ASI: The Good, The Bad, and The "AIslopocene"

It should be clear I have mixed feelings about AI these days. I love some AI applications. Photo editing tools? Fantastic! On-line apps that help clean up my dyslexic writing? Impressive!

But here's what's bugging me: Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a real problem. They're scraping everyone's creative work without permission, then spitting out convincing-sounding nonsense that's often completely wrong. We're heading into what many are calling the "AIslopocene", an era where slick, AI-generated content floods the internet while actual creators get nothing for their stolen work.

The worst part? Big tech companies are making billions by building expensive gateways to these models while contributing zero original content themselves. Meanwhile, the models are trained on everything from conspiracy theories to biased opinions, sometimes producing genuinely dangerous outputs, like when Grok started spouting Hitler's ideas.

I've been working with AI since the late '70s, so I'm not anti-technology. But what we're seeing now feels more like ASI, Arte-ficially Superficial Intelligence. It looks impressive on the surface but lacks real depth or understanding.

That's why I'm being transparent about my AI use. I've been hash tagging my #AIart since 2017, using specific AI icons/watermarks over images since 2023, and now adding footnotes when I use AI tools for editing or research.

I believe in ethical AI tools that genuinely help people while respecting creators and truth. But we need to stay vigilant about what's real intelligence versus what's just a shiny illusion designed to keep us scrolling.

Proof reading and summary assisted by Claude Sonnet 4 (AI)

What's Next for AIart? (Dystopian Surprise!)

Lately, I've been a bit out of the loop with the rapid developments in generative AIart. Life threw a curveball with some eye issues and a corneal graft, which severely limited my computer time – even with NightCafe's regular emails urging me to claim my daily free credits.

My vision is improving, and I decided to jump back in by following one of NightCafe's invitations. This time, the free credits led to another invite to join one of their weekly challenges; they even pre-filled a prompt for me! I only caught the first couple of lines but decided to see what might happen. I'd previously experimented with prompts about AI/robots making art, so I wondered if that had "seeded" my new prompt, or perhaps another AI had "scanned" my earlier work on NightCafe (nothing impressive, just me playing around with the generative AI tech, by the way).

The image generated quickly, and I was genuinely taken aback by how dystopian and depressing it felt. It struck a chord, echoing my own concerns about the "look-at-me" culture of celebrity-seeking masses, which often feels like a desperate race to the bottom. Are we, as real artists, being replaced by soulless images churned out by "pseudo-intelligent" applications, all designed to grab attention so that advertisers pay more? Was I becoming just another cog in a process, simply there to click a link or hit enter?

"A melancholic robot with glowing eyes, standing in an abandoned art studio, surrounded by discarded paintbrushes and canvases, with a single tear of oil streaming down its metallic face, in the style of surrealism, with melting clocks and distorted perspectives, reminiscent of Salvador Dali, with a matte background and a somber, introspective mood."

Upon looking at the full prompt (above) and selected Flux model settings, I realised this prompt was likely just a refinement of my last work from a month or so ago (when I was effectively blind in one eye), rather than a new AI "spoon-feeding" me. The original prompt was: 

"a blind artist being assisted by an AI robot to create a large abstract painting surrealism Salvador Dali matte background melting oil on canvas."

I had used the Dreamscape XL Lightning model, a diffusion style model I was starting to like. However, the results weren't very Dalí-esque. A couple of the generated options had reasonable likenesses of Dalí, but nothing suggested he was blind or that a robot was assisting him. he just looked sad. Plus, the backgrounds were sharp and detailed, not melting, surreal or painterly. Was I to blame?, "Does my prompt need refining?" Yeah-Nah I just lost motivation and stopped.

Perhaps this is the true moral of the story for the artistic and creative communities: Keep an eye on what's going on, but don't worry too much. There's a lot of real life happening away from your computer or phone screen, and it's okay to let the over hyped generative AIart 'race to the bottom.' A bit sad really, if we want to benefit from the technology.

P.S. I even used Gemini Ai (Gemini 2.7 Flash) to help fix up my dictated jipperish for this post!

Using robot.txt

For decades, website owners could control how search engine crawlers and other software bots interact with their sites. This powerful tool, known as robots.txt, has been an integral part of HTML since its early days. Let's dive into what robots.txt is and how you can use it effectively.

What is robots.txt? It is a simple text file placed in the root directory of your website. It provides instructions to web crawlers about which parts of your site they're allowed to access and index.

How does it work?

