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