Wonky Hands, AI Art, and Repeating History

Here is where AI Art was one year ago today:

DALL-E Mini generation of a greyhound running in space. DALL-E Mini was one of the more prominent and more developed AI art generators for most people to have access to one year ago. As dubbed by Will Knight from WIRED, it was the internet’s favorite meme machine.

Here it is now, taking top prizes in art competitions.

Jason Allen’s A.I.-generated work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” which won first place in the digital category at the annual Colorado State Fair.

A few months ago, when Midjourney was becoming a greater source of intrigue and contempt, there was still a clear tell if a certain work of art was drawn by real artists or spun out from a few lines of prompt: hands. AI-generated hands would often have too many fingers, too few fingers, fingers breaking through one another, irregular palms—inconsistencies that would be unlikely to occur to a human artist but are perfectly logical to a machine.

Demented hands courtesy of Merzmensch’s article “Drawing Hands and AI”

Fast forward a few months, with the release of Midjourney V5, relying on misplaced fingers is no longer a dependable tell.

Using the prompt, “photograph of a woman artist in an artist’s studio holding her hands up”, Midjourney V5 generated an image featuring indistinguishable human hands.

We can never be dependent on obvious tells as the nature of software is to evolve. Especially with masses of users pointing out evident flaws in AI-generated art, the only natural next step for developers is to fix the flaw. The discerning line now becomes something subjective—whether or not a work of art has “soul”. With this subjectivity and “fix” comes salient problems with misinformation, career displacement of artists and creatives, and the question of why.

Misinformation

With AI art’s ever increasing trend towards realism, users can now generate convincing enough images of celebrities, important political figures, and pop culture icons. Some people are confident enough in their ability to recognize real from fake but regardless of how seemingly “obvious” AI art is, someone will believe it. That someone could be a voter, your grandmother, or millions of internet users.

Garnering millions of views in a few days, this image of former president Donald Trump being arrested is completely artificial.

Of course there are more harmless uses of AI generation (ex. presidents playing Minecraft together) but the weapon of AI art generation only escalates the growing trend of disinformation by making it possible for anyone to back up their claims with an artificial but realistic image.

Career Displacement

Stable Diffusion from stability.ai, an open-source project, made its model set available in August 2022 under a permissive creative commons license, enabling anyone with a mid-performing computer and web access power to make any image to their prompt specifications—including for commercial use.

This technology, built off the backs of human artists, has given many companies the leverage to replace creatives with machines and “prompt engineers”. Greg Rutkowski, well known for his work on projects including Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, has become a source for hundreds of thousands of images explicitly seeking to copy his style.

“I’m very concerned about it. As a digital artist, or any artist, in this era, we’re focused on being recognized on the internet. Right now, when you type in my name, you see more work from the AI than work that I have done myself, which is terrifying for me. How long till the AI floods my results and is indistinguishable from my works?” (Rutkowski for Forbes)

On the other hand, David Holz, founder of Midjourney, has underscored the role of AI-art not to replace artists but to supplement them. Holz explains, “artists on the platform tell us it allows them to be more creative and explorative in the beginning, coming up with a lot of ideas in a short amount of time”. He also frames Midjourney as a way for those not in the creative field—such as stakeholders—to better conceptualize their idea from the start to avoid misconceptions or miscommunications later down the line of a commercial art project.

Still, many artists and technologists alike call for more stringent limitations on AI. Pause Giant AI Experiments has gained the attention and signatures of 31810 people at this time (6/7/23) including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI.

Why?

The replacement or significant decrease of jobs because of technology has been the norm for quite some time (farm workers, bank tellers, dark room techs). But the encroachment of AI into creative spaces can sometimes miss the point to why creative spaces exist at all.

Recently, a tweet describing the failure of “book disruption startups” has gone viral and garnered similar support. Quoted, the unnamed start up seems to (1) conflate the success of a fan-made fiction platform with the future success of a character AI platform, (2) degrade the enjoyment of “plain old reading” as “static stories” and (3) confuse a platform built purely on user support and enjoyment with profit incentive. Certainly there is much love to be found into talking to famous characters from shows and books, but the point of fan-made fiction is in the name—it’s fan-made. Not AI-made. It is foremost in the interest of reading and writing.

This line of profit-induced blindness revealed itself a year ago with the Knitting.com drama. In short, February 2022 two entrepreneurs Dave Bryant and Mike Jackness bought the domain name Knitting.com and laid out very clearly that they not only bought the domain for purely profit incensed reasons, but also knew nothing about the market they were entering. Their assumption that the world of knitting was full of grandmas and “unsophisticated competitors” fell flat. In reality, the community, primarily made up of women, people of color, and people with disabilities, rallied against them. In reponse, the podcast episode in which Jackness said he could “wreck” the industry was taken down and Knitting.com’s communication strategy was adjusted.

Co-founders Michael Jackness and Dave Bryant of EcomCrew

However, in a sentence that resounds closely with many artists facing off against AI-art now, knitter Nancy Murell, a supporter of independent yarn dyers and designers says “they might cheapen what we’re trying to do, [but] I don’t think they can replace what we’re trying to do. I don’t think they understand what we do.”