KATE THOMPSON DAVY: The promise and threat of ‘AI art’: Paint me like one of your ...

There’s a technology issue I’ve been following for a few months that has suddenly spilt over into popularity and publication everywhere I look, from my TikTok For You page to the features section of the illustrious New York Times: the matter of using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create digital graphics or images, some of which one might argue have made the shift from mere image generation into the sphere of art creation.    

It’s bleeding edge technology that has many tendrils, alarming current and potential applications, and is moving at pace. According to some, it is ringing the death knell for artists, while for others it is an exciting new tool to be wielded by creatives.

Trained on huge databases of images scraped from online (including stock and celebrity photographs, paintings and graphic design), these tools create all kinds of new graphic outputs based on user prompts. The most popular ones right now include DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

Their outputs — some funny, some terrifying — are likely all over your social media feeds, as both professional creatives and enthusiastic amateurs are deploying these tools to create never-before-seen things, shore up the meme universe and provide fellow social media users with endless entertainment.

The Guardian’s article on the AI art trend starts with this set of examples: “Want to see a picture of Jesus Christ laughing at a meme on his phone, Donald Trump as the Nevermind baby, or Karl Marx being slimed at the Nikelodeon Kid’s Choice awards?” This set of ideas shows how “if you can think it” ... an AI art tool can create a visual approximation thereof. And yes, I am using “AI art tools” as shorthand, and leaving the “but is it art?” debate for a few more paragraphs. Another subcategory of prompts are things like “X (noun) in the style of Y artist”. For a wealth of examples, ArtHub.ai hosts AI-generated images alongside the text prompts used to create them.

You can even try some of the simple or lite versions of these tools without the rigmarole of downloading and configuring, through portals such as Craiyon (formerly DALL·E mini, on craiyon.com) or the Stable Diffusion demo model available on the HuggingFace site.

But like complementary shades on the colour wheel, where there is new technology there are new fears and endless controversy. The collocate of anything AI, it seems, is “ethical dilemma”. Take The New York Times article, which opens with the story of Jason M Allen, who won the top accolade in the “emerging digital artists” category at a recent regional art fair in the US. His entry was created using Midjourney. It not only netted him a small cash prize, but also international infamy and no small amount of hate, despite the fact that he was pretty upfront about how he created his artwork, literally submitting it under the name “Jason M Allen via Midjourney”.

Despite the disclosure his critics say he “cheated” by using the diffusion model, which draws from existing works online and can be configured to mimic specific and current artists, which many see as a direct threat to their careers and wallets.

RJ Palmer is a “creature designer concept artist” whose strongly worded Twitter commentary on this was featured in the BBC’s coverage of the topic this week. He said he was “extremely concerned”, tweeting: “This thing wants our jobs; it’s actively anti-artist.”

Additionally, others of a sensible bent are concerned about the pragmatic mitigations this advancing capability will require. Applying the internet maxim of “rule 34” (if it exists, there is porn of it), these tools will need robust safety checker modules, content moderators for the galleries and similar interventions. This is, naturally, to protect vulnerable eyes, as much as to prevent the exploitation of people’s images into producing deepfake porn and nudes.

In my experience the capabilities of these tools varies widely — especially with the lite demo versions. Unlike the detailed, beautiful, and sometimes startling images from the full tools, I certainly didn’t produce anything I’d display in my home. Quite the opposite, truthfully. The output of my “Willem Dafoe eating a banana” for example is worthy of a spot on the delightfully absurdist subreddit, r/weirddalle subreddit.

And this might be where we get back into the issue of art versus artists. Though commentators seem to be utterly divided on whether this is a skill and toolset for artists, or the thing that kills them, they do agree that there is — ahem — an art to crafting the prompts themselves.

What is AI “art” good at? In my limited testing and personal observations, the lite versions of available tools are good at quick visualisations of simple concepts, using building blocks that are already in existence. The full tools in the right hands can create some magical, detailed, hyperrealistic images, but at that level, we could also argue that the skill of the user has elevated the output, just as collage or oil paint are mediums and tools. I am also excited about the instances of “world-building” and “fanfic” evidence in the growing body of work online, a sphere where the internet truly outperforms.

Is it art? The debate rages on. Alternatively, if we take our lead from Andy Warhol — famously divisive and maverick himself — “art is anything you can get away with”, putting AI output definitively in the running for that intangible title.

• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.