Artificial Intelligence Art Generation

[Fred Weiss]

A recent thread posted by WildWestDesigns got into me an extended look at what is going on in artificial intelligence to generate art and how it might relate to my business. At this point I've found quite a bit of information to ponder and would like to hear from as many members as possible about how they plan to deal with this new technology. Here's some of what I found:

1. Art generation using artificial intelligence will almost certainly have an impact on most of our businesses in terms of the cost of art and the rights to use it in your work.

2. There are in excess of 20 offerings of software and services that will allow anyone to generate high quality art in quantity either for a very low cost or for free including major players like Adobe with their Adobe Firefly product.

3. There is growing opposition in the various art communities and there is considerable concern over copyright infringement. Some developers are addressing this and others are not. The following is what the US Copyright Office has put out as of this writing:

There is also considerable discussion to be found on Utube about the matter: ai graphic design software - YouTube

So how about a full discussion in this thread.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Maybe AI will design better signs than I see out there now... can't get any worse

 

[Fred Weiss]

This is not unlike what happened to type manufacturers a couple of decades ago when the US Patent court ruled that the only protection to be had for a typeface was its name. At the time my company was a type dealer for a manufacturer named The Font Company. Within a couple of months guys like Kevin O'Rourke (one of the sharks on the TV show Shark Tank) released a product called Typecase which included most or all of the Adobe library with the names changed. He raked in tens of millions of dollars while type dealers and manufacturers went out of business.

Our current business includes selling digital art files of our own creation. So I look at Adobe Firefly as a great way to cut costs and increase productivity. But it also will most certainly cause me to lose customers.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Maybe AI will design better signs than I see out there now... can't get any worse

The art that gets generated is probably way better than most of what gets created ... but how will you feel if your work gets copied and sold to others?

 

[victor bogdanov]

I have a couple of mural designs generated by dali ai, with some manual tweaking turned into very good designs and have sold a few copies each. A similar quality image would cost $500-$1000 to have an artist draw it

 

[WildWestDesigns]

The art that gets generated is probably way better than most of what gets created

The question would be, how long will that last. Keep in mind, it's really a web scraper at this point (that may change, but as of right now, it's more of a web scraper, hence all of this tagging etc to supposely prevent "learning"). I would imagine that the content that is freely shared and not behind some paywall (unless there is a back room deal etc), the quality will eventually go down, because that will be the quality that AI is able to "learn" from.

One thing that could possibly be a positive, is if you could run on offline instance and have it "learn" your style and be able to generate from that. That would probably be the only way that I would ever go this route. Otherwise, I value to much the ability to think and create on my own. This type of abstraction in my mind is too much away from the user. Even with the little piddling that they may do afterward.

I do have to wonder, if the the creative muscles of people will atrophy as well if they get too used to something like this over the long haul (or they are dependent on it a generation or two down the line and that's all they know with how to create). Especially considering how lazy most people are. Probably won't look beyond what answers are spit out and just roll with it, regardless of what the use case is. The fact that a lot of students are using this is really cause for concern. I can see it replacing research (whatever is entailed for that specific case that is define as research).

I'm not to keen on AI being interjected in as much areas as it is. It definitely has the new kid on the block fad inertia going for it, but I wonder what the landscape will be in a few yrs time. I probably won't still be using it (unless some key considerations are met in my mind), but it will definitely be interesting to see where the laws are and the state of AI at that time.

 

[Boudica]

I use ai software to enhance low res photos. I only wish I had/make more time to explore more. Love the tech, though it feels like cheating, any and all technology is about "cheating" for how it's been and what we know. Also, with new tech bad things are born. Any thing new introduces inherent human evil.
It's up to the stupid humans to realize this.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Love the tech, though it feels like cheating, any and all technology is about "cheating" for how it's been and what we know.

I think that's the biggest problem that I have. To be honest though, even the analog methods have some ability of "cheating" in them. I think the biggest difference is how much is abstracted away from the user.

