You pointed out something that I've been thinking about for a while. The main use case for AI art, like you said, is spam, generated at industrial scale faster than any human possibly can. And this sort of algodribble flooding every website and platform is going to have an effect on how we see the internet.
We've experienced a good solid two decades of the internet being seen as a place on the cutting edge of not just technology, but politics and pop culture. Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all made expert, revolutionary use of the internet as the centerpiece of their political campaigns. In the 2010s, not having a smartphone or a subscription to Netflix was a sign that you were either an old fogey or dirt-poor -- either way, you were out of touch and falling behind. It was difficult to live in a major city without constant, 24/7 internet access thanks to how deeply woven into them many gig-economy services were. The internet was where Big Things Happened. This image is directly responsible for the massive power that the big tech corporations have, and their collective image as the industry that's shaping humanity's future.
That has started to change in the last few years, for a variety of reasons. There's a growing awareness of the mental health and addiction problems that social media causes, and talking about the downsides of the internet is no longer necessarily considered a "Luddite" position. The pandemic exposed us to a lot of the dark sides of living most of our lives online. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency even though most of "politics internet" was indifferent to him at best and hostile at worst. "Extremely online" is now an insult that implies its target to be living in a bubble.
What you said here regarding AI art becoming the equivalent of a cheap knockoff Chanel bag is IMO going to be the last straw that pushes a nascent backlash into overdrive. The internet will no longer be the new frontier of tech and discourse, but a digital version of a seedy flea market or dollar store on the wrong side of the tracks: a place where you can find "anything", ostensibly, but most of it is cheap knockoff merchandise that may or may not have been stolen or otherwise sourced through illegal means. People who want to put forward an image of respectability or classiness will start to cut themselves off from internet culture, while those who spend most of their time online will be viewed as increasingly low-class and trashy.
I think we're already starting to see this shift in real time, and I don't know if the tech industry, the way it's currently set up, is ready to handle this. The central pillar of their mythology and business model is that they are The Future, that they are going to take over the world and embed themselves in everything we do. A lot of the growing, performative weirdness we've seen from tech CEOs in the last few years, I feel, stems from a sense that Silicon Valley's honeymoon is over, that the good times might not be coming back, and that the enormous valuations of their companies may be built on sand and headed for a crash.
I went to art school and got a degree in generative art in the early 2000s. Back when we used Flash/Actionscript for everything and the novelty came from the lack of artistic intention in the generated work. Honestly feeling an overwhelming sense of hopelessness right now.
Artifact was such a good app and it's wild they blamed the cost of "content moderation" because of a bunch of dumb social features no one wanted and was immediately flooded with engagement spam. Frankly, I hope someone scoops up the tech for a low cost. Flipboard, NYT, Bloomberg could all make use of it. Seems like an obvious Auttomatic purchase based on how they've been building a portfolio of companies.
So, two real uses cases for AI Illustration. (Not cool with calling it "art," which is a word that means something else.):
1. Growth managers at companies that rely on internet advertising are using AI illustrations to create variations in their display and social ads. We consumers focus a lot on direct-to-consumer TikTok / Timu crap, but much of the volume of internet advertising is B2B-focused, where they're trying to get a business owner or manager to download an eBook and start a sales conversation. Ads with novel images get significantly more attention and action than those without. Every email and social marketer is using this now. In a few minutes you can get multiple variations to test, something that would take a human designer hours or days to make.
2. AI illustration is a game. Just for amusement, I actually pay $10/month to one of the online AI illustration services. Transforming your vision into images you wanted or even didn't expect is a lot of fun, and it can take hours of tweaking parameters, prompts, seeds, and base images to make something you like. It's a creative videogame, like Minecraft, Cities : Skylines, or The Sims.
I first heard about the NSFW Spider-Man 2 art when someone shared an article with me called "The Voice of Miles Morales's Mom Just Posted NSFW Fan Art and REFUSES To Take It Down" and nowhere in the article was there any proof that anyone asked her to take it down.
Yes, there are many problematic aspects to AI generated imagery, both regarding how the AI's are trained and how the technology can be (ab)used. But come on now, there's absolutely real use cases for AI generated imagery.
One of my hobbies is making digital illustrations using a number of tools such as DAZ Studio, Blender, GIMP, etc. (I guess I could try and sell these illustrations as book covers and such, but at the moment I'm just doing it for the fun of it.) I love working on the characters that are the main subjects of my illustrations, but I find working on backgrounds to be rather tedious. This is especially true for visually busy backgrounds eg forests, crowds, cityscapes... busy backgrounds can take a lot of boring work (and in the case of digital illustrations, computing power) and they're not even the focus of the piece, they're just backgrounds, usually blurred out by depth of field and obscured by the main characters in the forground. AI generated imagery could be a way to generate such backgrounds with less hassle.
Other example: Let's say you're designing a video game, the level you're working on is an old mansion. There's a wall full of family photos, maybe thirty of them. The photos are barely visible in the dimly lit room, they don't have any story significance and are not interactable. They're just there to set the mood. You have AI generate a bunch of portraits for this particular scene.
I can think of other uses... yes, image generating AI is very problematic and we absolutely have to address that. But to say it has no real world uses is silly.
You pointed out something that I've been thinking about for a while. The main use case for AI art, like you said, is spam, generated at industrial scale faster than any human possibly can. And this sort of algodribble flooding every website and platform is going to have an effect on how we see the internet.
