please... this is not a criticism or take down of AI art. I make AI art, I make comics and concept art with AI-generated imagery. I'm simply observing, and asking questions. It's so fascinating!
As a thought experiment I wanted to see if I could maybe answer my first question: has AI art surpassed the number of human-generated artworks? I don't know. Google "number of known human artworks" and you will not get an answer. So, we don't know that. But maybe we can try to answer the question "how many AI artworks have been created?"
Let's guess:
Average amount of time it takes to create an AI image: 30 seconds.
How many 30 second periods are in a day: 2,880
How many AI art prompters are out there: 100K?
Let's cut that number in HALF: 50K
Now... say all those people all over the globe make images every 30 seconds for a month. That's 4,320,000,000 images.
Since March 2022 - 7 months: 30,420,000,000 images.
Considering there were less than a Billion people on the planet before Industrialization... 3Billion by 1966, and another 3ish Billion since - AI art could very well have eclipsed, just in sheer numbers of works, the total number of human artworks — a staggering possibility!
Next question: Does the possibility of 30 BILLION AI images already in existence change the way you feel about YOUR AI "ART?"
