I've been thinking about AI art plenty over these last few months, watching the explosion of improvement in the space very curiously. Two trailing thoughts come to mind...
1) I think in full cinema HD. Scenes, framing, panning shots, visual texture and detailing everywhere I want to 'look'. My partner has aphantasia. While his inner sphere of creativity is livelier than mine, he and I don't 'speak the same language' when it comes to sharing our creative thoughts. We tabletop roleplay, spending a lot of time languishing in the space where he explains and I struggle to imagine. As these tools have evolved, I've personally encouraged him to explore AI art generation tools to bring to life ideas of his own in visual ways that I can better understand.
2) "If anyone can type in a prompt asking for an image in my style for $10 per month ... then why would anyone ever again pay me a commission to make my art?" I've heard this in a few different places and my honest reaction is always: Were they really ever going to commission said artist? As I entered the professional visual art space, I often thought to myself: what happens when someone sees my style and creates copy-cats? You sell a painting for $500? I'll do it for $50. Part of my journey was accepting (or at least trying to accept) that that's out of my control. While I've got pretty mixed feelings about the use of images for training data (how is feeding an AI a selection of images different than when I trawl through publicly posted art for inspiration?), I don't fundamentally see how AI art is different than paying an entirely different artist to imitate a style for less money than it costs to commission the original artist.
Ultimately I think it will come down to how these tools are litigated in courts for commercial use - I do not think AI art is ever leaving the personal use domain now. 🤔
Thank you so much for commenting, you working artist you. 😊
1) OoOOOoooO, what a great application for AI image creation. It's still frustrating to get exactly what you want out of Midjourney or DALL-E right now, but I bet it could help at least narrow your communications gap quite a bit. And sounds like it could a much more fun way to collaborate together!
2) Ha ha, you have beaten me to the punch a little bit, and that's awesome. I am going to make the same point in the next essay, which @KSC_Hatch mentioned to me as well, and which I totally agree with. I feel like people buy art either because it resonates with them or they love the artist (ideally both!), and I don't think an artist's fans are going to suddenly turn from artists in droves to make AI fakes to hang on their wall. The AI images aren't part of the artist's story, and that's what collectors are there to be a part of.
I also think AI art is here to stay, and will get folded into the overall act of art-creation eventually like everything else that has come along since we started making art.
To point 2 - this. I think most people who would use AI to generate art cheaply are not the people who would ever have commissioned art in the first place. I'm sure there are outliers. There are billions of humans. But I honestly don't see this as much different to the Fivrr climate, where people pay very little for pretty shitty looking art made by a person because someone is willing to make shitty art to get by and another person isn't willing to pay what good art is worth.
Fivrr and 99Designs and Behance...these all hit the design world *right* as I was attempting to do freelance design. I realised SO quickly that most people looking for designs through these sites had zero clues the costs involved in making a logo or a pamphlet or whatever. I spent a week attempting to use these sites, putting in fifteen to thirty hour designing stuff to have it rejected because thirty other people submitted designs too. I was the winning design *once* and got a "runner up" payment once and it put my hourly earnings at somewhere around £2.80 (this was when I lived in the UK) so I noped right out.
The race to the bottom is ugly for everyone. I'm glad you checked out! I did too--I tried freelance writing on one of the freelancing platforms that popped up at the time--it wasn't Upwork, but one like it. Not only were the rates awful--$200 to ghostwrite entire books--the clients were the worst. A local client wanted me to help him write a manual, and he wanted me to drive to his office everyday so he could watch me write to "learn" how to make a manual. For $300. Nooooooooooooope! Maybe if nothing else, artists protesting AI will bring *some* notice to how everyone wants art but no one wants to pay to have it created?
I've been thinking about AI art plenty over these last few months, watching the explosion of improvement in the space very curiously. Two trailing thoughts come to mind...
1) I think in full cinema HD. Scenes, framing, panning shots, visual texture and detailing everywhere I want to 'look'. My partner has aphantasia. While his inner sphere of creativity is livelier than mine, he and I don't 'speak the same language' when it comes to sharing our creative thoughts. We tabletop roleplay, spending a lot of time languishing in the space where he explains and I struggle to imagine. As these tools have evolved, I've personally encouraged him to explore AI art generation tools to bring to life ideas of his own in visual ways that I can better understand.
2) "If anyone can type in a prompt asking for an image in my style for $10 per month ... then why would anyone ever again pay me a commission to make my art?" I've heard this in a few different places and my honest reaction is always: Were they really ever going to commission said artist? As I entered the professional visual art space, I often thought to myself: what happens when someone sees my style and creates copy-cats? You sell a painting for $500? I'll do it for $50. Part of my journey was accepting (or at least trying to accept) that that's out of my control. While I've got pretty mixed feelings about the use of images for training data (how is feeding an AI a selection of images different than when I trawl through publicly posted art for inspiration?), I don't fundamentally see how AI art is different than paying an entirely different artist to imitate a style for less money than it costs to commission the original artist.
Ultimately I think it will come down to how these tools are litigated in courts for commercial use - I do not think AI art is ever leaving the personal use domain now. 🤔
Thank you so much for commenting, you working artist you. 😊
1) OoOOOoooO, what a great application for AI image creation. It's still frustrating to get exactly what you want out of Midjourney or DALL-E right now, but I bet it could help at least narrow your communications gap quite a bit. And sounds like it could a much more fun way to collaborate together!
2) Ha ha, you have beaten me to the punch a little bit, and that's awesome. I am going to make the same point in the next essay, which @KSC_Hatch mentioned to me as well, and which I totally agree with. I feel like people buy art either because it resonates with them or they love the artist (ideally both!), and I don't think an artist's fans are going to suddenly turn from artists in droves to make AI fakes to hang on their wall. The AI images aren't part of the artist's story, and that's what collectors are there to be a part of.
I also think AI art is here to stay, and will get folded into the overall act of art-creation eventually like everything else that has come along since we started making art.
To point 2 - this. I think most people who would use AI to generate art cheaply are not the people who would ever have commissioned art in the first place. I'm sure there are outliers. There are billions of humans. But I honestly don't see this as much different to the Fivrr climate, where people pay very little for pretty shitty looking art made by a person because someone is willing to make shitty art to get by and another person isn't willing to pay what good art is worth.
Thank you so much for mentioning Fiverr! It's a really important part of the whole industrialized art conversation. I mean, I wish it weren't, but....
Fivrr and 99Designs and Behance...these all hit the design world *right* as I was attempting to do freelance design. I realised SO quickly that most people looking for designs through these sites had zero clues the costs involved in making a logo or a pamphlet or whatever. I spent a week attempting to use these sites, putting in fifteen to thirty hour designing stuff to have it rejected because thirty other people submitted designs too. I was the winning design *once* and got a "runner up" payment once and it put my hourly earnings at somewhere around £2.80 (this was when I lived in the UK) so I noped right out.
The race to the bottom is ugly for everyone. I'm glad you checked out! I did too--I tried freelance writing on one of the freelancing platforms that popped up at the time--it wasn't Upwork, but one like it. Not only were the rates awful--$200 to ghostwrite entire books--the clients were the worst. A local client wanted me to help him write a manual, and he wanted me to drive to his office everyday so he could watch me write to "learn" how to make a manual. For $300. Nooooooooooooope! Maybe if nothing else, artists protesting AI will bring *some* notice to how everyone wants art but no one wants to pay to have it created?