AI in the Creative World

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3 MIN READ

By: Damon Day

With the release of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, there has been an outcry among artists regarding the state of AI art and its place, both as a creative medium and in many industries. Some herald this as a way to cover the skill gap between artists and those struggling, while others say it is art infringement and theft. In addition, ChatGPT has also raised eyebrows among many writers—particularly those in Sci-fi, who have warned many about the dangers of AI.

Okay, so why does this AI stuff matter?

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To create a brief history of AI art for those unaware, Stable Diffusion was released in 2022, and it creates images based on text prompts. For example, a man riding a horse would produce a picture of a man riding said horse. Midjourney was opened to the public in July 2022 by a research group of the same name. Like Stable Diffusion, this AI program lets users input a text prompt, which results in AI images.

Many of these images are often well done, with many prompts churning out high-quality artwork that appears well made in seconds. However, what causes many artists to dislike AI generally relates to how those images are created. The programs used to develop the AI are trained from images released onto the internet. For example, popular websites like Deviant, Artstation, and Twitter are used as grounds for AI art to scan pictures and incorporate them into a database. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion refer to this when creating art when feeding prompts into their system. 

ChatGPT functions similarly, with prompts being entered and creating text samples, trained on writing from all over the internet. Every book in a library database and every article published online, even this one. This results in flowing words and well-written articles created with just a few carefully selected prompts.

So, why the uproar about this? 

Many artists and writers fear these new developments will take their jobs. Copywriters, for example, are noted to be in danger of being replaced, as are proofreaders.

In addition, many big tech hubs and franchises are interested in using AI art to ‘backup’ artists and have shown promising results. To combat this, there have been new programs, such as Glaze-a tool to help artists prevent their artistic styles from being learned and mimicked by new AI-art models- that many artists have used in their work. While the debate of whether or not AI art and writing is theft is still ongoing, it isn’t likely to leave any time soon.