MINNEAPOLIS — Artificial Intelligence is coming at us fast and furious. It's on our phones, it's in our classrooms, and it's changing businesses and lives. There is little that isn't or won't be impacted by it, including the world of art, which is bringing up an ethical debate in our creative community. Is AI a tool or a threat?
“I know a lot of photographers and illustrators are mad and fee devalued, which I get, I’m a photographer too,” said Jim Henderson.
Henderson is a full-time photographer who does beautiful work, but he’s always looking for ways to improve and grow.
“You need to know what your competition is – is it really that good? So I started messing around with it, trying to make photographs and it’s incredible, it’s getting better,” Henderson said.
He’s talking about artificial intelligence. Henderson started dabbling in it about a year-and-a-half ago, and since he comes from a career in advertising, he thought he’d see how it worked in the world of illustration. So, he started making posters of dogs.
“I made a couple of them, and I just posted them on Facebook, and friends and people started emailing me about, 'Well, can you make one of Muffy or can you make one of my dog or whatever?'” he said.
And another project was born. But how does it even work?
“It's all done with prompts. Just text prompts,” Henderson explained.
Henderson types in descriptions of what he wants into the program. He gets four different options to choose from. From there, he can either pick one of those, or keep running the prompt or tweaking the description until he finds one he likes. Once he picks, he can then keep editing that version by typing in new prompts. And while it is that simple, it also isn't.
“So, what it's making for me actually doesn't exist anywhere," Henderson said. "That image doesn't exist but the data that it's learned to make it was taken from somewhere."
The systems used to create new works of art are being trained from art that already exists. Art that was created by a human and scraped off the internet. It has spurred copyright lawsuits and ethical questions.
“If you think about it, you're devaluing someone's experience that they trained and learned years and years to do what they are doing,” Henderson said.
He gets it, but he also knows one other important thing:
“I don't think it's just an enemy to look at and say because it's not going to go away,” he said.
The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) feels the same way.
“We actually had quite a few debates about how to create a policy around it,” said Erik Brandt, Chair of the Design Department at MCAD.
We're just at the beginning of what AI can do, so right now, they know it can be both a tool and a threat at the same time.
“We need to help each other use these systems ethically and how to still maintain the voice and the authorship that an artist and designer has to have – so that's tricky but we're not putting our heads in the sand,” he said.
MCAD already has classes dedicated to it, and like any research paper where you must cite your sources, students must disclose if they've used AI for any portion of their project.
Brandt also noted that this isn't the first time a new technology has changed their world. When photography was invented, painters felt threatened. The advent of photoshop challenged the ethics of what was real or manipulated, and desktop publishing changed the print industry entirely.
So, will AI generated art eventually be considered its own artform?
“To debate around that – around what is original and what's not – is, in the end, I hope, going to come down to the voice of the individual artist or designer,” said Brandt.
Back to Henderson and the dog posters, which take him hours to create.
"A lot of times I don't get at all what I want and so I keep tweaking the prompt and I keep rerunning it and running it and rewording it," he said.
It's his vision as an artist and designer, combined with Artificial intelligence, that create one-of-a-kind posters, which he fully discloses on his website. So as the beholder, you get to decide: Tool, threat, or artform?
For artists, there are ways to protect your creations online, including things like avoiding posting on social media or using a watermark.
There is also a new tool called Glaze that will, in simple terms, "scramble" your work so it cannot be copied.
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