 The file typically contains at least two types of instructions:

1. User-agent: Identifies the crawler being addressed
2. Disallow: Specifies which parts of the site the crawler shouldn't access

 A basic example might look like this:

User-agent: *                                    
Disallow: /                                        

The downside of this approach is that Google’s will not Index your website and therefore it won’t be found in any Google searches. Probably not what we want. An alternative is to identify a folder on your website (if you have folders). In this case my images are all stored in the subdiretory /images. 

Disallow: /images/                           

It is easy to make your robot text file much more specific. For example I don’t want chat gtp’s web scraper to go through my website you can stop so I need to know the agent name that OpenAi are using and I got this information from 20i article How to stop AI scraping your website (see see video below) 

User-agent: GPTBot                    
Disallow: /                                    

At this point in time I not sure this approach is reliable because I suspect that a lot of Bots that are scraping the Internet are just ignoring robot text.  it’s clearly a voluntary exercise. However it is one step that demonstrates you want to be opted out of the datasets collected by specific AI developer, which may come in handy in future.

A more regulated way to opt-out os such indiscriminate content scrapping would be nice?

Is AI getting “good enough”?

In two minds about using AI for art works

This is an AI image I created with the prompt above, using google Deep Mind’s latest incarnation of its generative app Imogen-3. it really looks better than most other generative AI. Less overcrowding with intricate but less relevant detail, with consistent lighting and better capturing the emotional direction of my prompt. It was also my only creation with this prompt.

Google claims 

"We’ve significantly improved Imagen 3’s ability to understand prompts, which helps the models generate a wide range of visual styles and capture small details from longer prompts.

To be even more useful, Imagen 3 will be available in multiple versions, each optimized for different types of tasks, from generating quick sketches to high-resolution images."

Ok that’s nice wording google but what does it mean and why do I see such a difference to other prompt generated images

Well perhaps there is a hint right at the end of their hype.

"Imagen 3 was built with our latest safety and responsibility innovations, from data and model development to production.

We used extensive filtering and data labeling to minimize harmful content in datasets and reduced the likelihood of harmful outputs. We also conducted red teaming and evaluations on topics including fairness, bias and content safety.”

Recent developments in AI technology have raised some intriguing questions about data handling, promoting fake news and bias. It appears that at least google is implementing input checking mechanisms on the information they use to train their models. This likely extends to assessing image quality as well, ensuring that the data fed into these systems meets certain standards. Looks “good enough”.

However, this observation leads to a more pressing personal concern: 

Does responsible AI development truly encompass ethical practices across the board? The issue of data collection methods remains a significant point of contention. Are these companies indiscriminately scraping data from various sources without proper consent or consideration?

This brings me to a personal worry many of us share: the privacy of our own data, particularly our photos. With the prevalence of cloud-based photo storage services like Google Photos, and the vast number of images captured and uploaded from mobile devices daily, it's natural to wonder about the security and usage of this data. I worry some companies are "hoovering up" these personal images en masse? If so, what are the implications for our privacy and the control we have over our own digital footprint? 

As consumers and digital citizens, it's important that we stay informed about these practices and advocate for ethical standards in AI development. The balance between technological advancement and personal privacy is delicate, and it's a conversation we need to keep having as AI continues to evolve and integrate into our daily lives.

Is Image Glazing Worth the Hassle?

Protecting our art is becoming crucial in today's AI-driven digital world. But is image glazing the answer? Here's my experience so far.

Cara, a popular alternate platform to Instagram at the moment, has yet to offer built-in glazing. They suggest using Glaze, a separate software. Sounds simple. Not quite.

Setting up Glaze is a bit of a headache:

- It's free, 👍 but requires downloading large zip files 👎

- You need a hefty amount of disk space 👎

- The process feels outdated and tedious 👎

took ~88 minutes to Glaze

The real kicker? It's slow.👎👎👎 We're talking almost an hour and a half per image for my 9x5 submissions on older hardware. Ouch.

tool ~83 minutes to Glaze

You can batch them 👍 but it's one at a time.👎

But here's the biggest issue: you can't tell if it worked 🤞. The image looks the same, and there's no way to verify if it's actually protecting your style.🤞

So, is it worth it? Excuse me if I'm a little sceptical. The process is time-consuming, and we're essentially trusting a black box. 

Can it really save our unique mark-making styles from AI theft?

