Techdirt Podcast Episode 329: Is AI Art The End For Artists?
Primer: Mike Masnick invited Rob Sheridan to talk about the impact of AI art on artists. Rob Sheridan is a graphic designer, and photographer best known for being an art director for Nine Inch Nails. Is AI art going to be the end for artists? Find out more in our podcast summary below.
Who is Rob Sheridan?
Rob Sheridan
Graphic designer, photographer, comic book author and more
Art director for Nine Inch Nails
First experience with AI art
First started with Mid Journey when they started at the beginning of the year
It was a very limited beta version where artists were brought in as early participants
AI art apps weren’t new but most are just bad Photoshop collages but Mid Journey was different
Had an existential crisis after trying it out
“And it's like, oh my god, this is making art and you go through this initial existential crisis like, well, what am I now and what is art? So what do I do? I mean, I typed a sentence and made something cooler than I could ever make by hand!”
~ Rob Sheridan
Lost a week of time and productivity trying to process what he felt about it
Finally decided to either quit art right now or figure out how to make AI art work for him because of its tremendous potential and it’s not going away
Set out on a kind of storytelling world-building project inspired by AI
An exercise for him to find authorship because typing a sentence and getting an image did not feel like something he could call his own art
He started to think that an artist is a curator and a contextualizer
By collecting a set of images that feel specific to his brain and building a context around it in a way that feels distinctly his own, he was creating a story to it that was truly his own making with the AI as a kind of robot artist working under his direction
As an artist, one has to be open-minded about this and the AI tool will not be rejected by society when more people can now explore their creativity in ways they never could before
Gatekeeping and similarities with other industries
Ultimately, it is all about gatekeeping
Happened with music and photography and now with art
With gatekeeping you protect artists, but it’s really just a very small number of artists
When the barriers are broken down, there will be a certain amount of redistribution where the highest end of people cannot be as successful as before
But you ended up with millions more who are now able to enter the arena for the first time ever
In the graphic design world, gatekeeping is of a different form
In this industry, there’s a feeling that only artists who had put in the hours and years of training to hone their craft are validated
Using AI art feels like cheating and stealing what others have built and worked on for decades
An example given is 3D graphics and CGI
When it first came out, it feels like these people didn’t put in the time
It’s the computers that are doing the work
This feels like cheating for those who had to do the manual work of doing the actual scene
Another example is given of photography vs painting
To the portrait artist, pressing a button on a camera to take a picture feels like cheating
Artist as curator of art
Art is subjective and it’s about how people perceive it
Rob gave an example of how her grandma will pick up leaves, press them and put them in frames to give them out as gifts
She didn’t make the leaves but the moment she curated the leaves and put them in frames, they became her art
Framing is most important
For someone new to Mid Journey, the images generated are very typical mid-journey standard outputs that are very common
This is less valuable than looking at an amazing output and wondering how a person can make it come out from Mid Journey
The people who made such amazing stuff are the artists
Anybody can do AI art now but most people won’t do it
Mike gave an example of photographers
They are curators and they didn’t create the scene
They figure out how to frame it, what lighting, angles and settings to best bring out the scene
Framing it the right way makes all the difference
Why artists should not panic
AI is likely going to end up as a tool for people to use
The industry will grow to have a lot more work for everyone
E.g. in the game industry where the game studio will want to build their own proprietary AI tools, so they will need their own artists to build materials for the AI to learn from
It might not happen right now, but overall, Rob thinks it’ll be better for art overall
The questions to ask if you’re an artist
Where and in what space might they fit into such a world where AI art is around?
What are the opportunities for them?
The artist might not do the same thing as they did and will certainly need to transition into these new jobs
Rob’s advice is to learn about AI art and how to adapt to it to get ahead of it
The casualties are those who refuse to change and are angry about the changes
He talks about the traditional professional photographers who refuse to move on to digital photography and still insist on their expensive gear and developing pictures in a darkroom
There is now more photography than ever and while it’s harder to charge $10k for a photo shoot, the truth is that many more people without expensive gear can now take a good photo
This is a form of gatekeeping
Copyright infringement
Lack of understanding of how copyright works
The AI art systems are not taking actual pieces of a famous artist’s works and repurposing them
The system is just looking at the works only
Cannot copyright a style or copyright something that kind of looks like something else
If styles can be copyrighted, then this will kill art
Will be more helpful if AI programs can let artists requests to have their names removed from the system
Will not hurt the system to have some current artists removed from it
Will be a gesture of good faith
Afraid that even doing this will not appease people as they will just change the goalpost and find other complaints about AI art
Will be a badge of honour to see that a computer’s understanding of the global consciousness of art includes an artist’s works
“Look, if people are doing searches in your name as an artist, that should be a vote of confidence for you as an artist, I mean, that shows that you have a following, that people are interested in your style, and they recognize what your style is” - Mike Masnick
Should see this as a vote of confidence for the artist
About a market for prompts
There’s a market for prompts now, so Mike is wondering if this is even sustainable
Having a tool that will generate anything doesn’t mean a person can get it to generate something useful
Interesting to Rob because on one hand there’s a group of people who are enraged about AI art, and yet here we have another group that is trying to capitalise off it
The whole thing is moving too fast
He collected a lot of images generated from older models of Mid Journey, wanting to do something to it
But when a new model came in, all his older prompts are broken and the output are way cooler
All these are just happening over a span of 4 months or so
Rob thinks the market for prompts, where people try to categorize and label stuff, is just going to be a waste of time
Prompt crafting will soon be like the equivalent of an Instagram filter, as we will have more advanced digital tools that are AI trained
e.g. AI-assisted brushes that paint according to a certain mood based on how you work or your style and preferences
Instead of filling in trees in the background, they can be tweaked according to certain parameters
Art is still a skill
With digital photography, anyone can have the opportunity to take great photos without spending a lot of expensive gear
This lowers the barrier to entry
Yet it is amazing that with so many tools available to us, some of us are still not able to take a good photo
Now we have a technology that can allow anyone to take the imagery out of their minds for the first time
Helps people to visually express what is inside of them
Also helps people to compress the time taken to express themselves without spending hundreds of hours in training and actually painting out their vision
There’s value in learning from scratch and that will always be valuable by itself
But learning and expressing visual creativity using AI art can also be a starting point in how we visualize art
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