Art created by artificial intelligence: “Scary and fascinating at the same time”

DALL-E 2 is an artificial intelligence software that can turn anything you type into art in any style. Want a Renoir-esque panda portrait? Here you go!

Sugarplum Fairy eating a Kehinde Wiley style cheeseburger? Try it! One woman said: “It’s terrifying and exciting at the same time!”

People use DALL-E to make music videos…

… as well as covers of children’s books and magazines.

I even used it to illustrate the Sunday Morning stories.

DALL-E 2 and its competitors like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are available to everyone; they are inexpensive or even free to use. It’s easy to see how this technology will change the game in graphic design, interior design, architecture, fashion and film production.

Aditya Ramesh, the creator of DALL-E, works at OpenAI, a company founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and others. “The goal of the company is to develop artificial general intelligence,” he said. “And by that we mean artificial intelligence that can do everything a human can do and deploy it in a safe way that maximizes the benefit of society.”

To teach DALL-E (the name is a combination of Dali, the artist, and Wall-E, the Pixar robot), the company fed it 600 million tagged images from the Internet.

“It’s not just cut and paste together; his understanding of images is more conceptual and abstract, like how a person draws inspiration from all the images he or she has seen in his or her life,” Ramesh. said.

I know what you’re thinking: This will put many artists out of work.

Meet concept artist Carla Ortiz, who has designed characters, creatures and costumes for many Marvel films, such as Doctor Strange. “Why would anyone hire someone when they can just get something [AI] is it ‘good enough’?’ she said.

But her biggest concern isn’t unemployment; the fact is that the works of professional artists ended up in the OpenAI database. That’s how DALL-E knows how to emulate the style of Norman Rockwell, or Picasso, or Ansel Adams, or living, working artists.

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” Ortiz said. “It’s an invasion of our ability to consent to access these, you know, data sets. No one asked us The way to fix this is to do so by creating datasets that are completely complete works in the public domain and further expanding through licensing agreements.”

The idea is that if an artist decides to “opt in” to the AI’s image database and become part of its algorithms, the artist will be compensated.

Artificial intelligence art companies say they’re listening. For example, Stability AI recently announced that it will allow artists to “opt out” of future versions of its database.

But OpenAI is also concerned about other flaws, such as the creation of AI-generated images that contain pornography, violence or misinformation. Ramesh said, “When we trained the model, we filtered out images of weapons, blood, gore.”

So if someone types the phrase “The President Kills Kittens” into the DALL-E image generator, it will return an error message. “It won’t let you do that,” Ramesh said.

DALL-E also attempts to offset racial and gender stereotypes in the online image universe. So, even though 90% of photos of doctors online may be white men, Ramesh said, DALL-E will try to even things out.

But not all AI companies have such protections built in. According to Emad Mostak, CEO of Stability AI, “it’s worth having many different views and perspectives. And as a society, we need to come together and figure out what the best way to use this amazing technology is.”

Stable Diffusion by Stability AI is open source, which means it’s free for everyone, with no restrictions or railings. This approach caused a lot of anxiety.

Mostak said, “We think putting this out there so people can see the power of the technology and then figure out together how we can reduce the damage is better than being in the province of unselected companies.”

Some fans of Stable Diffusion do create harmful and shocking images, but they rarely see the light of day, according to Mostak, because Twitter and Facebook filter them out. “If you put it on social media or post it there, it’s treated like any other bad content,” he said.

The modern art of artificial intelligence achieves this. These first apps still have problems with text, faces, and creating the usual number of fingers.

But they are improving fast. Meanwhile, AI applications that generate audio and video are already in the testing phase.

For artist Karla Ortiz, these are troubling events. She believes that there is value in the creative process itself: “It’s therapeutic. It is inspiring. It is communication between one person. Artificial intelligence tools can’t do that yet.”

But Stability AI CEO Emad Mostake is all in on the art of artificial intelligence. “I think this is one of the biggest leaps forward in technology, maybe since the Internet,” he said. “It will create whole new industries and it will make media even more exciting and entertaining. I think it creates a lot of new jobs.

“It’s inevitable. And I think it’s just going to change pretty much everything.”

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The plot was prepared by Sarah Kugel. Editor: George Pazderets.