Making cool art with AI Illustrators

[Birched]

This is a discussion thread for the article on page 52 of issue #33 of ER Magazine.

Let's use the article as jumping off point, and explore the possibilities in AI generated art illustration!

[Birched]

[Post 2: index of AI illustrators]

From the article:

• StarryAI: http://starryai.com
• Dream: https://dream.ai
• Dall-E: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
• Midjourney (you will also need Discord to use it): https://www.midjourney.com/home/

More links:

[Birched]

[Post 3: Philosophy]

In this post, I will try to concisely summarise some of the legal, philosophical, and ethical issues around the use of these AI art creators.

As a starting point:

• Using the art appears legal, currently, in jurisdictions I am aware of (but I am not an expert and you are responsible for knowing your own local rules).
• It is useful, and allows people to create derivative pieces to suit their own needs that they would not normally have access to in ways that seem consistent with the idea of "fair use". In a way, it's a new art palette.
• The AI engines appears to have been trained on existing art without the knowledge or consent of real artists. This is controversial. In some cases, the art can be created in the style of a particular artist, and will sometimes even include features such as their signature.

I do not want to make an exhaustive discussion of the issues in this post, but if a few good articles by experts turn up in discussion I will post the links here.

[lostcheerio]

I've read page 3 and also page 52 and I'm just here with popcorn.

[Yoshimi]

AI Art (and machine learning in general) also has a huge carbon footprint due to the computing power needed to produce images and the life cycle of the equipment. The research on this impact is still developing but there are some solutions possible. Consumers of AI art who are concerned about climate impacts can keep an eye on different companies' practices and "vote" with their choices.

[lostcheerio]

Relevant: Tor got busted for using AI on a high profile book cover, and decided not to change it.

[Birched]

Originally Posted by Yoshimi

AI Art (and machine learning in general) also has a huge carbon footprint due to the computing power needed to produce images and the life cycle of the equipment. The research on this impact is still developing but there are some solutions possible. Consumers of AI art who are concerned about climate impacts can keep an eye on different companies' practices and "vote" with their choices.

That paper was published before the current craze and focuses on some different applications of AI art, but it still seems very relevant. It reminds me of the kind of thing people have been talking about with e.g. "As of August 2022, published estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto-assets are between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia." from whitehouse.govcrypto. I could imagine the current craze of AI-generated art has had a pretty substantial energy and carbon footprint, though I am not sure how much goes into each new piece once the AI algorithm has already been developed. I was listening to part of an audio discussion at MidJourney and they said that they were currently doing 10% of the volume of Instagram in images, so even that site alone has gotten very big, very quickly.

Originally Posted by lostcheerio

Relevant: Tor got busted for using AI on a high profile book cover, and decided not to change it.

Interesting. Definitely that article represents a very militant (I'm not saying it's wrong) view about artists' rights, similar to what I've seen elsewhere online. I do think that the contrarian view, that these AIs are tools that greatly increase the creative potential almost any given person, and their ability to themselves generate representations of their ideas, also has a lot of merit. I hope that some kind of common ground can be reached where artists are respected (especially if they 'opt out' however that might work) but these tools still exist.

[lostcheerio]

I wonder which is worse for us PbP players -- to use AI art generators to create character portraits (I have been doing this and absolutely love it) or to use images from the web that were made by actual artists. Lots of us dutifully credit our images, but whether you give credit to the original artist or not, they don't get paid for that. Is this better than using AI?

I've done all of these things:

1. Used AI for images
2. Used images I found on the web giving credit to the original artist
3. Used images I found on the web NOT giving credit, either because I couldn't trace it or because I just didn't take the time
4. Drawn my own character art using a reference image.
5. Paid artists to make character art.

Obviously 5 is the best for artists, but is there a real difference between 1-4 in terms of the artists getting paid for their pirated work?

[GallupsMirror]

Open-source AI-generated art may resolve the legal issues, where the AI codebase is open source, the artwork used to train the AI is public domain and royalty-free, the text prompts (as a condition of use) must be public domain, and so the art output is too.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when movies, possibly with music, sound effects, and dialog, not just still images, can be generated by AI too. And then it'll be immersive 3D worlds, like what you get with Occulus. The Star Trek holodeck, or some version of it, may not be so far off, just like Captain Kirk's communicator became the smartphone. Just put on the visor, tell the computer what you want--"battle a dragon with my sword in a castle"--and there it is.

Art and photography, including CGI processing and compositing, is my enjoyment rather than my living, so I don't feel threatened by AI that lets just anyone achieve similar results. But I understand why a commercial artist may not like it. Either way, AI artwork here to stay, and it's only going to get better and cheaper.

[Inuvash255]

I personally ended my subscription to Midjourney. I saw one too many posts from artists pleading with people not to feed the beast that scans people's art without permission.

Worse yet, when some politely asked to be removed from the system (or even to not be creditted on the wikipedia page about AI art); they were met with derision and rudeness and disrespect. Programmers and AI-art fans can be proper jerks, apparently.

@lostcheerio: While I do agree; for my own uses- I only used AI art for RPG stuff; for one-time or one-campaign use; in the same way that I also used to scour the web to 'steal' images for the same purpose.

That said, I suppose the big difference is that I didn't pay someone to scour the web for me; which is money that gets re-invested in art-thievery. While I may be using it pretty fairly or innocently; some unethical people out there have used AI art for art contests or to sort of "impersonate" an artist, or otherwise pretend that their AI-prompting is their own labor.

I wish there was some sort of regulation against mis-representing AI art, and the related IP-theft.

I'd love to use an AI art generator without an ethical dilemma. It's such a useful tool for translating my imagination into a picture my friends can see.