Someone in the “AI Art Universe” Facebook group tabbed it “art harvesting.” It’s an interesting analogy: sprouts planted by many other people are ‘scraped’ into a giant blender that sorts and readies them to be grown into exotic new gardens. But it’s increasingly than a poetic analogy— it’s a worldwide phenomenon, way worthier than a garden. It’s a jungle of fields and plantations, meadows and forests filled with fantasy notation and creatures, scenes and settings that could be in the afar past, the far future, or flipside galaxy. And it’s springing up, morphing, regenerating surpassing our eyes. Some of the results are visionless and ugly, some are eerily beautiful, and all you have to do to participate is type a prompt that describes your vision. A minute or so later, a suite of images springs up on your screen, ready to be enhanced by you (and, apparently, by anyone else).
I trolled virtually for a while, trying to find an AI-generated garden “good enough” to show as an example. I finally settled on an wayfarer landscape credited to Bryan Price on NightCafe.studio. With it came a 25%-off-my-first-month offer. Ah yes, flipside income-generator for someone who is not me, i.e. for NightCafé and all the similar sites that are popping up.
Traditional illustrators are up in arms. On Thursday, December 22, the Society of Illustrators posted this message on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
In less than 24 hours, this collaborative post by the awarding winning duo of Society of Illustrators President Tim O’Brien and illustrator Edel Rodriguez had increasingly than 8,500 likes on Instagram, 16.2k likes, and 3,280 reposts on Twitter.
For increasingly than 30 years, O’Brien has been painting meticulous oil portraits of famous people, from his hero Muhammed Ali to Elon Musk, and many have been featured on the imbricate of TIME. He and his colleagues are insisting that illustrations for publication must be created by real, thinking humans who interact with real clients and use real artists’ tools. “The sudden availability of artificially designed images creates a moral rencontre to the tableau polity and to the broader diamond community,” O’Brien said. “We are at the hair-trigger point at which illustrators and designers must value human interaction and reject the output of AI image generators. The inclusion of a credit highlighting an AI generator should bring on a sense of shame.”
O’Brien went on to note that athletes are subject to drug tests for trying to enhance their performance artificially, and those who goof are punished. “Humans can run faster, jump higher, and perform largest using synthetic means, [but] we as humans are interested in what a human vacated can do. That’s what makes us human.”
Illustrator Victor Juhasz, weightier known for caricatures that have graced the pages of Rolling Stone, TIME, Newsweek, and many other publications, takes the treatise a big step farther. “The current craze for AI-generated ‘art’ is a symptom of a disease,” he said.
Juhasz did not mince words. “The temptation to take the fast, easy way rather than put in nonflexible work is enormous. Contemporary society thrives on celebrity, fame and notoriety, and much of it has nothing to do with honest craftsmanship. It’s well-nigh the con and getting yonder with it.”
Other notable illustrators like Anita Kunz, known for her New Yorker covers and feminist responses to archetype art have spoken out on how much they hate seeing their work scraped into databases. Karla Ortiz, a painter, printmaker, and concept versifier at Marvel Studios, has been expressly vocal on social media, posting impassioned arguments versus the commercial use of AI art and spearheading a GoFundMe wayfarers to rent a lobbyist to make the voices of artists heard.
At the present moment, the creative heads of magazines sound largely uninterested in AI. Michael Mrak, the creative director of Scientific American, a science publication with over 10 million subscribers, “[sees] no reason to replace real artists with AI-generated anything.”
“AI can generate interesting and elaborate imagery, but there are many problems from a legal and moral point of view,” he continued. “AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted and therefore has potential legal issues tying to it, a principal one stuff that it uses art from wideness the internet to make the final image. That, and the fact that it scraped or pulled copyrighted art into its learning algorithm.”
Art director and designer Alexander Isley treasures his one-on-one collaborations with artists. “I have never used AI-generated artwork, and have no interest in doing so, unless it’s in the context of how odious it is,” he said. “From all I’ve seen and read, machine-generated artwork is based on modifying, remixing, or subtracting to real artists’ existing work without wisecrack or compensation. With vicarious artwork, sketches and revisions are often required. How does this process work with AI-generated images? I can’t deny that the results can be interesting to squint at, but it’s a fun parlor trick.”
While art directors might not see AI as a threat, the competitive speciality of diamond complicates matters. Will AI-generated art be eligible to win contests and grants?
