by Malena Pugliese

Staff Editor in Chief

 

Innovation is not a new concept, and neither is technology

being a day to day convenience for anything from

communicating with friends and family half a world apart

within seconds to ordering food from your couch, and now,

making art.

 

We’ve come to know eras of art such as the Gothic era or

Renaissance era, even the Impressionist era, but today’s

art is a whole new era with so much influence and innovation

and styles to offer that it is hard to pinpoint—all this under an

umbrella of a term coined “Contemporary Art.” One of the

biggest up-and-coming parts of contemporary art, however,

may be the practice of not even having to pick up a brush,

chisel, or drawing pad stylus, but merely typing in words a

nd inputting images. It may come to a surprise to most people, but the earliest example of AI art comes from the early 70s, when artist-turned-college professor Harold Cohen helped build the computer system AARON, which Cohen used to create paintings using pre-programmed algorithmic code, paintings that have been displayed in their own exhibitions at museums. Now, after fifty-some-odd years, the technology has improved immensely and is more accessible with softwares like Midjourney and DALL-E 2 quickly becoming common names in the AI art community. 

 

And while one man achieved a place in an art museum for his creations, Colorado-native Jason M. Allen won an award with his own AI generated artwork, and even Cosmopolitan has released the first magazine issue with an artificial-intelligence-generated cover, traditional artists have some mixed emotions about the idea of this becoming a new normal. 

 

“The goal of the company is to develop artificial general intelligence. And by that, we mean an AI that can do all of the things a human can, and to deploy it in a way that’s safe and maximizes the positive benefits to society,” explains Aditya Ramesh, the creator of DALL-E 2. “It’s not merely cutting-and-pasting together; it’s understanding of images is sort of more conceptual and abstract, sort of like how a human would use inspiration from all the images that he or she may have seen in their lifetimes.” 

 

And there is some credit to what Ramesh says, as artists do have some praises for the technology.

 

“AI can help the art community by allowing a quick way to produce concept art,” says senior Eli Zelenock, an artist with his own small business painting henna at parties, which he operates with his business partner fellow artist and senior Ava Kopitzki. Meanwhile, senior Aurora Matteson, an artist who boasts a huge following on her Instagram account where she posts her own, non-AI generated art, is a bit more critical, and confesses  “I  don't think it has helped other than for entertainment purposes, but it can still inspire real artists with ideas.”

 

But, even with the good it can allow, there’s limitations and chances AI technology in art could cause real harm.

 

“While AI art is impressive in its own right, it is very bland and emotionless with human input and the art it learns from,” explains Matteson. It can also create real suspicion, with artists online posting about comments they’ve received asking them what they would call their art style in words, likely from AI gurus hoping to create similar art. “AI has caused issues with stealing art, with real artists who worked hard being accused of it being AI art.” While Zelenock is less skeptical about the good AI art technology has to offer, he also has some doubts, explaining “I definitely don’t think AI art is a bad thing.  Although there is the potential that it will threaten some people’s jobs, as AI art has put into the hands of people the ability to create art that would normally need years of practice.  This obviously has threatened the art community.”

 

Yet, even with these point of views, one has to admit there’s been plenty of interesting creations that have been circulated online (I myself saw photos of rococo-style sneakers the other day and thought “wow, I want a pair of those'' only to find out they weren’t even real, just AI generated. Darn!).

 

“I've seen AI art used over real videos to make it animated which is very interesting,” comments Matteson. Zelenock, who himself has created a totally memeable compilation of AI generated images of Ryan Reynolds riding a horse, adds “One of the more interesting uses I have seen AI art being used for is the creation of D & D characters and OCs (original characters).”

 

These cool creations, while made with AI which may seem like a quick and easy shortcut, follow a specific formula when generating images.

 

“Number one: everything becomes numbers. A computer only knows how to read numbers so anything abstract such as text or image must all be represented as numbers for a computer to work with. Number two: every image is basically a grid of pixels and each pixel contains a color and each color is represented as numbers. Specifically three numbers, for red, green, and blue. Every color in our rainbow has a unique combination of these three numbers. This leads to number three: diffusion which is a fancy word for ‘make an image fuzzy’...technically known as noise, and noise is really just random colors in every pixel. Diffusion is the core technique that allow models to generate any image they can think of,” explains Raymond Sun, the founder and developer of SyncTrainer, an AI-enabled mobile app for analyzing dance and sport synchronization. “Now, when I enter a prompt into a generator such as Stable Diffusion, what happens in the back end is that my prompt goes through two steps: in the first step, the text encoder interprets the prompt and finds the key concepts which then guide the image generator which uses diffusion to create the output image.”

 

Having said that, it’s not clear if those who create AI art can be considered true artists when they must follow such an intricate, imperfect formula, and still end up with art that can be identified as AI generated just by a few key factors‒the future of AI art is looking pretty shaky.

 

Matteson is very firm in her belief that she wouldn’t call those who use AI for art artists and adds “in the future I think the trend will die out.” She also mentions the areas to look out for if you’re trying to identify AI art from real art, “You can tell [it’s AI art] when you see inconsistencies in areas such as hair, hands, and eyes.” Zelenock agrees that using AI generators disqualifies you from being called an artist, yet still believes there’s a future for this industry. “I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but I wouldn’t exactly call them an artist, they are their own category. When the camera was first invented people had a hard time accepting it because they thought there was no need to draw.  We do not see any lack of artists today.  I believe a similar trend will follow.”

 

AI has certainly helped create some very unique pieces of content, but if you wanted a future as an AI art creator, there may be some obstacles, as shown with the AI art comic book Zarya of the Dawn (who’s main character looks strikingly like Zendaya, as the creator, Kris Kashtanova, uses her name when inputting the prompts). The comic book, which was being published online, lost its copyright in December, as the United States Copyright Office announced that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection. Additionally, artists online have become increasingly more against the idea of AI art, as their art continues to be used by AI artists who input it into software to make their creations. Nothing is for certain, but one thing is for sure, with new technology, new regulations follow too and it’s only a matter of time before AI is given a set of guidelines. The world may choose to embrace AI art, or they may choose to chase it away.