Well it's been a minute since I've posted here on the ol Hive blog. I've been around. Checking in pretty regularly, but not much posting. Maybe I'll get it back started, not sure, but I felt like it tonight, and the topic is...

AI art...

If you're NOT an artist, you may not be aware, but artists are feeling some type of way about AI art these days. I was pretty neutral at first, but slowly I've been drifting into the anti camp. The main issue I have is that AI art algorithms are being trained with artists work against their will, and without consent, and these algorithms COULD NOT work without the input from the human artists whose work is being used without their consent and in many cases, directly against their will.

I don't really have an issue with the tech. Actually I think it's insanely cool. But if you can't get it to work without ripping people's art against their will, that's a problem. Especially when these companies are monetizing this stuff.

Of course there's the whole deal that this is going to costs jobs and all that, but honestly, I think that just comes with new tech, and it's just the way of things. As an artist, if I'm using AI to the fullest extent, a non artist will still not be able to compete with me in a professional capacity. Anything you can do I can do better and all that, but there will be some simple things, or some edge cases, where the AI art will be the final solution. It is what it is. Before I ramble more, here's some of the stuff I "made"

Do these look cool? Yes, yes they do. Especially considering they took almost nothing to create. Me thinking up a prompt. Where I can see that these AI tools struggle though is specificity. For the anime girl in front of the mech, the prompt was actually "an anime girl IN a mech". Know why it probably can't puth the girl in the mech? Because it hasn't ripped off enough human art of girls in mechs to be able to come up with that. So if you need a girl IN a mech and not standing in front of a mech, you probably still gotta hire a human being.

All that said, I think it's definitely fun as hell to play with. I really wish the developers working on this stuff would just get their shit together enough to be able to confidently say no art is in this model that isn't consented by the artist. Then I'd have no issues. Even with my issues though, I don't think this is going anywhere. It's not going to get banned and I honestly don't have much faith in artists ability to mobilize and force some sort of legal precedent to make what I suggested the law. So at the end of the day, I'm going to familiarize myself with all this stuff because when the tech wave comes, I don't think it's smart to refuse to adopt at the expense of your relevance. I think we're a long way away from AI art being able to replace humans, but it's like all technology progression, it's not all at once. It eats at the fringes, slowly but surely creeping in more and more everyday. Sigh...

Anyway, what do you think of AI art? Let me know in the comments.