Photography without a camera

On Saturday I attended an artist talk at the Museum of Australian Photography focused on three exhibits around “photography without a camera”. One project that really interested me was by Kate Robinson, who created images using generative AI and then made physical prints using the traditional cyanotype process. She ran a workshop on the process in the afternoon

I've been fascinated by optical illusions, like Rubin's vase which can be seen as two faces or a vase. I tried generating the illusion image through text prompts to DALL-E 2 but it didn't work, their AI evidently didn't know about the famous illusion, I just got nice vases. So I experimented with Stable Diffusion instead, knowing I could add a noisy starter image with the same prompt “photo-realistic version of Rubin vase”, this generated something closer to what I needed.

I then gave Stable Diffusion a detailed text prompt asking for “Male & Female Heads in profile facing each other, Professional photography, bokeh, natural lighting” I used the latest SDXL 1.0 model which generates very realistic images. This produced some great portraits which had sharp focus on the faces and soft, blurred backgrounds, while maintaining the illusion styling.

1. Stable Diffusion Starter
2. Stable Diffusion generated images
3. Selected image upscaled
4. Greyscale & Inverted for transparency

I picked one of the four generated AI images with good tonal range, upscaled it, and inverted it to make a negative. Then printed this negative image onto a transparency. Kate had already prepared some watercolour paper with the light-sensitive cyanotype chemicals. I sandwiched the sensitized paper with the transparency under a piece of perspex and exposed it to sunlight for about 25 minutes.

When the transparency was removed the image had magically appeared on the paper! Somewhat faded. Just like seeing that first print develop in the darkroom, under the red light. I rinsed the paper first in water and then briefly in vinegar to set the blue cyanotype tones. In only about 40 minutes, I had gone from an AI concept to a one-of-a-kind cyanotype print, all without ever using a camera!

This project showed me the creative potential in blending digital and analogue photographic methods. I'm re-excited to experiment more with generated AI images and bringing them into the real world through alternative printing processes.

The hyper-real, as a replacement for our photographs?

 

I was out scouting for my last photowalk, on a bright winters day with virtually no breeze. The Jells Park lake was forming a beautiful mirror with strong reflections. I am also testing out the new Skylum Neo extension for creating a multi-image stitched panorama, its nice and much faster than the stitching routine I'm currently using in ON1 Photo RAW.

Things are changing fast in generative AIart all the time and I was also testing out the latest version of Stable Diffusion (model SDXL 1.0) on Nightcafe studio and thought a sunny winter's scene like the above would make a good test. I used the text prompt -

"bright winter blue sky, some clouds over a still lake with strong reflection, yellow ochre grasses in foreground, Professional photography, natural lighting, shot on micro four third digital camera sharp focus"

With the above photo being given the defaults of a 50% Prompt Weight and 50% Noise Weight as the starting diffusion image for the generative process.

Certainly the capabilities of these generative AI systems has become really great, the detail is definitely starp and the reflections undoubted strong. However is it just a bit disturbingly too much on the hyper-real side?

"Hyper-real: More real than reality..." Brookes Jensen, Lenswork PodcastLW1362 - The End of the Trail, Sort Of

Is it me or AI that’s improving" ?

 Painting Granitic Rocks

This week's Wednesday Wanderers was painting a vista on the East Coast of Tasmania, a little channel of granitic rocks against some silhouetted trees reflected in the water. I was trying out a different Art Spectrum watercolour paper, 300gsm but 20% cotton and heavily textured. Didn’t really like it at first, unfortunately it’s also very absorbent so I ran out of time to wait for it to dry during the session. I returned to it yesterday, adding a little bit of detail, some deep tone and colour. It turned out OK (see below).

As has been my way of late I have also checked out what AI might make of my style. I did a “sty;e transfer” on night café studio, which trains on my artwork (above) and applies that to the originl photo. The results were pretty good (see below). Still a couple of tiny “distractions”. So the question is “Have I improved or has AI?” Perhaps its both, especially in the rendering of the granite boulders.

Pushing my luck I decided to also do some generative Ai testing using the prompt- "bright blue sky granite rocks silhouetted trees with strong reflections watercolor" 

So the score (according to me).

Me  1/1           my Style Transfer   0.95/1         Generative AI   0.2/3

How would you score the images?

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.

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.

Opt-in & Opt-out Talk about #AIart and Have I Been Trained website

 Nothing brings the finer points of a debate into the spotlight than personal involvement.

The big AIart news of the last few days is that Stable AI will allow artist to opt out of being included in the next dataset being used to train the neural network to be used for Stable Diffusion 3. Well at least you can opt-out for the next couple of weeks, so follow this up now. 