 

[GAC05]

It was a little dry but I managed to make it all the way through the clip. Unfortunately, my main takeaway was:
This person has a great-sounding voice, he would do well recording audiobooks for publishers.
Then, I thought, what if this is an AI and not a human voice at all?
Once that registered I went into an infinite feedback loop and had to give up the thinking part.

 

[Fred Weiss]

Shutterstock has jumped into the mix by partnering with LG Partners.

LG Partners with Shutterstock to Change Lives with AI

 

[Bobby H]

Overall, I don't have a very positive opinion of AI-generated art. Basically it seems like a hustle, using technology to completely de-value art and the skills it takes to create it manually. AI poses similar threats to creative writing and music. The people developing and promoting this AI technology keep dancing around the ethical and economical issues. But deep down the motivation behind this stuff is about eliminating jobs and making the creative spirit utterly worthless in value.

The graphic design industry has already gone through at least two or more rounds of this stuff where technology has been used as a "race to the bottom" tool to purge actual skill, talent and professionalism from the work force.

In the early 1980's we had the shift from analog-only print production to digital-based work-flow. Too many employers figured the computers were doing the work. So why not get rid of the people with degrees or other formal training and have the low-paid, unskilled "secretary" do the work instead? The situation made it harder for people who had talent and skills to prove their worth. A decade later the Internet blew up in popularity. So did the spread of pirated software. Anyone with a hacked copy of Photoshop could pass himself off as an "artist" or "designer." Lots of employers didn't care. As long as the work was getting done who cares how the results looked? They were saving money on payroll. That's all that mattered.

So here we are now with this AI stuff. It's not going to take long before hustlers are trying to sell AI-generating tools to sign companies as a way to eliminate employees and slash payroll.

AI, at least for now, can't really do a lot of things correctly in terms of art and graphics creation. The tools generate lots of glitches, mistakes and "uncanny valley" kinds of things even when it almost gets an image just right. AI also generates a fair amount of nightmare fuel imagery. Unfortunately, prior to the arrival of AI the graphic design industry has not exactly had a high set of standards. If an AI tool can squeeze and stretch default Arial into a sign layout in 1/1,000,000 the amount of time of a human graphic designer I don't think many bosses will mind. But it could give city council members more inspiration to draft more sweeping anti-signs ordinances.

 

[Boudica]

I think that's the biggest problem that I have. To be honest though, even the analog methods have some ability of "cheating" in them. I think the biggest difference is how much is abstracted away from the user.

Analog methods, absolutely!.... Microwave ovens used to be, and still are cheating. A calculator is cheating. But I use them every day.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Analog methods, absolutely!.... Microwave ovens used to be, and still are cheating. A calculator is cheating. But I use them every day.

Again, it's the level of abstraction and how much involvement the user has that's really more of my concern.

For instance, take your calculator, while that is cheating compared to pen/paper, it's less so compared to using for example a quoting program that all you do is insert the desired number(s), but don't really know what arithmetic operators go where/order of operations. That's abstracted away and someone may or may not know (or if they did at one time, they may have to think about it if they had to use the more manual way quite a bit longer). Now that program is much more efficient compared to just using the calculator or by using the pen/paper, but the level of abstraction is still further away. The mind atrophies, it doesn't get practice. Same thing with AI. The creative thought processes that goes into idea, to finish product is not the same, that muscle is likely not being used the same way if there was more involvement by the user. The level and type of user input with generating the image is less, to the point, I would argue that the user isn't really creating the image and doing some post generating cleanup isn't enough in my mind to qualify and if that cleanup has to be so drastic, is AI really worth using? As more and more people are used to AI being the first tool in their ever shrinking toolbox (or perhaps their only tool), higher chance of human creativity going down.

The mind, be it the logical part or the creative part needs to be exercised. Use it or lose it.

