What Happens When Art Is Democratized By AI?
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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?
While most artists are disturbed that an AI image won, the person who generated that AI image is Jason Allen — an artist himself.
Wait … what? Transhuman artiste??!
Some artists are ok with their work being used for training but would like to be paid for it. Platform companies like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion are considering how to give artists control over their work being used for training and/or being paid for it.
Riiiiiight … did not occur to them when they were blatantly stealing art for training but now that someone is protesting, they are going to “think” about it for a while, probably pay a few prominent artists and then continue stealing from the rest. Let us return here in 3 years to see.
Be all that as it may, these abilities of AI are in effect democratizing the artistic process … but only to a certain extent. I have railed on previously about AI capabilities being limited to its training set here…
