Stable Diffusion has the goal of providing billions of people an avenue for creating impossible art using artificial intelligence. As of writing, the AI art community is continuously growing.
Mark, AI Art Generators: Img2Img
I initially set out to simply determine and describe my position on the recent “NoAI” protests cropping up on sites like ArtStation and DeviantArt. I’m a relatively new digital artist and certainly don’t want my art nor the artwork of those who came before me to be stolen and copied without appropriate consideration.
As I read article after article, reviewed many different perspectives, and continued to discover a number of things I frankly didn’t know about the development and deployment of AI technology, I’ve come to realize that this genie is pretty much already out of the bottle – the opportunity to just “make it go away” is completely gone.
Some semblance of peaceful coexistence is likely the best hope at this point. I’m sure there will be litigation, but these AI tools are already out in the wild as is artwork created throughout history. The “NoAI” movement in its current form is essentially building resentment against artists in the mistaken belief that all artists are completely against technological progress. “AI” or “NoAI” isn’t really the main point on which we should focus.
Art and artificial intelligence (AI) may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but the relationship between the two has a long and complex history. From the earliest days of art, technology has played a role in its creation, whether through the invention of new materials or the development of new techniques.
J. Scott Stratton, Art and AI: The Evolving Relationship
In my journey of discovery, I’ve found sites advertised as AI art repositories trying to simply cash in on the most recent craze – ultimately containing very little material created by AI. A number of these sites were just reposted art from living artists without their knowledge or consent. I also found sites with “higher quality” AI generated products – though many still had defects if you looked closely enough. In most cases I would fully expect to see better products from a living artist. Regardless, our art is out there, essentially all over the web either on our own sites or the sites of others, and the databases that drive these AI systems have already been populated with this data. AI is only going to get better over time.
We began using AI to create art by first teaching it to understand and replicate our own art. The technique is called style transfer and it uses deep neural networks to replicate, recreate and blend styles of artwork.
Jennifer Aue, The Relationship Between Art and AI
More than anything, we need the ability to either remove artwork from these training databases or develop the appropriate negative prompts to exclude specific artists or artistic styles by default. Since these AI tools are open source and out in the wild, I don’t think there is anything that can effectively be done to completely prevent someone from building their own private database and populating it with whatever training material they choose.
The next step beyond imitation is developing of a collaborative relationship between artist and AI.
Jennifer Aue, The Relationship Between Art and AI
I think stock art and photography is fair game for training data. Beyond stock data, I think artists should be allowed ultimate consent and control over whether their works are used in training and production of AI art. Enforcement at a corporate level is probably doable, with some degree of cost, but at the individual level this will likely never effectively happen. At a personal or individual level, it falls to us to educate our customers. There will always be people who will be perfectly happy with what could essentially be called counterfeit material, we can’t fix that, it’s a personal choice. We can however help our customers, supporters, and the general public to know how best to support the artistic community.
As artists, it is great working with a large space. However, it’s not the same regarding AI Art Generators. Developers created AI Art Generators that work well with the 512×512 ratio. Increasing the width or height while generating causes some unusual results.
Mark, AI Art Generators : Img2Img
Discussions within the community need to shift towards how we change the message. Do we advocate for an official “NoAI” meta tag? If we do, keep in mind that adherence to standard tags is and always has been completely voluntary. Might there a method to capitalize web3 or NFT technology to validate some level of provenance over digital art products? Again, provenance itself doesn’t solve the problem but it might allow customers some sort of ability to confirm that products they purchase actually benefit the artist they think they’re supporting.
How do we legally define when a specific style becomes an inseparable part of the end product? Does there need to be a discussion regarding removal of artist “style” prompts to provide some form of Intellectual Property (IP) protection from AI? Does ongoing litigation related to deepfakes have any bearing on this discussion?
I don’t know the answers to all these questions but ultimately the consumer will determine whether or not they want to have a genuine product, a counterfeit product, or at least make sure that the actual artist profits from their work. We need to find a way to [first] educate our fans and supporters and [second] enable or, even better, empower customers to choose genuine works over counterfeits.
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