Visual artists draw from visual references, not words, as they imagine their work. So when language is in the driver’s seat of making art, it erects a barrier between the artist and the canvas.
Still from ‘All watched over by machines of loving grace’ by Memo Akten, 2021. Created using custom AI software.
Memo Akten
Robert Mahari, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jessica Fjeld, Harvard Law School, and Ziv Epstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Intellectual property law wasn’t written with AI in mind, so it isn’t clear who owns the images that emerge from prompts – or if the artists whose work was scraped to train AI models should be paid.
The ‘Portrait of Edmond de Bellamy’ was produced by a generative adversarial network that was fed a data set of 15,000 portraits spanning six centuries.
Christies/Picril
AI is starting to make us doubt whether humans have a monopoly on creativity. Two scholars argue AI’s use scenarios may be endless but that they require another form of creativity: curation.
Generative AI thrives on exploiting people’s reflexive assumptions of authenticity by producing material that looks like ‘the real thing.’
artpartner-images/The Image Bank via Getty Images
Generative AI can seem like magic, which makes it both enticing and frightening. Scholars are helping society come to grips with the potential benefits and harms.
Images generated by AI systems, like these fake photos of Donald Trump being arrested (he hasn’t been arrested), can be a dangerous source of misinformation.
AP Photo/J. David Ake
In a world of increasingly convincing AI-generated text, photos and videos, it’s more important than ever to be able to distinguish authentic media from fakes and imitations. The challenge is how.
This is a fake AI-generated image.
Daniel Kempe via Twitter/Midjourney
AI tools are now generating content that’s difficult to distinguish from reality.
Some critics have claimed that artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has “killed the essay,” while DALL-E, an AI image generator, has been portrayed as a threat to artistic integrity.
(Shutterstock)
New technologies are often surrounded by hopeful messages that they will alleviate poverty and bring about positive social change. History shows these assumptions are often misplaced.
A volcano-themed tissue box designed with the help of AI-assisted image generation.
Juan Noguera
During the brainstorming stage of the design process, AI-powered image generation programs can open creative doors that may have otherwise never been accessed.
The technology’s focus on the framing of the artistic task amounts to the fetishization of the creative moment – and devalues the journey that waters the seed of an idea to its fruition.
From ChatGPT to Lensa, it feels like AI is here to take over. But despite some impressive results, such systems still have plenty of limitations.
A synthetic image generated by mimicking real faces, left, and a synthetic face generated from the text prompt ‘a photo of a 50-year-old man with short black hair,’ right.
Hany Farid using StyleGAN2 (left) and DALL-E (right)
New software that can generate images and text on command may deliver ‘good enough’ creativity in advertising, copywriting, stock imagery and graphic design.