AI ART : The END of An Artist`s Career

Written by Farhan Tanvir & Pritom Mondol.

Have you ever thought of your imagination becoming a reality? If yes, then look no further than Art. Art is a great way to express human imagination with colors and brush strokes. From ancient cave paintings to today`s digital illustrations, art has always been a staple of human culture and creativity. However, due to the recent surge of AI art tools, art is now suddenly losing all its prestige and charisma.

AI as an Artist?

-    In today`s world, AI is encroaching on many fields that are traditionally run by humans. So far it`s been mostly technical tasks such as recognizing CT scans for doctors, predicting oil deposits for engineers, image recognition tasks, and so on. But ART is something different and it is one of the last fields to be encroached upon by AI. Creating art requires a unique combination of skills, creativity, and the very human element of aesthetic taste. But what if I told you that for the first time it seems that visual art may have also fallen into the hands of AI.

  

Introducing DALL-E and DALL-E 2:

DALL-E, an AI artist, was first launched back in January 2021 by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory under the supervision of Elon Musk. This AI caught everyone by surprise with its ability to generate new images that didn`t exist before. No one ever expected this kind of text-to-image generator technology to appear so early in the century. It had its limitations but what it could do felt like it came right out of a sci-fi movie. 

A DALL-E example of "An astronaut riding a horse."

In April this year, OpenAI launched the next iteration of this AI named 'DALLE-2'. Unlike the previous version, this iteration could create life-like photos in different artistic styles, giving the image an aesthetic look whereas the previous one could only generate cartoon-like images. As DALLE-2 was superior to DALLE, it surprised the 200 researchers who had access to it. However, according to OpenAI, DALLE-2 currently has a user base of 1.5 million people worldwide after being commercially available and rebranded as DALL-E.

Dawn of AI-ART:

In August 2022 a Discord-based AI art platform called ‘Mid-Journey’ became a sensation by creating arts that were comparable to DALL-E. And the best part of this AI was that, unlike DALL-E, this AI was open for the ordinary public to use. Many people joined Discord that month just to make artworks of their own imagination and interest using AI. This AI offered a cheap and fast text-to-image generating service that seemed like a better option to everyone when they compared it to digital artist fees and the time they take to make the final product. This clearly shows how artificial intelligence-driven art can be more appealing to people than traditional art as it is more affordable and less time-consuming.

ALL OF THIS BEGS THE QUESTION– 

"WILL AI ART REPLACE TRADITIONAL ART?"

To answer this question, we have to dig deeper into the matter.

MidJourney VS DALL-E

First, we have to know what these AIs are currently capable of. This video showcases how DALL-E works and what it is capable of. And to know more about Mid-Journey we can watch this video. There is another video that does a comparison between DALL-E and Mid-Journey AI.

After watching these videos, we`ll learn that,

• Both DALL-E and Mid-Journey are capable of turning any text description given as a prompt to the AI into a unique image or a work of art that has never been seen before.

• These AI are very fast in generating the image outputs. In fact DALL-E is so fast that it takes only 10 seconds to create a realistic image or art with it!!

• These AI are capable of mimicking the creative judgments of an artist when applying colors, and adding features to its design element.

• These AI can simulate complex backgrounds, depth of field effects, realistic shadows, shading, and reflections while rendering the end result in high resolution. However, DALL-E focuses more on realism than art, whereas Mid-Journey AI`s primary goal is to produce art.

• DALL-E can predict which design elements will look good to the human eye and thus it can fill in blank details about the image that were not given on its own. The OpenAI team wrote about this concept and called it ‘Filling in the blank’. Mid-Journey AI also follows a similar architecture.




“Unlike a 3D rendering engine, whose inputs must be specified unambiguously and in complete detail, DALL-E is often able to ‘fill in the blanks’ when the caption implies that the image must contain a certain detail that is not explicitly stated.” — The OpenAI Team

However, these AIs are not perfect. Professional design artists may still find some imperfections in the rendered images produced by an AI artist. But to an ordinary consumer, these imperfections are meaningless when he can create high-quality digital art in just a matter of seconds. The consumer can also edit the final product while using an AI-ART system to remove the minor imperfections of the rendered image. When it comes to accuracy, DALL-E is comparatively better than other AIs. To get an idea of DALL-E AI`s performance against a human artist, you can watch this clip from a YouTube video titled, "Can AI Replace Our Graphic Designer?" Even though this video was filmed in the early stages of DALL-E 2, it should give us a good idea of its performance against a human artist. But we should also keep in mind that this AI is being heavily trained every day meaning that the current update should be much better than the one used in the video.

Impacts of AI-ART :

• The digital art community around the world has mixed feelings about this AI technology. Some are excited about what it can do next, how it can enhance their art, and how it can democratize digital art for everyone while others are terrified and concerned that one day this AI might take over the digital art market by storm, resulting in unemployment for the digital artists. 

• People will soon start questioning the value of creativity as it can now be mimicked by machines making it no longer a human element.

• Art might start losing its appreciation as a machine can create it within seconds.

Final Thoughts:

If this situation goes on, traditional artists will face a huge problem and they might even go extinct. Traditional artwork holds social values and emotions that AI can`t replicate. Many great artists in the past have portrayed many revolutionary acts, famines, disasters, histories, etc. through their artworks

But at present, this occupation is facing threat due to the sudden artificialization of art. We need to remember that art is not just a portrayal of different ideas on paper sheets, it's much more than that. It`s a reflection of the artist`s emotions and feelings.

If we went back 5 years ago, the idea that an AI could create art from scratch was radical at that time. But since then the technology absolutely skyrocketed. It`s no longer a cute novelty. It has grown up to something that is starting to catch people off guard. And from this point onwards, it will only get better. This makes us wonder, “Will the need for artists to create art be demolished?” The answer is, “Probably yes. That is where we are headed with this kind of technology”