AI Apocalypse
Jason M. Allen / Midjourney, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
AI-generated art rattles the art world
When the field of artificial intelligence first began gaining traction, the consensus was that AI would take care of menial tasks like office work, manual labor, or service work. The occupation of these jobs would allow more people to pursue creative pursuits instead. However, with recent developments in AI, the exact opposite has appeared to have happened.
Back during the spring of 2022, AI art generators gained a massive surge of popularity with the public release of DALL-E mini, which quickly skyrocketed to a daily user count of 1.5 million.
The AI worked by taking several images and combining them to form a single picture in response to a prompt from a user.
The astounding success of the AI-generated images inspired several other counterparts such as “Different Dimension Me” which gained traction a few months back for creating an anime-like counterpart of any image you fed it.
However, the newly trending field of AI-generated art quickly caused a few problems.
"co-produced by the means of AI (artificial intelligence) image generators", "These images were imagined by language and re-edited more between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining “inpainting”, “outpainting” and “prompt whispering” techniques.", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
People started using AI-generated art in art contests where it often started winning awards. This caused controversy as the art wasn’t human made, so many people made arguments that it didn’t deserve one. It was revealed that the art used to generate these images was taken without the artists’ consent, meaning that not only was it not an original creation, but it was also plagiarizing art from human artists.
In addition, a lot of artists expressed the sentiment that AI-generated art would put them out of a job in an already difficult market.
“A new AI image generator appears to be capable of making art that looks 100% human made,” digital artist RJ Palmer tweeted. “As an artist, I am extremely concerned.”
Overall, AI-generated art has left a lasting impact on the art industry, and the consequences of its existence will become more and more apparent in the following months, as the list of things artificial intelligence cannot accomplish slowly gets smaller and smaller.