“The short wordplay is yes,” was the initial wordplay from Patrick Coyne, editor/designer of Communication Arts, one of the world’s most important diamond publications. “We unchangingly tell jurors to select work based on the quality of the idea and the execution. We gloat compelling imagery regardless of how it was created.”
Managing Editor Michael Coyne noted that Communication Arts had once featured a few campaigns that used AI-generated art “because they were interesting or towardly applications for AI as an originative tool rather than a medium on its own.” He cited an ad wayfarers by Dentsu Creative Portugal for Jardim Sonoro, an electronic music festival held in a national park near Lisbon, is an example. According to the agency’s creative directors, the rencontre was to tousle the musicians’ portraits with natural elements. “We learned that AI is a unconfined tool,” they commented. “We are still at its whence and will certainly see significant developments that will dazzle us all. But it won’t replace anyone. It needs someone to guide the creative process.” They added, “Novelty and discomfort often lead to unconfined work.”
However, a few days later, the Communication Arts‘ team’s stance evolved. “We’ve been approached by several illustrators upset over our position regarding unsuspicious entries for the Tableau Annual produced with text-to-image AI software,” Patrick Coyne wrote via email. “While I still see the long-term potential for AI-assisted creative exploration, I largest understand the position that illustrators and photographers are currently facing with copyright infringement and the unauthorized use of their work to ‘train’ the current yield of text-to-image AI software. Consequently, we are reversing our position and will not be accepting AI text-to-image generated submissions in our Tableau competition.”
Hobbyists have a variegated relationship to the software. Daniel Rocha of São Paulo is an zippy freelancer to Facebook’s “AI Art Universe” group, and one of the many thousands of people who make AI art for fun. “I use [Mage’s Standard Diffusion program] daily, many times a day,” he said. “I click ‘enter’ on a prompt many, many times, until I get something good or see that I need to transpiration it considering something is not nice. I’ve generated increasingly than 22,000 pictures, but that’s not at all time-consuming, since all I have to do is click, click, click.”
Oddly enough, Rocha works in Brazil’s patent and trademark office, where he analyzes the registrability of trademarks. However, “that has nothing to do with what I do on Mage,” he clarified. “I think it is an extremely useful tool for artists. They can use it to fill in details or etch a ramified scene extremely fast.”
Stable Diffusion can be trained to fit an author’s style, which allows them to make grandiose scenes in a short time, in their own style. “An ventriloquist like me can reproduce the work of a skilled artist, art that could surpass in quality and inspiration the Sistine Chapel ceiling,” Rocha continued. “That took years for Michelangelo to make, and [similar work] can now be completed in a few days or weeks. Right now, the artists are too scared, but I think they will come virtually soon.”
Since I have family members who like to play with DALL-E, we decided to try it ourselves. I went in wondering if I could re-create one of the world’s most iconic posters, Milton Glaser’s 1966 “Dylan.” When I used Mage, the results were dismal. Apparently, the Mage database doesn’t have the stuff. We had no luck on DALL-E either (“does not follow our content policy”), but got meh results with Midjourney, where we typed “/imagine the famous 1966 Milton Glaser Bob Dylan poster” and got:
The curly hair must have gotten scraped in, withal with some old tome covers. And possibly black-and-white portraits to which the photographer owns the copyright. Then we tried: “/imagine the famous 1966 Milton Glaser Bob Dylan poster, but for Lady Gaga” and got:
The whole process took well-nigh three minutes. Fortunately— for now, at least— AI isn’t giving Milton Glaser’s sunny work any serious competition.
To get clarity on where AI stands in regards to legality, I reached out to Martin Schwimmer, a partner at top-rated New York intellectual property law firm LeasonEllis. In his opinion, text-to-image AI models “present novel [new, unexplored] legal issues, including the extent to which the creator of the repository of images makes use of images that were previously displayed on the internet, and to what extent can an AI model squint at an image and derive ‘rules’ well-nigh that image.” While that language is a little murky to me, it sounds like the lawyers are working on it.
However, Schwimmer didn’t stipulate that all AI repositories consist of ‘scraped’ images without regard to copyright. For example, he said, a repository named Laion consists not of images, but links to images, which theoretically makes a legal difference.
As to who owns the so-called final product, Schwimmer said that he views AI models as one increasingly tool that helps users generate content. “The copyright wringer will be comparable to the wringer we use today when artists use the various tableau tools, graphics editors, paint programs, and other digital art tools: Is the work sufficiently original when divorced from the twin tools?”
For now, that will be the last word.
