“Art is dead, dude,” Jason Allen, won first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Art competition with an AI image.

 

“Recent improvements in AI have shifted the dial. Not only can AI image generators now transpose written phrases (prompts) into novel pictures, but strides have been made in AI speech-generation too: large language models such as GPT-3 have reached a level of fluency that convinced at least one recently fired Google researcher of machine sentience.” - The Guardian

 

Because the AI has been trained on billions of images, some of which are copyrighted works by living artists, it can generally create a pretty faithful approximation, yet creating a copyright infringement mess.

 

Do these tools put an entire class of creatives at risk? In some cases, AI may be used in place of stock images. Illustration for articles, books or album covers may soon face competition from AI, undermining a thriving area of commercial art.

 

“AI can’t handle concepts: collapsing moments in time, memory, thoughts, emotions – all of that is a real human skill, that makes a piece of art rather than something that visually looks pretty.” -  Anna Ridler, an artist known for her work with AI.

 

“Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything.

 

Our machines have crossed a threshold. All our lives, we have been reassured that computers were incapable of being truly creative. Yet, suddenly, millions of people are now using a new breed of AIs to generate stunning, never-before-seen pictures.” - Wired – Kevin Kelly

 

The Art Of Prompting

It is no exaggeration to call images generated with the help of AI co-creations. The secret of this new power is very long conversations between humans and machines. Progress for each image comes from multiple  iterations, detours, and hours, sometimes days, of teamwork—all on the back of years of advancements in machine learning.

 

ART IS HUMAN VS. ART IS HYBRID

 

 The Backlash.

DeviantArt and Getty Images, who sell stock photos and illustrations for design and editorial use, has already banned AI-generated images after a growing demand from their contributors. These are well-intentioned demands to identify AI art with a label and to segregate it from “real” art or not sell or show it at all.

 

“To developers and technically minded people, [A.I. is] this cool thing, but to illustrators, it’s very upsetting because it feels like you’ve eliminated the need to hire the illustrator,” cartoonist Matt Bors, founder of the Nib, tells the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel. “The bottom came out of illustration a while ago,” Bors adds, “but A.I. art does seem like a thing that will devalue art in the long run.” – Sarah Kuta - The Smithsonian

 

Can’t blockchain track the prompts and compensate all contributing artists accordingly? Move from “Wow! Free Art” to “Wow! I compensated 200 contributors from this Art.” Create Business Economies vs. Exploitation Systems.

 

Instead of fearing AI, we should embrace what it teaches us. 

Creativity is independent of consciousness. Synthetic creativity is a commodity now. There is a new battle between High Art and Low Art. Not to be confused with Low Brow Art.

 

Artists always lead new technology waves. It takes a human to see the potential, harness it and find new ways to use it. Ultimately it is a time saver, not a job-killer. MTV may have killed the Radio Star, but TV did not kill Radio. How quickly generations forget about the Dewey Decimal system and rolodexes.

 

The challenge should be how to make this technology and experience more human, more empathic, more accepted. We’ll leave that to Cyberdyne Systems Corporation 

 

“This isn’t going to stop, Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” – Jason Allen

 

MediaSlam is a podcast and publication of CurtDoty.co that discusses the intersection of design, content and technology. Follow Curt Doty on linkedin and Follow MediaSlam on Clubhouse. To learn more, go to www.curtdoty.co/mediaslam