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What Happens When Art Is Democratized By AI?
It took me two years of haunting Gloucester, MA and its seaside public dahlia garden, and quite luckily happening upon a particularly hued bloom exposed in a decidedly delightful slant of sunlight to capture the above photo. And DALL-E blithely produced the below in about five seconds when I typed in “black and white close up of dahlia”. Is my art threatened? Should I be incensed my labors are to naught? Will DALL-E somehow pick up my image and learn from it to generate much better dahlias? Will people shilly-shally over buying my art if they can get a better one gratis from DALL-E?
Some artistes found out their work was used to train AIs like DALL-E and they are furious. In fact, an image generated by AI Midjourney won an art competition recently:
Ya know … in a world where we segregate genders in competition and in bathrooms … in a world where the transgendered are held in fear, fascination and apathy … how did we let a machine compete with humans … and win?