There is a site, that can check whether you have been included in the massive Laion-5B & Laion-400m neural networks used in Stable Diffusion & Google's Imogen, yes they were trained on 5.8 billion images. I haven't established its legitimacy as an ethical stance, but it does seem legit. It doesn't appear to be a sneaky way to get more images (with so much hacking and phising establishing trust is a big issue in the #AIart discussions)

https://haveibeentrained.com/ 

However, when you see you are one of the artist whose images have been used to train the Lioan Neural Network and had no idea they are in there, some things suddenly confront you.

It took me very little time using the image search feature, to find two of my works. They were part of my Retracing Darwin exhibition in early 2010 and very early examples of my personal technique I call photoimpression. I actually don't mind if others study my method and even create examples of their own. I would like them to acknowledge me, which is becoming a hollow wish on today's web. I don't blame redbubble either, I am sure they didn't know and/or had not given permission either,

I really don't want my work, especially my own special techniques, style, mark-making colouring or composition used without my permission. This is the stuff that makes my work original. Firstly because I know I'll never be acknowledged, that others could profit from this work or contribution to this work to what is presented as their original, I also actually find a lot of the so-called art generated by these AI's a bit scary and I don't approve, and finally I find the whole process a bit morally questionable and not ethical.

So I've made up my mind, Now I do want to opt out.

Now I have to find out how? 

Damn! I have to do it image by image. Cest La Vie

Blood on my hands?

 All I wanted to do was leave Facebook, so I decided to create a goodbye profile picture using a text-to-image AI art algorithm. Really puzzled why I ended up with blood on my hands? 

However, I did make the mistake of making my goodbye message public instead of just to my friends warning them not to click on any request from me, this started a flood of uninformed comments not to be so angry (which I wasn’t just frustrated) and each with convenient links to go somewhere else. If you see those please don’t click on them either. 

So my facebook account should be gone (well in 30days)

When "good enough" isn't really.

The general vibes I am getting back from my fairly intermittent and probably very personalized investigation of the massive deluge of commentary on "text to image" AIart is that of two extremes. Those vehemently against it (with the argument that it will be the end of artists, whatever that means) and those who see it as a wonderful new technology (bringing artistic creation to everyone). I don't agree with either. Like all technology there are pluses and minuses.

Created with Google
Deep Dream Generator

Let's begin by discussing a small personal project of my own. Can AIart tools be used to inspire my creativity? Specifically help me create a new cartoon character, I'm just using a simple prompt.

"cartoon of a watercolour artist painting with red hat"

I submitted this to a number of the more popular AIart tools. I definitely didn't expect similar results as I have been following most of the technical issues how each system has been created. The biggest difference is the data selected to train the neural networks, and remember there are usually two neural nets, one to review images (usually scrapped fairly randomly from the broader web, and the second to analyse associated text (usually within the websites or social media posts as an alternate text caption). Finally, it is very important to recognize that these systems are not copying the original images or even parts of those images. In the case of the image-based network it is just using "abstracted" dimensions (descriptors) that allow it to differentiate or group parts of the image. A previous post includes a video that explains these steps clearly. These could be shape, colour, texts, line ... I'll call them patches of style ... or perhaps how marks are shown might be a better description. Well, the results are a lot different.

Created in Nightcafe using a variety of methods but the same prompt.

First all these differences must make everyone realize that the common generic argument that these are copies or "rip offs" of an artist work, are largely uninformed ("fake new" in social media speak). Clearly, they are different because the neural nets were trained on different & very large datasets. In fact even submitting the same prompts can produce differences within a given tool. They are less copies and more just appropriation of some machine recognizable aspects of the style. You can quickly get into very muddy waters if you try to label this plagiarism, but even so I suspect5 legally this is a grey area.

The second myth to debunk is that because some of these systems are open source and free they are not promoted by greedy profit oriented vested interests (aka wannabe venture capitalist silicon valley types). Despite all this, yes all systems, restrict the number of free prompts you can submit and then offer ways to "buy" more "credits". To make it more game like you can "earn" credits sometimes by continuing to stay on the websites or use a specific part of their services. The really big costs in these systems are not really generating the work (although it might require more power/performance than the average PC or tablet today) it is the collating of the data and neural network training with millions of images and thousands on dimensions for characterization. These big projects requiring many people and seriously massive computer resources. Conveniently, a lot of this data is based on research projects, usually at universities and made available to the community relatively free of restrictions. I don't understand what is going on here, I do suspect some vested interests are deeply involved in academia, but I will restrain my suspicion until I know the work is noble and working towards a better future..

