The "Art" in Artificial Intelligence

June 08, 2023

A pencil sketch of two eyes overlapping each other

Nowadays, there's no stopping humans from becoming the overlords of artificial intelligence. In fact, for some, it has always been...humans, gods; robots, subordinates. But AI has slowly crept up our own work spaces as machine learning continues to lure the public into the palms of its robotic hands.

It is almost impossible not to anthropomorphise AI as we often make it a point of showing who is in-charge. With ChatGPT and Bard leading the race in making many professionals feel anxious about job security (assuming it did exist), we may soon see bolder developments when it comes to generative AI. So fasten your seatbelts.

The rise of AI art

A long list of websites housing AI art generators began popping on Google search results lately due to the increasing use of the tech, as well as the interest in it. Some of these sites are open source like DALL·E 2, and others offer a free trial period, such as Midjourney. Several of them, on the other hand, have both free and paid options like Stable Diffusion. But all of these AI art platforms almost share a common goal, and that is to be like M3gan, I mean, to "assist" humans in art-making.

Training the "artist"

The time has finally come when our roles have been switched from machine learners to trainers. By feeding the technology with prompts or suggested images, most of these AI models can produce, if not masterpieces, but beautiful artworks through a complex combination of deep learning techniques and generative algorithms. Which begs the question: who's assisting who? And whether you like the quality of the art pieces or not, feel free to provide your critique. I'm sure the "artist" will not take offence.

So, what do you think? Do you support AI art? Are you against it? Comment your thoughts below.

Bonus: I prompted an AI to create a hyperrealistic portrait of me based on my IG's profile photo, and it generated a hyper-insomniac version of me instead, but it's not like it's wrong. 😄