One Truth Republic
This very cute A.I. generated art is your future
u/Parsec29 - reddit.comWhen a new technical marvel is introduced, it’s not always clear at the beginning what impact it will have. There is always a lot of speculation including fadists who say it will be here today and gone tomorrow and fanatics who proclaim it to be the answer to life itself.
The hot topic of VR had great promise when it exploded onto the scene in 2010 with the first Oculus but its impact on the modern world is still very small. It has lots of hype but the impact is small.
Other tech, like the car, electricity and cell phones exploded and either marginalized or completely obliterated entire industries.
In the era of horses, there were entire industries built around the breeding, selling and caring of horses. In that time you would encounter tens or even hundreds of horses every day. Today you’re more likely to encounter wild deer on your occasional road trip than ever encounter a horse.
This guy is smacking his own ass like he is the horse. Degenerate gambling is the best @barstoolbets (Via IG/bravedavey) pic.twitter.com/TGj1Lgj6C3
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) September 3, 2019
All those businesses and jobs all but disappeared when the car arrived.
Cutting, hauling, storing and delivering ice for ice chests employed thousands across the country as preserving food was an increasingly popular need. Electricity and the refrigerator removed that entire sector.
There are many more examples. And what is clear is that this pattern of replacement is the way of things. Nothing lasts forever.
Now about art …
Is the age of human art over?
In a word - No.
It’s actually the opposite. Everyone can now create high quality art. The barrier to entry has fallen.
The artist behind the cutest storm trooper in the world, u/Parsec29 from reddit, is not an artist and says about his usage of MidJourney “I am only an hobbyist”. And yet he was able to create this masterpiece. This gem would not have existed without u/parsec29.
530 million years ago creatures evolved eyes and this resulted in the Cambrian explosion. A massive increase in the diversity of life in the metazoan phyla - the animal kingdom. The advent of eyes was like throwing gasoline on the fires of evolution as adapt or die went into full effect. From wikipedia - “Before early Cambrian diversification, most organisms were relatively simple, composed of individual cells, or small multicellular organisms”
A similar thing will happen to art.
Until today art was restricted to those with time and talent. The vast majority of humans don’t have the luxury or luck of circumstance to be able to vast amounts of time to the mastery of putting color to canvas.
But there are a lucky few who not only get to engage in art but also get paid for it. Art today is not just for museums or art galleries but there is art everywhere. Corporate art which is art for companies hallways, there’s art for websites, and much much more. And very little of it is actually pushing any limits. A lot of it is repetitive and very derivative. These artists currently survive by being available. They hang a sign up that says artist and people show up needing something. Many of these artists wont survive.
Before the camera many artists were needed to decorate business facades, create art for books and other paper media, decorate public buildings, circus tents, pavilion entrances, banners, and more. As a result having images was rare and expensive. The camera changed everything. Especially the Brownie which was the first camera built for the masses. And while artists who create art still exist the common “sign painters” have all but disappeared.
And so will go the artists of the mundane. As it will now be possible for everyone to create art. But at the top end art will see significant adaptation. Artists with truly unique visions will be able to rise above the noise and stand out. And without any doubt these people will rely on AI generated art to their creations. At the very least as one of the sources of inspiration. They will build on the very best of what is possible and push further. They will evolve ahead of the threat of AI and find new islands of art that would never have been otherwise found. And it wont just be people that know how to apply color to canvas. People who previously had the eye but not the time or the mechanical ability will now have a chance.
This is the door that will open.
And in support of this what will rise is a plethora of tools and capabilities to create art at a quality and on scales never seen before. MidJourney and its ilk will usher in a golden age of art.
Imagine trying to make a video, before youtube and smartphones, and getting millions of people watching it. It would have been impossible. But today YOU dear reader can become a youtube star.
So it will be with Art.
Many artists are angry
And for good reason. They are seeing their passion and their livelihood threatened. And not just trivially. A.I. art recently won the top prize in an art competition. You can imagine how a person that worked for days, weeks or even months on a piece of art would be angry for losing to someone that spent at most a few hours.
It’s hard to blame artists for feeling hurt. Dejected even.
Art is often very personal. Unlike the sciences which deal with objective truths. Art, which is inherently subjective, finds its bearings on the seas of emotion.
On top of this is the very real impact to peoples bottom line. Which while small for now is going to increase. You are already seeing AI art in blogs, articles, and other mediums that have nothing to do with art or the discussion of how it is generated. Even with the occasional AI artifacts no one is objecting. We’re already accepting AI art as a tool for story telling. And that all has a monetary consequence on working artists.
A.I. art is theft?
There’s another reason that artists are angry and this is because of the idea that the AI art is stealing from them. AI art has learned from these artists and now allows anyone to copy their style. Their signature as it were. Is this a valid criticism?
MidJourney and other generators like Stable Diffusion are being trained on the gargantuan LAION 5b. A training dataset that contains 5 billion image-text pairs. Created by scraping the internet it is filled with … everything. Yes it has art in it but it has photos of anything you can imagine. It’s an arbitrary slice of our deeply chaotic world. You can peruse the dataset to get a sense of it yourself.
So is it ripping off artists? Well … yes? It is. Not because specific artists are in the dataset. Their contributions are immeasurable in any image generation. The ripping off happens when you can ask for images in the style of a specific artist. “A man with a sword fighting a dragon in the style of Greg Rutkowski” will create art that is very evocative of art by Greg Rutkowski.
The problem is that other artists also rip off artists. People painting near-clones of popular works of art is an industry unto itself. Because if it is known that a particular style of art sells then so must similar styles. And that near clone art is also in the LAION dataset.
The question is whether this cloning is good or bad. And the answer is that it’s good. Have you ever heard of a clone of a GOLDEN HOUR digital watch? Of course not. It’s just a random watch brand that you can find on Amazon. You have heard of a Rolex clone. The existence of cloning increases the value of authentic Rolex watches. Being able to say you have a real one adds cachet to the brand.
To put it simply - artists that are being cloned can and should and DO raise their prices.
What happens next
Pandora’s box is now open. A.I. art is here to stay. And while it has been out for a handful of months its impact is already being felt. This will get harder for working artists. Agencies built around creating art will find it increasingly difficult to justify the prices they ask. People will also create art for themselves. Going to the local art-show and buying cookie cutter art will happen less frequently.
But human generated art is going to see an explosion in creativity. Enabled in part by A.I. and necessitated by the need to survive.
A.I. art will push art to the breaking point and beyond.
And the humans that weather this phase will be legends.
Jeremy Holowczak
