AI-GENERATED ART: WHAT? HOW? WHY?
AI-GENERATED ART: WHAT? HOW? WHY?
What is Ai-Generated Art?
Dall-E 2 is an open source AI tool that takes keywords and produces digital images, creating unique pieces of art. Type in any word, or series of words, and it will pull in imagery and information from across the web, transmute it and create a completely unique piece of artwork.
These type of transformer models have taken over the internet in recent months, with anyone who’s curious about the potential and power of AI creation trying out the leading stable diffusion tool and many more.
Dall-E is probably the most commonly known AI art tool, but there are others that have launched as well - including Meta’s own AI video creation tool aptly named Make-A-Video, Dream, Midjourney and Night Cafe, among others.
They all take user-generated text prompts and use AI to crawl countless existing images, and then blend what it finds into essentially an all-new image. It does this however without regard for the copyright protecting the original images.
This kind of software is now available as a seamless plug in app to popular design software packages like Adobe Photoshop, Figma, and even Canva so we’re definitely going to be seeing a lot more AI driven art in the months ahead.
How to use it?
It's pretty mind-blowing when you see what Dall-E can create and until you play around with AI generated art it’s hard to explain. Here’s an example of something I created.
I entered the words: fries, band, London, eyes, oil painting.
And voila! This is what Dall-E made:
The options are endless with Dall-E is able to pick up on specific characteristics or aspects that are inputted, such as “green gloves” or 3D style.
There’s also the option of uploading your own image, which is then modified by the AI.
Why should you care?
AI-generated art and design is exploding and soon will be unavoidable. We're even now seeing it on TikTok with their inbuilt AI face generator filter and voiceover filter. AI is a brand new space that no one can fully predict.
It can also be an amazing tool to spark creativity, imagination and out-of-box ideas, and to us this is one of the main benefits of Dall-E.
For example, it's amazing tool to bring ideas or concepts to life in a visual way. Maybe you had the idea of doing a photoshoot, or getting someone to create an illustration of monkey’s throwing bananas - Dall-E can give you an idea of what this could look like, and help determine what you do and don’t want to see. This is also true for taking vague ideas and making them more concrete.
But who owns it?
Dall-E keeps sparking the question amongst creatives, “can we use this without making ourselves obsolete?” We think so. There’s plenty of room for everyone.
But there’s also the question of who owns the art?
The copyright around AI generated art is still very much a grey area, and there are bound to be a lot of issues ahead in terms of navigating this and setting precedent.
Getty Images for example just decided to ban all AI-generated images from their library to avoid the whole issue all together.
Conclusion:
Although some people may even argue that AI-generated art, isn't really art, we’re excited about this new format and to see what the future brings for it. It’s all brand new so it can be scary, exciting and inspiring all at once.
What do you think about this hot topic? We’d love to get your thoughts. And if there are any artists who are keen to explore AI-generated art we’d love to work with you.