My final consideration for now is, are the photographers, illustrators and artists, whose work has been used in the training of these massive neural networks, happy about their work being included. I doubt they have even been consulted at all. Ok could they opt out? so that their style, characteristic mark making, colouring or composition doesn't keep turning up. I suspect not. The cat is already out of bag?

So, is AIart good enough (in terms of artistic quality)? Of course the quality of art is a very subject matter, and more relevant is the common perception that what is popular must be good. AIart has become very impressive in a short time but it doesn't live up to my expectations at the moment. There is always something a bit off (eg cropping, missing body parts, straying from the brief). Sure, you can refine the prompt, use the magic "words/modifiers", paint in or out, evolve and upscale, if you don't mind being kept using up your credits and buying more. Perhaps it is the public who have become more tolerant of lower resolution imagery and spend a lot less time actually looking at it. Instead, they are keen to scroll onto the next image, looking for that flashy colourful and more often moving picture. Well for a few seconds at least. The "good enough" threshold has perhaps become lower.

Creativity in name, not so much in practice

Whilst I have long since stopped using Lightroom and other Adobe products, I do still take a keen interest in what is going on at Adobe and more particularly what they are working on. So I have been attending the virtual aspects of adobe’s big MAX conference for the last few years.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen described how the company is determined to develop "AI for social good” in his keynote address. They are certainly using AI within many of their tools. Creating a wealth of “one-click”, “fix-it”, “make it better” tools within their existing suites of applications. For sure it will take a lot of tedious hack work out of making visual images and video, but I don’t think this is going to re-assure the real creatives worried about the rise of AI art.

One really obvious theme is everything is moving to video (or at least animated images) and the general idea of creativity is all about building a social media space, going viral, capturing the hearts and mind in a few second, possible in a 2D becoming meta 3D style, design assets and brand kit consistency, again with that “single click” aspect dominating. Sounds like a lot of the sameness, everyone clicking on the same few links and expecting originally and creativity may actually result with more and more of the same!

The hyped “new” tool Adobe Express has a lot of the look and feel of Canva, perhaps with nicer integration with other adobe tools (so you need to pay more rent), The photographic enhancements in lightroom and photoshop are mainly not new and exciting, being offered in a number of other pieces of software, just not integrated so again you have to spend more renting it all. The sneaks segment usually my favourite to see what new technology might be coming up was a disappointment. Perhaps with the exception of project blink (for AI-powered video editing on the web)

I did like the short presentation by Relu Ou on "the myths and realities about Artifical Intelligence", Particularly his closing remark “Please let your imagination direct how you use these tools.”

Second Generation selfportrait

 A lot of people on the Internet express the opinion that artist will go extinct because of #AIart. I am not one of them.

AIart Selfportarit of Artist on the Beach
(Style tranfer of a photo using a stable diffusion reference)

The current crop of text to image neural networks can be quite amazing, very good at capturing style, colouring and texture aspects of artistic mark making. Not so good at expressing an artist intent, specifically originality. Unfortunately, most of the current neural networks I’ve been trained up on rather depressing and dystopian art and images. I’m not sure that this is really the direction of art, more to do with the wasteland of trends on social media, where most images are found these days. Further so much depends on how you express yourself in the text prompt and modifiers. Will poets become the new visual artists?  Further it’s become common practice to keep refining the image and prompt. This is a lot like building up glazes or over-painting, creating layers of added texture and form and more eye appeal.

Already I can see that the simple first attempt text string output on social media from any of the AIart systems around at the moment, looks much the same, not quite right, unusually cropped and frequently scarily dystopian. Hopefully those jumping on the “one-click” filter style of social media influencer posts will soon become bored with the method. Leaving those interested in the potential for artistic expression time to experiment and refine methods. Thereby expanding the range of tools and media they have to hand. I for one look forward to this time.

Unnatural Crops Explained

The developments in Text to Image AIart generated images are amazing. Things are changing, and largely improving in image quality almost weekly. However one thing I had noticed that was staying fairly constant was unnatural looking crops, the weird truncating of the subjects, particularly people. Surely this was not a new artistic trend I had no knowledge of, or perhaps the artist who's work is being used to train these systems had an aversion to conventional composition.

