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“It is foolish to resist AI while creating art,” Sneha Chakraborty, a muralist, said, at Cypher 2023. She was one of the panellists who discussed the fusion of AI in art, alongside Gokul Pillai, Vimal Chandran and Tapan Aslot, whose mind-boggling artworks took centre stage at the event. 

When Douglas Hofstadter wrote the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, he was convinced that creative pursuits were intrinsically linked to humanity and not machines. That, however, is not the case today. “The current AI systems, especially language models and diffusion models, which are used for visual arts are perfectly suited to creative pursuits,” said Sentience Institute’s co-founder Jacy Reese Anthis, saying that many of the scientists misjudged AI, thinking that the first breakthrough would be in area of self-driving vehicles. Now, it looks like generative AI is turning that dream into a reality as well. 

AI tools that create ‘art’

Instead of painstakingly making the piece of art, now technology has democratised the product giving access to anyone to come up with brilliant images from mere prompts. Ryan Murdoch an artist said, “So, I think it will shift our values away from, ‘Is this stunning image with the colours that I want?’ to ‘Is this image really clever, meaningful, or special in some other way?’”

The tools though can be used by anyone will be different when employed by an artist with skill and finesse. “We all have cameras but we still employ a professional photographer when it comes to capturing special moments,” reasoned Gokul Pillai, a photographer turned AI artist, who spoke at Cypher 2023. 

Text-to-image tools released by OpenAI’s unleashed an entire collage of similar tools. DALL.E progressively improved with its next iterations. The quality of images, the intricacies of the background, understanding detailed and long prompts got better and they’ve even released it for ChatGPT enterprise and plus users. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Imagen are all similar platforms and the most popular ones among the many available online that do the same thing. 

Unfazed by this photo editing software like Adobe, Figma, Blender and CorelDraw are pushing ahead with their own AI suites. All of them are constantly updating their AI features to their already existing quiver. 

Delegating all the repetitive and uninspiring work to the computer, Adobe aims to automate routine or “busy work” tasks, such as removing stray hairs in Photoshop and editing filler words in videos. At Adobe Max, their annual conference, the company appeased their uses with new announcements like the Generative Colour for Illustrator. With simple prompts, users can ask Firefly to generate and apply new colour palettes to existing work in seconds

Canva on the other hand launched ‘Magic Studio’ and true to its name even non experts can work on the platform with AI tools thanks to their partnership with OpenAI, Runway and Google Imagen’s datasets. 

Is it really art?

There is no doubt that art has been constantly changing. From paintbrushes to digital canvases, the tool used by humans to express themselves has only evolved over time. The AI systems built on top of billions of images that were made by humans are now the building blocks to the art that will be created in the future. 

The view that somehow this will destroy human creativity or it’s going to take the soul from it is misplaced fear. It will multiply the number of mediocre art on the internet by nature of experimentation but the artists will finally benefit from not having to work on mundane tasks. Vimal Chandran, explained how this works for him, saying, “ When I’m beginning to make a movie, it used to take a long time to make a mood board of the initial sketches for all the frames. This is a lengthy and somewhat tedious aspect of the movie-making process. Now I outsource this to AI which has improved my productivity, allowing me to concentrate more on the main aspects of movie production.”

Another interesting example of how Japanese anime Akira 1988 took three years of work from 70+ of artists working round the clock to create one masterpiece but today to be able to do the same within months doesn’t take away anything from the original. The period of turmoil that musicians inflicted upon themselves when they denied P2P file sharing and then digital music decimated the piracy laws finally embracing digital music is where we stand with AI art.