How AI and artists can coexist as collaborators rather than adversaries? MONTY GOULD this process involve grainy nothing canvases that CLIP squints at and says “I guess it kind of looks like an erupting volcano painted by Van Gogh?”, or whatever the prompts was, before VQGAN returns a new iteration and asks “How about now? Hotter or colder?”. This repeats until we have an VQGAN image output that can fool CLIP (and discerning humans) that what they are seeing is the real deal. The success of this process relies heavily on how well-trained the process is, which is primarily a function of the quantity of images it has been fed as reference. This dataset routinely demonstrates societal biases seen in online image catalogues – for example, disproportionately returning photographs for cis-men when searching ‘CEO’, or white people when searching ‘professional hairstyles’ - and searches and inevitably contains copyrighted material, like original art and photography. Artist RJ Palmer told BBC News’ Chris Vallance that “AI is not just like finding inspiration in the work of other artists: This is directly stealing their essence in a way".
"Computer-generated art has at its best been an exercise in creating absurd surrealist memes, such as the twitter viral ‘Court Sketch of Godzilla on Trial’ by DALL-E Mini."
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he discourse concerning ‘art’ created by artificial intelligence seems to be fast approaching a consensus. Computergenerated art has at its best been an exercise in creating absurd surrealist memes, such as the twitter viral “Court Sketch of Godzilla on Trial” by DALL-E Mini. At its worst, AI art has been a method by which freelance artists are being driven out of work, such as “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” by Midjourney which won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, much to human competitors’ dismay. Using AI to create ‘art’, or at least images, is not new however, the ease with which these images can be created has drastically decreased whilst the quality has drastically increased. Andy Baio does a comprehensive analysis of the various dangers this advancement holds, ranging from reducing “demand in some paid creative services” to “opening up new avenues for deepfakes, misinformation, and online harassment and exploitation”. If we believe there is an ethical responsibility on artists in the creation of their art, which is perhaps an unreasonable belief, can we find an ethical and constructive use for AI within the field of design?
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“AI is not just like finding inspiration in the work of other artists: This is directly stealing their essence in a way." Beginning a search for this tool should start with a brief look at how these image generators work. Many of the most popular generators (DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Nightcafe, Stable Diffusion) use Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network and Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (VQGAN+CLIP) – a maths-heavy acronym that isn’t particularly meaningful for anyone outside of machine learning circles. Breaking this down, we have an image generator process in VQGAN and an image discriminator process in CLIP; VQGAN creates the ‘art’ and CLIP decides how well this ‘art’ meets the prompt the user has supplied, feeding back to VQGAN who tries again. The first iterations of
"AI should not replace an artist but instead be another tool a designer could utilise, like a new set of brushes or an idea journal." The 3 main considerations we want to consider in creating an ethical use of AI in design (alongside concerns about the quality of output, well-covered elsewhere) are as follows: • AI should not replace an artist but instead be another tool a designer could utilise, like a new set of brushes or an idea journal. •AI should not mimic an existing artist but instead at most reference styles and concepts, with personal touches added by the designer, like seeking inspiration from a gallery visit. • AI should not be trusted with solely directing output but instead work under supervision and guidance from an (ethical) designer, like a master directing an apprentice. Wi t h t h e s e i n m i n d , w e c a n c r a f t a VQGAN+CLIP+Designer approach in which the designer inserts themselves into the AI process to ensure these considerations are met. This concept, known as Human In The Loop (HITL), has been applied in many machine learning environments to improve transparency, incorporate human judgement, and lessen the need for ‘perfect’ algorithms. The existing