A Slightly Informed Opinion About AI Generated Art

There has been a lot of talk about AI generated art among artists lately. Because I'm always about twenty years behind technology and have clung tightly to my sketchbook and pencils over the years, I first ignored the debate while assuming these new apps/programs would destroy artist's jobs and degrade future art into overly derivative repetitious crap made by amateur, prosaic hacks. But then I thought I should research it a bit and try one of the apps and have an informed opinion instead of a reflexive reaction to them.

According to some articles, one of the benefits of AI generated art apps is to assist the artist in quickly generating fresh ideas for current or future art projects. I chose craiyon from a list of the top apps to see if I agreed. There was a simple screen where I typed in my phrases and ideas. The app took a couple minutes to generate six images with different visual interpretations of my text, which was "a woman in a long white dress with arms that become tree branches." The results were bizarre. (see above screenshots) It looked like a sloppy photo bash of trees and women in dresses: certainly nothing artistically threatening. But it was also very intriguing and immediately caused me to try again with more specific text about the subject and look of the final images. When I directed it to create something in the style of a distinct artistic medium or style, the characters were still warped and oddly sutured together, but I appreciated and was inspired by some of the palettes, compositions, and poses it chose. My creativity mentally kicked in to correct the flaws in the details while combining the app's images in novel iterations that pleased me and were closer to my original vision. After using it a few times, I agree that it is a useful conceptual tool for the artist. 

My other thought about the apps, was that as AI learns how to make artistic images that could potentially compete with human artwork, this should drive the artist not to despair or anger or cynicism, but rather to evolve, grow, and except the challenge to go further into creation and further into the next new way of sharing their vision with the world: using this tool to catapult them further on into imagining impossibilities.

Let these apps be a stepping stool to reach the next level of personal artistic growth.