Is generative AI really a threat to creative professionals?
When the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021’s Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later.
The internet revelled in the meme-making opportunities, with a Twitter account documenting “weird Dall-E generations” racking up more than a million followers. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world’s first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of “generative AI”. The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google’s Imagen Video and Meta’s Make-A-Video.
But AI’s new artistic prowess wasn’t received so ecstatically by some creatives. “The main concern for me is what this does to the future of not just my industry, but creative human industries in general,” says Palmer.
By ingesting large datasets in order to analyse patterns and build predictive models, AI has long proved itself superior to humans at some tasks. It’s this number-crunching nous that led an AI to trounce the world Go champion back in 2016, rapidly computing the most advantageous game strategy, and unafraid to execute moves that would have elicited scoffs had they come from a person. But until recently, producing original output, especially creative work, was considered a distinctly human pursuit.
Recent improvements in AI have shifted the dial. Not only can AI image generators now transpose written phrases into novel pictures, but strides have been made in AI speech-generation too: large language models such as GPT-3 have reached a level of fluency that convinced at least one recently fired Google researcher of machine sentience. Plug in Bach’s oeuvre, and an AI can improvise music in more or less the same style – with the caveat that it would often be impossible for a human orchestra to actually play.
This class of technology is known as generative AI, and it works through a process known as diffusion. Essentially, huge datasets are scraped together to train the AI, and through a technical process the AI is able to devise new content that resembles the training data but isn’t identical. Once it has seen millions of pictures of dogs tagged with the word “dog”, it is able to lay down pixels in the shape of an entirely novel pup that resembles the dataset closely enough that we would have no issue labelling it a dog. It’s not perfect – AI image tools still struggle with rendering hands that look human, body proportions can be off, and they have a habit of producing nonsense writing.
While internet users have embraced this supercharged creative potential – armed with the correctly refined prompt, even novices can now create arresting digital canvases – some artists have balked at the new technology’s capacity for mimicry. Among the prompts entered into image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, many tag an artist’s name in order to ensure a more aesthetically pleasing style for the resulting image. Something as mundane as a bowl of oranges can become eye-catching if rendered in the style of, say, Picasso. Because the AI has been trained on billions of images, some of which are copyrighted works by living artists, it can generally create a pretty faithful approximation.
Some are outraged at what they consider theft of their artistic trademark. Greg Rutkowski, a concept artist and illustrator well known for his golden-light infused epic fantasy scenes, has already been mentioned in hundreds of thousands of prompts used across Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. “It’s been just a month.
