It's not the end of the world, but the world as we know it now, is going to be absolutely gone within 3-5 years. AI is going to change everything. I did a post earlier this week in OCA talking a bit about AI art. Basically reiterating that it is not allowed in OCA and saying a bit about how I feel about it. One thing I mentioned is that I HAVE been experimenting with it though. Up until the time I wrote that post I'd created some pretty amazing stuff. Stuff that definitely convinced me that this tech was a total game changer, but since then it's gone from impressive to damn new magic. That's what this post will be littered with. A series of images I've created over the last 3 days, with Midjourney. In total, just down this one rabbit hole of subject matter, I've created over 600 images...in three days.
The Good
As you'll see from the images in this post, this technology is amazing. I don't think it's an understatement to say it's totally revolutionary. It has far reaching implications and use cases for artists and non artists. After using it for a while I can tell an artist would definitely have the edge over a normal person in producing images. A big help is knowledge of art history. Being able to invoke art styles, movements, mediums, and artists gives you a lot of flexibility in controlling the style of the image and the subject matter included. It's not as straight forward as one might hope figuring out how to get specific results. It's incredibly easy to get GOOD results, but it's pretty challenging to get results that you can control and reproduce with some predictability.
Also something I consider a plus is actually that becoming a prompt whisperer does actually take some practice, and artists will be the ones that put in the time and work to get really good at it. This is where, even with all the negatives I'm going to point out, I do think artists should familiarize themselves with these tools. If a new weapon that you think is immoral gets dropped on the battlefield, if it can easily change the course of the war, you have to use it or expect to lose. Of course, you can still advocate that the weapon be taken out of the fight, like chemical weapons, but this isn't chemical weapons something everyone agrees is abhorrent. For a lot of people this is going to be a God send.
The Bad
There's a lot of bad that I can think of that comes with this. Not just the fact that it threatens artists jobs. It also cheapens art to the viewer. You might be in awe at the images in this post right now. Why? It's because you haven't really ever seen any of this before and it looks really good, but the more important part is you haven't seen a TON of stuff like this before, but let's say 50 people saw this, liked it, went over to MJ and create 500 new images in the same style. Suddenly you're sick of it, it's all over the place. We're going to a world where that's going to be the new norm. Someone figures something cool out. A million people all go copy it and within a few days, it's tiring to look at. Not to mention when this happens it will totally drown out actual artists work and it will be harder and harder for them to get any eyeballs on their work because this is now what they're competing against.
Of course the obvious bad is for artists making a living creating art. Zero chance this isn't going to totally change the landscape. I guess some good news is like I said, it's pretty difficult to get results that are predictable. It will be good, but it's all over the place. Usually when someone is in the market for some production art, they need something very specific and at least right now, AI sucks at very specific.
I'm seeing a world where someone is going to look at one of my paintings and say to me as a compliment "Wow! this looks like it was painted with AI!" and I'm going to die inside a little. I am a realist. I'm not one to pretend things aren't what they are. These paintings are amazing. The thing that makes me die inside, is that WILL be a complement. People thinking there is some woo woo special thing about human art that will make it stand out, I just think the AI needs more time, and more data. It will figure out hands. Processing will get cheaper and faster, ugghhh. Yea, it's not the end of the world. It's a huge change to the world, and I'm not sure it's for the better.
The Ugly
And now we get into what's worst of all about this. It took me a decent amount of research to learn how all this actually works and in the end, it's all about the data baby. The data is the oil, it's the gold, it's the fucking unobtanium in this new world, and the way all these current text to image generators acquired their data is shady and immoral as all hell. There are artist initiatives going on to lobby Congress to check this, but to say I have little faith in Congress is the understatement of the century. There is also going to undoubtedly be litigation coming, because they are IP infringement machines but the tech is moving at light speed and laws and governments move a sloth speed.
Here's the condensed version
The main dataset these apps are using is called LAION-5B. It's opensource and contains 5.8 Billion images. Among these images are a ton of copyrighted material. Art, tv shows, movies, porn, everything. The for-profit companies like Midjourney and Stability AI would not be able to just haphazardly take a bunch of copyrighted materials, but via the legal loophole of accessing an opensource resource they were able to. That's all good until you learn that Stability AI is one of the funders and creators of the non-profit that created the dataset that they use in for-profit products.
So basically these companies stole a bunch of artists work, then used it to create a tool to put them out of work. It's pretty messed up. Individual artists have been targeted and had models built to exclusively replicate their style and some of them are actually really good at doing just that.
So yea, I don't know. Part of me thinks this thing is a runaway train, good luck putting the brakes on now. I'd also be lying if I said a part of me wasn't enjoying essentially creating what feels like a whole alternate reality in realtime, so even I'm still conflicted, but this is a rant after all. We're living in some crazy times. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I'll leave you with a few more pieces to enjoy, but I hope you feel bad while you enjoy them haha.
