Can AIart be considered an artistic tool?

Despite the overwhelming impression you might get from just reading the latest social media post that there are two sides to the current #AIart cognitive dissonance.  The artist Luddites, who are claiming their creativityis being stolen versus the non-artistic utopians who think that text to image prompts lets them make great art in seconds. However, there is a lot of ground between the two camps.

I have worked with and spoken to other artists who have been very interested in what this new text to image tools, like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion can do. Many have been investigating these techniques as legitimate ways to create expressions of their unique creativity. In other words, is there life in these approaches as a tool. In my opinion it's not a simple yes/no answer but there is promise.

I have actually been interested and evaluating AI for a long time. I was even very early using the hashtag #AIart. In particular I have experimented with the idea of using such machine learning to capture the essence of my style of mark-making and “find” that within photos I have taken. This is one of the areas of what I have investigating under the “hand drawn photo”project. This method definitely has merit. Below is an example I created at nighcafe using their style transfer method. 

I starred with a handrawn image of an eagle's head I drew for Inktober. This was then used to “train” a simple neural net. I also supplied a photo, a self-portrait, which I had used as inspiration for myrevised profile on instagram. The training of the personalised network has to be scheduled on to suitable computer somewhere about on the internet and does take a while so the resulting image is not returned immediately. It is worth waiting for because now I have a black and white rendering. In my style of inkwork is closely follows the tones and shapes of the photo. I printed it on a laser printer and then hand-coloured it with my earth-coloured Ecoline Brush pens. I would consider this a work of my own art, but I have used some aspects of #Aiart in its creation.

The makeshift Incremental Backup

 My revised archive system is bedding done nicely.

As a gentleman of leisure now, I don’t produce as much data as I used to and thus the automated incremental backups (such as having a NAS system constantly) are no longer urgent and the number of files is considerably smaller. The old NAS has stopped working and the priority of setting up such a system has almost disappeared.

However, in setting up the three-tiered archive system (Son-Father-Grandfather) and re-arranging my back-pack portable harddrives, I ended up with one older 1.5GB that was slightly bulkier than the rest. Significantly it didn’t fit the small zip-up disk wallets I was using to store the archive sets.

I thought it would give me the opportunity to store incremental backups, so I put it through a few chkdsk/fix sessions and all was well. I just kept it on my desk (but not connected) and then at least each week or more often if I doing a lot of stuff (eg larger photo session). All that is required is setting up an INC Backup folder and setting up 5 folders below that for each week in the month, which will ensure I have fewer files to look through should I need to recover anything. I just plug it in and copy anything I’ve been recently working onto the drive.

I’m doing this manually but it is not a big task anymore other than remembering what to copy. Maybe I should set up an automatic file synch system. Hopefully, that can wait.

If a picture is worth 1000 words…

What value will a picture have if it's based on 10, or maybe 100 words?

I’m a chronic dyslexic and words don’t flow easily for me. However, I had decided it was about time to update my Instagram profile picture (it still had me behind a COVID Mask). So why not try and find what Stable Diffusion (a leading text-to-image AI system) had to offer.

Prompt: "Profile artwork for instagram, using watercolour markers"  7 words

Plus a starter image, a head and shoulders photo of me. Hmmm, I’m not a girl and my eyes are roughly the same size. So it didn’t really take much notice of my picture perhaps I need to tell it I have grey hair and a beard

Prompt: "Portrait artist, gray hair goatee beard Profile artwork for instagram, using watercolour markers head and shoulders" 16 words

I add a few negatives  with a -0.3 weight to discourage the process going there

"ugly, scary, poorly drawn face, out of frame, cut off" 10 more words, 26 in total

A mighty improvement and without a starter photo this time BUT how are these an artist and blue rinse in my hair? Seriously?

The last image set was choosen with the same starter but used the additional modifiers (artistic portrait preset image). It added a lot of words some for a positive match some negative, for a total of 88 words

Prompt: "Portrait artist, gray hair goatee beard Profile artwork for instagram, using watercolour markers head and shoulders portrait, 8k resolution concept art portrait by Greg Rutkowski, Artgerm, WLOP, Alphonse Mucha dynamic lighting hyperdetailed intricately detailed Splash art trending on Artstation triadic colors Unreal Engine 5 volumetric lighting” 56words

"ugly, tiling, poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn feet, poorly drawn face, out of frame, extra limbs, disfigured, deformed, body out of frame, blurry, bad anatomy, blurred, watermark, grainy, signature, cut off, draft" 32 negative words

Well it’s a lot more realistically rendered, but still poorly cropped (head chopped up and at best a single shoulder, etc… etc and... Why is this an artist? So do I need to craft a longer more descriptive prompt, or just run a lot more prompts?

The images above have been created on Nightcafe using Stable Diffusion interface

It actually took less time to have a play with my ecoline watercolour brush pens and a pitt pen than to assemble the above.

So my new Instagram profile picture is handdrawn, I trust you understand why.

PS I must humbly apologise to @Greg Rutkowski (I hadn't noticed he was mentioned in the final prompt, hmm the problems with presets) and I do understand why he is not happy.

Why I'm not too concerned about the current #AIart

 

I don't consider these overhyped bitmaps to be magic or even that intelligent. When we see the results of these text to image services, we are looking at a fairly straightforward machine learning neural network application, albeit on a massively large training data set scale.

The data sets are so large and were scrapped together so quickly, without curation or even human review that they contain a lot of straight rubbish and often the darkest side of human behaviour. Whilst this is unpleasant it will be difficult to fix without starting again but there is a taint of not quite right. Importantly, a lot of the material used in the training was copyrighted but that was ignored as it was scrapped and fed into the neural nets. This is legally questionable, but the big money potential may spend this small problem away.

I think it is the lack of ethics in not attributing or even asking artists if they wish to contribute, that could be the undoing of the magic. If the majority of those consuming the images on the net don`t care or have already scrolled over the issue in their cosy little social media bubble, nothing will happen. However, if those looking also see the discussion of unhappy artists and appreciate the widespread collection and indiscriminant use of existing art renderings (style and colour, not cut and paste copies). Perhaps they might investigate and get a whiff of what is so on the nose. Let’s hope so.