AI-generated art?

Over the past few years, the amount of artwork produced by AI and published on the internet has increased dramatically. These works include two-dimensional drawings, three-dimensional graphics and hyper realistic images that can be confused for real photographs. The advancement in this technology has changed all avenues of content creation and consumption and not to mention this is just the other beginning of the whole process. Companies such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E seekers have made it possible for anyone to create their own text to image works at an economic price. These systems image generation systems make use of machine learning technologies which have been trained with a huge amount of pictures available on the internet. They are experts in turning ideas into visual images. Users can therefore, expect and meet their wildest expectation and ideas through the use of the app that simply requires the user to fill and submit a text box of their expectations. This is so easy that within seconds the amazed user can enjoy new pictures completely designed visually with the click of a button.As for my first encounter with Midjourney, I must say it was a good journey indeed. I remember spending hours upon hours trying various prompt compositions and artistic styles and retraining the algorithm. What amazed me was that each result was always diverse; even the same prompt repeated over and over produced different outcomes.

The resultant images may be “upscaled” to exact copies of the originals in all respects. For me, Midjourney is also greatly useful in creating more than one rotoscope animation by upscaling the same images more than once and playing them in quick motion, producing an exquisite stop motion. Manual image stitching was required to attain that but in more sophisticated databases like DALL-E, it is possible to create a video automatically. The output quality may vary but most of these so-called ‘video footages’ rendered by AI, in some instances, appear hyper-realistic.

Similarly, AI is conquering other domains beyond visual art and uses – text content and copywriting too with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLM) at the forefront. These AI chatbots such as ChatGPT employ the referred models to summarize, translate, anticipate and even generate text and submit ready-made content in no time while walking in the shoes of the conversation.

With knowledge on a range of topics, ChatGPT has the ability to self-generate content in forms such as poetry, songs, stories, scripts, blogs, essays, proposal, article, cover letter, social media captions and hashtags and many more without the assistance of any other human being. I have always loved creative writing and wanted to be a writer, and so I view ChatGPT not only as a means to supplement my word bank but also as something that sparks my interest. The same applies to ChatGTP in different aspects of life as I seek help, advice, tips and recommendations from them at work and otherwise.

And what comes next? The rate at which this generation is growing is hard to believe. But somewhere in this exuberance, fears are lurking. The ethical issue is still a gray area as this is a new thing. Most of the artists, teachers, or even some professionals are anxious that this may lead to the violation of some laws including but not limited to the doctrine of fair use, morality, patent laws, copyright, and even personal rights. While others think that these computer programs would take over people's jobs. Such caution is understandable, but personally I think that there will be human-machine relationships in their productive forms. Machines will not displace us; they will only helped to increase productivity for routine work performed meticulously reducing wastage of time so that more complex tasks can be dealt with by people. Sure, ai is good at working on repetitive tasks such as analysing data, and sorting them into various patterns as required. However, it has no aspect of feelings, compassion, ethics, imagination, and solving complexities that are inherent to human beings.

On a personal note, I fully support the capacity and possibilities provided by AI. I consider it a tool that enhances my skills in my creative profession rather than downplays them. AI can be faulty at times, but its development is on the rise. Many small startups and even more establishments are emerging with the focus of using AI technology in various By-Industries.