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| Eric Bourdages provocative Midjourney creations |
I had a ton of fun with the AI renderer Midjourney, bringing the world of Magnum Thrax to life. I've left it up for the time being on Instagram @Magnum_thrax. I found the tool incredibly fun and addictive, and every time I turned around there was something else I wanted to try.
I've since stopped and cancelled my account.
Why?
Unfortunately, the AI Renderer engineers scraped the work of living artists in building their program, without consent of the artists. That's not actually illegal, and it's how human artists train. There's never been a law against aping a style, likely because it takes years of work and the development of a skill set to do, and even then, individual artists bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the mix, altering it from the style they were originally trying to duplicate. Then they often go off in their own direction.
AI, however, can duplicate someone's style as fast as it can analyze it, and produce pieces in a matter of minutes. Over the last month or two it's reached a point where it can start to take work away from living artists.
I thought it'd take years to reach this point.
Some of the time, the AI Renderings have atrocious hands and all sorts of bizarre artifacts and visual gaffes, but this is occurring less and less. With a little bit of touch up work, I can get an AI Rendering looking... almost commercially viable, if I do say so myself.
A good artist can make AI art really sing, but then, they'd be reduced to being touch up artists.
Most people using AI Renderers were not giving out commercial art jobs in the first place, and much of the work on social media is not going to seriously impact anyone. It's not accepted by stock art companies, it's not allowed at conventions, and given the terms of service, it can't, or shouldn't, be charged for. You can't brand anything with it, given those terms.
Anyone is free to use it.
That said, commercial art is heavily influenced by cost, speed and convenience. AI renderers are all that. And many times, as in say editorial illustration, you may not care if the image is used elsewhere. As the renderers improves further, I can see it being used instead of employing living artists.
Commercial adoption of AI output presents some serious problems:
1) If the AI gets so good that its output is indistinguishable from that of a living artist, it threatens the artist's livelihood. Even if there are limits on what can be rendered (say only simple images) it still results in a loss of income. These artists are at the forefront of our culture, developing imagery after decades of investment in their skill set. This threatens the value of their work.
2) Who will go into the arts if there's no chance of making a living at it? Do we want to see the field gutted and left to AI?
3) If we don't try and set some reasonable and fair limits here, what is going to happen when the AI comes for other jobs? A bad precedent here could impact how AI is developed in the future, and not in a good way. First they came for the artists and I did nothing... etcetera.
Even if you aren't referencing a specific artist, their material can still wind up being leveraged to fulfill a prompt. It's part of the overall engine, so it's a small part of everything rendered.
That makes the entire engine tainted.
This is a terrible shame, given how amazing the technology is. It's absolutely mind blowing, and I can understand the engineers cutting corners in their single minded zeal to create the best AI possible. I'm sure they have a legal team that went over what they were doing in terms of obeying the letter of the law. Unfortunately, the law never foresaw something like this; so what they've done... it strikes me as being unfair, and even unethical.
Artists should be compensated for what they've contributed to the engine, and have the ability to opt out. It should only analyze the creative commons, material not in copyright and not of living artists. That's not unreasonable.
There are now millions of people subscribing to these services, which funnels a good deal of money to the developers.
I don't know if the genie here can be put back in the bottle, but I do feel the artists are being treated unfairly, deserve compensation, and suspect that legislation is going to be necessary.
That, of course, will take years.
Let's hope they work things out.
It does remind me of automation's impact in the past. The Luddites were not so much anti-technology as they were against losing their livelihood at a time when job loss could mean starvation. There was no welfare or unemployment insurance then. The owners refused to profit share, refused to retrain workers, refused to even offer a little money to help the loom workers survive until they could find alternate employment. It was very polarizing, and resulted in mobs burning down factories and assassinating business owners.
Something along this line is happening now, and it won't just be to artists. Millions, possibly tens of millions, of people are in danger of losing their jobs to AI over the next couple of decades.
It's the dawn of a new era.
We have to decide whether it will be a wondrous one, or a dystopian nightmare.
