Artificial Intelligence in Art and Design
Remember when FaceApp was used as the new school party trick at every gathering to show your unsuspecting victim what they would look like in the next decade or so?
Would you be surprised to know that the same technology that made your cousin into your uncle is now on its way to making hundreds of thousands of dollars at art auctions?
The time for belief is now because it’s happening.
In October 2019 (yup already back then) an artwork named, Portrait of Edmond Belamy, sold for over $430 000 proving itself as the most expensive piece of “Artificial” art to ever be sold.
But things are getting crazier as the years’ progress and today we are going to talk about it.
What is AI Art?
Luckily to answer this question we don’t need to identify the definition of art (that may be a bit more complex).
Art created by Artificial Intelligence is known as Generative Adversarial Network art or GAN art. This is the initial processing system by which computers have and still are creating artworks to gawk at.
How this works is simple to understand but immensely complicated to execute. Two AI programs are placed on competing spectrums where the goal is inevitably to create images that cannot be distinguished as “fake” by the competitor.
Still with me?
The way that the algorithms are able to distinguish this is through machine learning where each AI is fed thousands of images whereby they learn and analyse how these images look and appear. The AI then “competes” and creates off of each other until a subsequent image is formed.
However, this was initially in its infancy until a few radical changes and developments have occurred.
The Revolution
Over the past few years, AI Artists (and those creating these creatives) have gotten a lot smarter.
A recent development in the AI art world is the advent creation of softwares known as DALL E and Midjourney have been taking the world by storm.
These experimental (and sometimes fully practical) software tools have created a whole new outlook on what can be classified as art in the modern landscape.
Simply utilising narrative input from a user, these two AI programs are able to create hyper-realistic and oftentimes stunning works of art.
With this software, GAN art has become user-friendly and is both in fact fully available to the consumer market and anyone with an internet connection and some semblance of creativity.
Simply input a phrase like “The future of technology,” as one such example and the AI gets to work generating a high-resolution interpretation of the phrase with clinical accuracy.
Some scary stuff allowing Artificial Intelligence to gauge what we oftentimes cannot fathom, however, it does promote more uses than a few hours of entertainment.
AI Put to Work
Now a lot of you are probably asking, “What’s the point? Aren’t artists already the solution for art?”
These questions are true, however, as humans do quite often, we have already found a way to utilise these tools for the better.
In our firm’s case, we have fully embraced the AI Artist as a part of our organisation, using Midjourney as a helpful concept creator and element generator for our graphic design uses.
In other industries, similar tools have been utilised to create music videos, imagery, and even in a copywriting sense (I may be out of the job soon … not really).
Although Elon musk once said “AI is far more dangerous than Nukes,” we aren’t quite there yet and the current landscape actually enhances the average human’s capacity to create.
There is the thought that one day these Robo-Picasso’s may replace your graphic designer or animator, but that may not be the case. We are currently able to leverage these tools for better content creation and brand new outlooks on what art is.
With this in mind, our creative industry may not be at risk and may in fact get better.
The only answer we have right now is that we should wait to see what comes next.
As always the “threats” are there but for now, we fully embrace our AI Compadres in the creative industry until such a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger appears in a leather jacket and sunglasses, that may be a good time to reconsider.
But until then, AI is most definitely our friend.