Example of a headless figure based on stable diffusion prompt

Am I an artist now? John Singer Sargent

Turns out there is a simpler explanation (see quote from a NovelAI blog post below). The unnatural crops are a result of the training set being converted to a square format (so the images are the same ratio) and just arbitrarily using the center of the image.

 Aspect Ratio Bucketing

One common issue of existing image generation models is that they are very prone to producing images with unnatural crops. This is due to the fact that these models are trained to produce square images. However, most photos and artworks are not square. However, the model can only work on images of the same size at the same time, and during training, it is common practice to operate on multiple training samples at once to optimize the efficiency of the GPUs used. As a compromise, square images are chosen, and during training, only the center of each image is cropped out and then shown to the image generation model as a training example.

Are we having fun yet?

It hasn't taken long for my AIart works to fall foul of the censors. Ok not the real censors, the perceived NFW (not for work, standards of the USA based morals on the internet) Whilst I can only see blur in one of the images generated, I expect that it was being interpreted as NUDITY. Which isn't surprising for anything Salvador Dali inspired

I also believe the warning is probably coming from Stable Diffusion itself. That might be a very good thing, indicating they are concerned with the ethics (aka complying with social norms) of the types of images they are being asked to generate. I do know that certain words are not allowed in the text submitted. Again, a bit restrictive but overall, a good thing.

Back to what I was playing with, just having fun. Which I learnt from a Catherine Price in a recent Ted Talk, involves Play, Connection & the Flow State. I like self-referential (meta) subject so I have submitted the phrase "Are we having fun yet?" Firstly the phrase just by itself and the results were totally underwhelming. Perhaps AI doesn't know what fun is yet?

Then by 3 well known artists  / cartoonists / photographers each as modifiers. The results are more encouraging. I've picked the most appropriate in each group of four thumbnails.

Moral: Be careful what you ask for!

The Is it Art? Questioning AIart

The question everyone seems to be asking is AIart really Art?

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My view is that it is just a different form of expression and it does have many of the characteristics of Art. It certainly will give more people the ability to create things. Something they probably lost as teenagers when they decided they couldn't draw. (Some of us continued to draw and maybe never grow up as suggested by Picasso) However, it is already being exploited by copycat and wannabe influencer types that are on that constant production of "content" treadmill for social media. When you first see an image created by DALL-E or Midjourney it's quite amazing but once you have seen a few the novelty does wear off, and with so many similar dystopian examples now being shown it's becoming a little disturbing.

Yet I see AIart in its many forms as a powerful tool in the hands of creatives. Something that is very clear in the above video, which is also worth watching as a simple explanation of what text prompted image generations actually is and the basics of how it works. So I'm keenly following the developments. On the upside, this technology can save a lot of time getting inspired and just fooling around with concepts. On the downside I do worry that the copycats will exploit true artists' ideas and styles, monetizing such works and thereby ripping off the less-discerning public. I can also see that many artists will not wish to have their works included any publicly available neural network, which inevitably means not having any of their art published on the net!. I don't have an answer to this. 

Such is (modern) life.

Amazing but ... ... ...

It seems like only yesterday that I wandered in Mid Journey while looking to get an invite to DALL-E. It was actually almost a month ago but a lot has happened in the field of AIart, especially using artificially intelligent processes to create an image from a text prompt. (I prefer to consider these tools large scale and targeted neural networks, not intelligences)

Vermeer's  "Girl with a Pearl Earring" extended by DALL-E Outpainting

This illustration is from a PetaPixel article about a technique called outpainting,  were an image can be extended seamlessly, The approach uses shadows, reflections, and textures to extend the created background that is designed to blend perfectly with the original image, and uses its ability to pull in details from the millions of images run through its reference neural network. Not by finding actual object but shapes we see as real objects.

These technology advanced are truly amazing and wonderful tools for the creatives and original thinkers. Yet I am willing to bet that the technology will be dragged down on social to just create very dystopian, offensive, distastefully, look at me and wanna-bee influencer copycatism. They are already filling my Instagram feed. One bright outcome could be, it will probably lead to a big popularity to post AIart  as static images back on Instagram, making it largely a photo and interactive place again (#makeinstagramgreatagain) and not just a place to be force feed with ads, reels and the misguided opinions of the haters.

So what is my opinion, have we created ART?

No! The generation of this image by computer is amazing but it has taken a compellingly beautiful and intriguing work of art and made a mundane domestic scene with lots of clutter, you are unlikely to stop and wonder what she is looking at and just swipe past!