 

[Gino]

Cripes, I pulled a muscle in my head about a quarter of the way through. The harddrive in my head is two 5.25 floppy drives "A" & "B" and I switch 'em back & forth. This is way over my pay level. Let me know when the discussion is finished and I'll try reading the cliffsnotes.

 

[Johnny Best]

So Fred, when you created your plotter art, did you originally draw out the subject and scan and then create a vector file and that is what is copyrighted? Or did you take a Mona Lisa and copy it and put your own name on it.

 

[Fred Weiss]

So Fred, when you created your plotter art, did you originally draw out the subject and scan and then create a vector file and that is what is copyrighted? Or did you take a Mona Lisa and copy it and put your own name on it.

We did the former Johnny, but I'm sure some of them violated copyrights because a photo in a magazine or newspaper was often the starting point. The result was normally so different from the source that we felt we were not doing anything wrong. To me it's hard to know where lines should be drawn. If I draw a picture of a car, even if I'm only using my memory of a car, it is still, IMHO, a derivative of a copyrighted piece of machinery.

So if I feed instructions to Adobe Firefly to create images of a car, the program searches its dataset for images of cars and creates new images from what it finds. As I understand the information from the patent office, I cannot claim a copyright to any of these new images unless I take a brush or pen (digital or real) to them to alter them further. This, of course, assumes that Firefly is searching only among images that it has cleared of any copyright claims.

 

[Kevin Schultz]

 

[DL Signs]

I have no desire to let AI do my work for me, heck, I don't even use image tracing. I love what I do...

If I was tempted to use it commercially, I'd be concerned about how the upcoming litigation could change everything we think is right or wrong to do with it right now. Imagine doing a large costly job for a high end business using generated art, only to have some deep pocket entity like Getty, Disney, or whoever see something in it they feel is theirs, or too close to theirs. that wouldn't end well for anyone. Too many things could go south at this stage. Everyone is in "protect my copyright" mode over this, and the current lawsuits are just the beginning.

Even though the technology is incredible, it only follows the input you give it. With all the copyrighted art that's already been pilfered and re-posted elsewhere on the web, it can't tell if it's actually feeding on open source or not, and no way to distinguish one from the other. It doesn't know right from wrong, copyright from open source if it's been re-posted or the rights have been purchased by someone else, it's a computer program that can't think on it's own. The Getty lawsuit is probably a slam dunk, parts of their watermark were even found embedded in some AI generated art, that suit alone will have a major impact. There's just too many variables right now that could put a legitimate business's reputation and financial future on the line for me to trust it for anything other than a cool toy to play with. Until the laws catch up with this new technology, no one can predict what will happen. I'm steering clear of it for commercial use until the dust settles, the court rulings are in, and know what's safe to use, or not use.

Even then, I'll probably just keep doing what I've always done, when a customer wants something designed, I'll draw it myself. When they want it tweaked, I can modify it till it meets their liking, because I created it, and know every node. I won't have to worry about copyright claims, I'll never have to look like a fool by having to tell a customer with a very specific design request "sorry, I can't design, and that's as close to what you want as the AI program I use can get it". Close enough isn't always good enough. Glad I don't need it.

Keep being creative

 

[ProSignTN]

My father was born in 1935, in a two room log cabin with no electricity, no running water and only a mule for family transportation. We are living in the fastest changing hundred years in the history of this planet and AI will accelerate our current trajectory by multiples. The good news is I'm coaching baseball again and have finally learned to use a group text. So... I'm catching up...lol

 

[DL Signs]

My father was born in 1935, in a two room log cabin with no electricity, no running water and only a mule for family transportation. We are living in the fastest changing hundred years in the history of this planet and AI will accelerate our current trajectory by multiples. The good news is I'm coaching baseball again and have finally learned to use a group text. So... I'm catching up...lol

I started this stuff in the 60's painting and hand lettering trucks. When I think back to those days, and look at what I'm doing digitally today it makes my brain hurt... The advancements in technology is insane.