AI Generated Art
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Personally I take issue with the economic effect AI Art will have on artists. It’s going to cost jobs in an already difficult space to operate in.
Otherwise, I don’t think it’s possible to put the AI monster back in the box and I don’t want to ban any kind of technology.
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I thought we already had an AI Generated Art thread going??
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@helvetica YOU RIGHT. MERGE TIME.
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It’s a very neat technology. I played around with it a little bit yesterday, and had some decent things spit out of it that made me think, ‘Neat!’
But also mixed in there is the desire for it be driven by consent and/or public domain when training. It’s emerging tech, and I’m in tech, so I felt like I had to at least see what the state of it was. A lot of missing fingers. A lot of extra fingers, eyes, limbs, and other horrors, but every so often it would spit something out that I really jived with. And I was having fun with it. But that kinda came with guilt.
Like, who actually was sourced on this picture I liked? It doesn’t tell me. I can’t seek them out and ask for a commission. A few mashups of anime images, probably sourced from scraping the entirety of a website.
So, yeah. It’s cool, and I get excited about it, but I want a way to engage with it that makes me feel less sleazy.
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Obviously, this is an extremely complex issue. Animation studios have been using computer aided art for quite some time, but the technology is now becoming accessible to the everyday person. If you want an excellent example of ‘AI’ assisted art being used as a tool by artists, take a look at the interviews with the creative team that produced Klaus.
This technology is currently putting people out of work and it won’t be getting better as developers continue to refine these programs. Concept artists are the most endangered by this as the companies that utilize their services have already begun trimming departments down. A couple of artists with a few machines can turn out as many (if not more) works than an entire team could.
There is a bit of solace to be found. Even if you ignore the legal precariousness, these programs are far from perfect. It takes time and effort to prompt the computer to get exactly what you want. Even after the ‘art’ is generated, it still requires a degree of touching up. Not everyone has the skill set to do this, but… the gap between semi-professional artists and everyone with a computer is beginning to close.
The threat of automation is here and it isn’t going away. Professions that people assumed were safe are not. We’ve needed to have a serious conversation about this for years, but we won’t see anything actionable until it’s far too late. Much like a number of the other extremely predictable assumptions that academics have been warning us about for decades.
If you want to do something against it, make certain not to buy into companies that are trying to run a profit on these programs. Not only will you be slowing the progression of digital art automation, but you’ll also be saving yourself cash. The majority of those paid ‘programs’ are really just a branch of Stable Diffusion…which is a program you can download to your machine for free.
