Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Art

Artists face challenging but exciting times in the era of AI art. Advanced tools are democratizing art creation, allowing anyone to generate impressive images with simple prompts.

"It's foolish to resist artificial intelligence in art creation," mural artist Sneha Chakraborty said.

When Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, he believed that creative pursuits had an intrinsic connection to humans that machines could never possess. However, the situation is different now. "Current AI systems, especially language models and diffusion models used for visual art, are very suitable for creative pursuits," said Jacy Reese Anthis, co-founder of the Sentience Institute.

AI Tools for Creating "Art"

Now, anyone can create stunning images with simple prompts. Artist Ryan Murdoch said, "So, I think it will shift our values from 'Is this a stunning image with the colors I want?' to 'Is this image truly clever, meaningful, or otherwise special?'"

While these tools can be used by anyone, they produce different effects when used by skilled artists. Gokul Pillai, a photographer turned AI artist, said, "We all have cameras, but when capturing special moments, we still hire professional photographers."

OpenAI's text-to-image tool, DALL.E, has paved the way for a series of similar tools. It has gradually improved in subsequent iterations, better understanding the quality of images, the complexity of backgrounds, and detailed and long prompts. They have even released it for use by ChatGPT Enterprise and premium users. Similar platforms include Midtravel, Stable Diffusion, and Imagen.

Meanwhile, photo editing software like Adobe, Figma, Blender, and CorelDraw are continuously updating their existing AI features.

Adobe's goal is to delegate all repetitive and tedious work to computers, such as removing stray hairs in Photoshop and editing fill words in videos. At Adobe's annual conference, Adobe Max, the company announced its new feature, Generative Colour for Illustrator, allowing users to generate and apply new color schemes with simple prompts in seconds.

On the other hand, Canva has launched "Magic Studio," which lives up to its name by allowing even non-experts to work with AI tools on the platform.

Is This Really Art?

Art has always been evolving, that's for sure. From paintbrushes to digital canvases, the tools humans use to express themselves have evolved over time. AI systems built upon billions of human-created images are now the foundation of future art creation.

Concerns about AI undermining human creativity or stripping art of its soul are unnecessary. It will undoubtedly lead to an influx of mediocre artworks on the internet, but it will also free artists from mundane tasks. Vimal Chandran explained the impact on him, saying, "When starting a film, creating mood boards with initial sketches for all frames used to take a long time. It was a tedious step in the filmmaking process. Now, I delegate this task to AI, which has increased my productivity and allowed me to focus more on the main aspects of filmmaking."

Another interesting example is the Japanese animation Akira (1988), which required over 70 artists working continuously for three years to create a masterpiece. But now, achieving the same result in a few months doesn't diminish the value of the original work. Just as musicians initially rejected P2P file sharing and then went through a turbulent period before embracing digital music, we are currently in a similar phase with AI art.