Who was not artistically inclined at first use tools to generate and share creative images and already doing it with Craiyon.
Description
Who was not artistically inclined at first use tools to generate and share creative images and already doing it with Craiyon.
In April 2022 the artificial intelligence company OpenAI issued an unusual warning when it announced a new service called DALL-E 2. The system can generate vivid and realistic photos, paintings, and illustrations in response to a line of text or an uploaded image.
One part of OpenAI’s release notes cautioned that “the model may increase the efficiency of performing some tasks like photo editing or production of stock photography, which could displace jobs of designers, photographers, models, editors, and artists.”
The first version of DALL-E, announced in January 2021, was a landmark for computer-generated art. It showed that machine-learning algorithms fed many thousands of images as training data could reproduce and recombine features from those existing images in novel, coherent, and aesthetically pleasing ways.
A year later, DALL-E 2 markedly improved the quality of images that can be produced. It can also reliably adopt different artistic styles, and can produce images that are more photorealistic. Want a studio-quality photograph of a Shiba Inu dog wearing a beret and black turtleneck? Just type that in and wait. A steampunk illustration of a castle in the clouds? No problem. Or a 19th-century-style painting of a group of women signing the Declaration of Independence? Great idea!
The new version of DALL-E is just one example of a new category of powerful image-generation tools. Google recently announced two, Imagen, in May, and Parti, in June. Several open source projects have also created image generators, such as Craiyon, which went viral last month after people began using it to post memes on social media.
The errors and glitches of AI image generators can themselves feel like an artistic tool. Craiyon, a less-capable clone of the original DALL-E previously named DALL-E Mini, went viral last month after users discovered the fun in providing it with surreal, farcical, or unnerving text prompts. One art critic describes the limitations of the AI behind Caiyon as yielding an “online grotesque”—bizarre or disturbing fusions drawn from the zeitgeist of the internet.
“Peoples' clever prompts are at least half the fun,” says Aaron Hertzmann, a principal scientist at Adobe Research and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington who studies computational art. He says Craiyon and other image-generation tools are enabling new forms of exploration, something inherent to creativity.
Perhaps the biggest change that AI image generators will bring is dramatically expanding the number of people able to generate and experiment with art and illustration. “Optimistically, you might say this is revolutionary in communication,” says Tom White, an artist based in New Zealand whose work explores artificial intelligence. Even those who are not artistically inclined could use such tools to generate and share creative images, White says, something people are already doing with Craiyon memes. “That may change how we relate to each other.”
White suspects that tools like DALL-E 2 may become far more powerful and interesting as it becomes possible to interact with them in different ways. The only way to refine an image DALL-E produces currently is to rewrite the prompt or crop the image and use it as the prompt for a new set of ideas. White believes that it won’t be long before people using creative AI tools will be able to ask for specific adjustments to an image. “Dall-E is not the end of the road,” White says.
United States
