Free Inquiry #1: AI Art

I always struggle with choosing a topic with something as open ended as a free-inquiry, so I decided to focus on something that I don’t really understand, AI art.   AI art that can be widely used is a new technology and could potentially change the world substantially in ways people might now realize.  Using minimal word prompts, anyone can produce interesting dynamic images on a wide range of subjects.  While a few months ago there were only a few AI art programs publicly available, now there are new ones appearing almost every day. 

Some challenging issues that are appearing with the rise of AI art.  Certain technical artistic skills have been essentially devalued overnight.  Producing magazine covers or other graphic designs can now easily use free or low cost AI art in place of hiring a human artist.  While some artists will certainly learn to use these AI images to skip technical work and produce art differently, it’s unclear what the long term impact that this change in skill set will have.  What AI art can do right now is still limited to a large degree, but it could potentially do even more in the near future.

 It’s also unclear to what degree and in what way these art programs rely on popular copyrighted works to produce their images.  Artists like Greg Rutkowski have argued that AI programs should be restricted from relying on the work of living artists (Artnet).  Artists that have made their work available more freely in digital format have likely been used more to create the AI images. 

One of the reasons I wanted to look at AI art is that I really want to learn about using resources that allow for creative commons use like Unsplash to help produce teaching materials.  The AI art program I used “Midjourney”, gives the creator the full rights to use any image they produce using it.  

Here are a few images I created with Midjourney along with the text prompts that I used.  These text prompts were my only input.

Images created using the prompt “classroom, students, learning”

“Upscaled” Image

Another “Upscaled” Image

Citations 

Artnet 2022,

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-i-should-exclude-living-artists-from-its-database-says-one-painter-whose-works-were-used-to-fuel-image-generators-2178352