How Today's AI Art Debate Will Shape the Creative Landscape of the 21st Century
How the singular features and the lack of regulation of AI systems make this situation uniquely challenging.
AI art systems are in vogue. Although they’ve existed for a few years now, 2022 will be remembered as the year the AI art revolution began. AI tech companies — big and small, for-profit and non-profit — have been developing text-to-image generative models that are sending shockwaves across the creative world — that not long ago felt so safe from AI.
DALL·E 2 (OpenAI) is arguably the model that sparked this transformative trend, but there are many more. Some are private models that companies have announced but never released, like Imagen and Parti (Google Brain) or Make-A-Scene (Meta AI). Other models are in the stage of open beta (anyone can access them through a form or waitlist), like the aforementioned DALL·E 2 or Midjourney. And the vast majority fall into the category of open-source models. Here we find the popular DALL·E mini (now renamed Craiyon), the Colab notebooks that started everything (The Big Sleep, VQGAN-Clip, and Disco Diffusion), and soon-to-be-rel…