An Analytical Artist on AI Art — 5 Short Essays
By Moses Cirulis
Presented by Modest Metamodernist
In these essays, I hope to put forth a modest synthesis of AI art and writing. To keep it short, I believe that AI Art is an unfortunate trend but not without precedent.
Read on…
Is AI Art Theft?
This is the central claim from most of my fellow artists-the idea is that AI art programs steal images from other artists and essentially bashes them together in order to make its imagery.
Technically, though, this is incorrect-though it’s difficult to explain exactly why without sounding like a techbro AI supporter. My reasoning though is based on what an Art AI actually does-at least, based on my experience.
Given my experience with Midjourney, what the AI actually does is use the imagery it’s trained on purely for reference purposes. In addition to that art trained network, Art AIs use a neural language net, and in the case of iterative AIs like Midjourney, learns to make art based on the selections of its users, defining with each selection for the machine what is “art”.
I’ll put it this way-you can get a generic looking knight in a Frank Frazzetta-esque pose using Midjourney, but you can’t get a Frazzetta piece. Reference, not tracing.
