By Marco Elsy & Barrington Kirkham
AI-generated art is already taking the art world by storm, so how is AI going to influence the future of not only art but also other major aspects of our lives? Let’s take a look at some of the ways art is being redefined by artificial intelligence.
ALL the images below and in this article were artificially generated using txt2img prompts.
Question: What Is Considered Art?
What is art? It’s visual, performative, and so much more. It could be considered music and dance, sculptures or literature. Photography is also a form of art, and so is architecture. Then there’s also art in a cinematic form. Art is much more than just an old painting in a museum. With all of this in mind, could AI-generated art just be yet another subsection of art?
Originality and Ownership
AI-generated art is being fully experimented with in 2022. There are countless AI art generators available that are free and easy to use online. To create an AI artwork, you can simply feed an AI generator with text prompts. Consequently it will develop an art concept that matches the prompts. And it usually does quite an impressive job.
You can also feed AI-generators with images. It’s up to you to choose the photos you give it. This brings up the question of, who’s the creator of the artwork? Is it the AI doing the work? Or, is it you, the one who picks which text prompts or images inputted?
So, who owns the AI-generated art when it’s created?
According to the current laws in the United States, without human creation there is no protection. And, since AI generators aren’t human, they cannot currently benefit from copyright protections.
IMAGE to IMAGE AI:
Below are some examples of how powerful this AI is, take a kids drawing (Mushroom House) and tell it what style you’d like and it will spit out jaw dropping images within minutes.
AI-Generated Art Is Revolutionising Publishing
Put yourself in the position of an author of a book. It’s all ready to be published and distributed but it’s yet to have a cover image or pictures inside.
You’ve got two options: pay an illustrator to create your front cover, or use an AI-generator to create your artwork for you.
Just like providing the illustrator with a brief for the book cover artwork, using an AI-generator you’ll provide text prompts and go through pretty much the same procedure; except it’ll be a human (author) to computer interaction – instead of a human (author) to human (illustrator) experience.
After all, why not? When you speak with a (human) professional, you go through pretty much the same process as you would an AI. And AI doesn’t only help with book covers. The same could also apply to album covers, posters, and anything where artwork is required.
So is AI Art: A Danger, a Replacement, or an Addition?
Due to the nature of art, it can be perceived by many different people in a multitude of ways. So, before we go thinking AI-generated art will replace people in the process of being artistic, think again. It does seems however that an artwork whether created by a human or a machine, it’s nonetheless still art.
Artificial intelligence is looking to be incredibly beneficial in healthcare, finance, education, and many other areas of our lives. It’s in constant advancement. So, why do we praise AI when it’s mentioned in relation to those fields, but tend to ridicule it when it enters the art world?