We've experienced a good solid two decades of the internet being seen as a place on the cutting edge of not just technology, but politics and pop culture. Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all made expert, revolutionary use of the internet as the centerpiece of their political campaigns. In the 2010s, not having a smartphone or a subscription to Netflix was a sign that you were either an old fogey or dirt-poor -- either way, you were out of touch and falling behind. It was difficult to live in a major city without constant, 24/7 internet access thanks to how deeply woven into them many gig-economy services were. The internet was where Big Things Happened. This image is directly responsible for the massive power that the big tech corporations have, and their collective image as the industry that's shaping humanity's future.
That has started to change in the last few years, for a variety of reasons. There's a growing awareness of the mental health and addiction problems that social media causes, and talking about the downsides of the internet is no longer necessarily considered a "Luddite" position. The pandemic exposed us to a lot of the dark sides of living most of our lives online. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency even though most of "politics internet" was indifferent to him at best and hostile at worst. "Extremely online" is now an insult that implies its target to be living in a bubble.
What you said here regarding AI art becoming the equivalent of a cheap knockoff Chanel bag is IMO going to be the last straw that pushes a nascent backlash into overdrive. The internet will no longer be the new frontier of tech and discourse, but a digital version of a seedy flea market or dollar store on the wrong side of the tracks: a place where you can find "anything", ostensibly, but most of it is cheap knockoff merchandise that may or may not have been stolen or otherwise sourced through illegal means. People who want to put forward an image of respectability or classiness will start to cut themselves off from internet culture, while those who spend most of their time online will be viewed as increasingly low-class and trashy.
I think we're already starting to see this shift in real time, and I don't know if the tech industry, the way it's currently set up, is ready to handle this. The central pillar of their mythology and business model is that they are The Future, that they are going to take over the world and embed themselves in everything we do. A lot of the growing, performative weirdness we've seen from tech CEOs in the last few years, I feel, stems from a sense that Silicon Valley's honeymoon is over, that the good times might not be coming back, and that the enormous valuations of their companies may be built on sand and headed for a crash.
I went to art school and got a degree in generative art in the early 2000s. Back when we used Flash/Actionscript for everything and the novelty came from the lack of artistic intention in the generated work. Honestly feeling an overwhelming sense of hopelessness right now.
Artifact was such a good app and it's wild they blamed the cost of "content moderation" because of a bunch of dumb social features no one wanted and was immediately flooded with engagement spam. Frankly, I hope someone scoops up the tech for a low cost. Flipboard, NYT, Bloomberg could all make use of it. Seems like an obvious Auttomatic purchase based on how they've been building a portfolio of companies.
So, two real uses cases for AI Illustration. (Not cool with calling it "art," which is a word that means something else.):
1. Growth managers at companies that rely on internet advertising are using AI illustrations to create variations in their display and social ads. We consumers focus a lot on direct-to-consumer TikTok / Timu crap, but much of the volume of internet advertising is B2B-focused, where they're trying to get a business owner or manager to download an eBook and start a sales conversation. Ads with novel images get significantly more attention and action than those without. Every email and social marketer is using this now. In a few minutes you can get multiple variations to test, something that would take a human designer hours or days to make.
2. AI illustration is a game. Just for amusement, I actually pay $10/month to one of the online AI illustration services. Transforming your vision into images you wanted or even didn't expect is a lot of fun, and it can take hours of tweaking parameters, prompts, seeds, and base images to make something you like. It's a creative videogame, like Minecraft, Cities : Skylines, or The Sims.
You say "AI use cases" like you're running Adobe.
It's like saying "paintbrush use cases."
We're in the 5 stages of grief with new tech that disrupts.
And each time there were lawsuits and backlash and fear.
When you say AI art can't create anything new, you just sound old.
When you call it low effort and a scam, you sound petty and jealous.
There's definitely that element but there's also something bigger.
Lots of established digital artists are using AI the same way they used Photoshop.
It's just another tool. Mocking people won't turn back the clock.
AI Art will become just another medium -nothing super special about it.
Future museums will include AI art and maybe they'll have a few of these posts for context.
I first heard about the NSFW Spider-Man 2 art when someone shared an article with me called "The Voice of Miles Morales's Mom Just Posted NSFW Fan Art and REFUSES To Take It Down" and nowhere in the article was there any proof that anyone asked her to take it down.
Yes, there are many problematic aspects to AI generated imagery, both regarding how the AI's are trained and how the technology can be (ab)used. But come on now, there's absolutely real use cases for AI generated imagery.
One of my hobbies is making digital illustrations using a number of tools such as DAZ Studio, Blender, GIMP, etc. (I guess I could try and sell these illustrations as book covers and such, but at the moment I'm just doing it for the fun of it.) I love working on the characters that are the main subjects of my illustrations, but I find working on backgrounds to be rather tedious. This is especially true for visually busy backgrounds eg forests, crowds, cityscapes... busy backgrounds can take a lot of boring work (and in the case of digital illustrations, computing power) and they're not even the focus of the piece, they're just backgrounds, usually blurred out by depth of field and obscured by the main characters in the forground. AI generated imagery could be a way to generate such backgrounds with less hassle.
Other example: Let's say you're designing a video game, the level you're working on is an old mansion. There's a wall full of family photos, maybe thirty of them. The photos are barely visible in the dimly lit room, they don't have any story significance and are not interactable. They're just there to set the mood. You have AI generate a bunch of portraits for this particular scene.
I can think of other uses... yes, image generating AI is very problematic and we absolutely have to address that. But to say it has no real world uses is silly.
AI is kinda like Lowrider Car pinstriping.
You can claim it's art, but it's actually more craft/decoration that just happens to be created by software. 🙄
#freeble
The best (and only good) use of/context for AI art I've seen is writer Elif Batuman's newsletter, eg https://eliflife.substack.com/p/what-is-breakfast. That's it, nothing else.