Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagArtists and AI art

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detail of Dante Alighieri statue

Make Literature Human Again

Should the AI novel be embraced or avoided?

I’ve been writing avidly since the first grade. Thumbing through a children’s nature magazine in the classroom one day, I discovered a crisp image of a red fox standing in the snow. I’d seen pictures of foxes before, but something stood out to me about this one to the point that I felt like I needed to write about it. If you’re looking for advice on owning foxes as pets, see my manual on the topic. (Full disclosure: my first-grade self was absolutely convinced having a fox for a pet is out of the question.) Years later, that fundamental impulse hasn’t left. Writing stories, novels, essays, news reports, and poetry has always been a fundamental way to try to do Read More ›

Techno adam and God
Disintegrating reaching hands concept illustration in vaporwave style color palette isolated on blue background.

What is Art Without the Human Mind?

AI art tools can wow us with technical skill, but fail to generate meaning

There’s no doubt that tools like OpenAI can create impressive, detailed renderings of images. Type in “Master Yoda riding a musk ox in Taiwan” and you’ll get…something. A friend of mine sent me a two-headed bunny dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi and a few other comic horrors, and I knew he’d been playing around with an AI art tool. But, it doesn’t take much reflection to feel that something important is missing in these artificially generated images. Sure, they’re detailed and colorful, and accurate. You can type in a scene and have it pop up on command. However, what do actual human artists think of these tools, and what do they essentially miss? Artist Peter Mohrbacher gave a balanced assessment of Read More ›

futuristid dystopian city
Dystopian futuristic cyberpunk city at night in a neon haze. Blue and purple glowing neon lights. Urban wallpaper. 3D illustration.

AI Art Tool Can Generate Both Beauty and Horror

Making AI image generators mainstream might offer people an interesting new frontier to explore. But the tech has a serious dark side

The capacities of AI art generators have grown much in the past couple of years. Through complex algorithms, AI scans the internet and manages to make artistic composites, some sublime, others grotesque. Today, AI art generators have incredible potential, but their capacities can also be easily abused. According to a Wired article from September 21, Science fiction novelist Elle Simpson-Edin wanted to generate artwork for her newest book. So, she tried AI tools. Her novel unabashedly depicts gore and sex, but most of the AI tools she discovered included “guardrails” that sanctioned explicit content. That is until she found Unstable Diffusion, “a Discord community for people using unrestricted versions of a recently released, open source AI image tool called Stable Diffusion.” Read More ›

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cozy domestic christmas interior with window, bed, candles and fireplace - neural network generated art, picture produced with ai in 2022

What Can AI Text-to-Image Generators Do for Artists?

Developer David Holz discusses his Midjourney generator in terms of the communities that grow up around art generated from words or phrases

In an interview with David Holz, founder of Midjourney, Verge senior reporter James Vincent asks about the new text-to-art AI image generators that are shaking up the illustration market: Generally, the “few dozen” current versions — which rely on combining materials from across the internet — work reasonably well but here are the drawbacks Vincent notes: They’re tricky and expensive to create, requiring access to millions of images used to train the system (it looks for patterns in the pictures and copies them) and a great deal of computational grunt (for which costs vary, but a million-dollar price tag isn’t out of the question). James Vincent, “‘An engine for the imagination’: The rise of AI image generators” at The Verge Read More ›