What You May Have Missed #12

On AI art, trad artists, and the clash between the two

Before we start, here’s an idea for you: Christmas is around the corner. I’m quite bad a coming up with ideas for gifts, and I know I’m not alone! That’s why I want to remind you that you can gift a TAB subscription to someone who may like it as much as you!

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ArtStation Trending page a few days ago. Credit: Kotaku (I use MJ to make my cover images because my finances don’t permit me to hire an artist, but it would’ve been in bad taste to do it here.)

Generative AI grows and grows

This week's WYMHM is focused on AI art. The events that are taking place right now in the space will play a vital role in the future of Generative AI as a whole.

2022 has been the year of “text-to-everything,” as Daniel Bashir from “Last Week in AI” deemed it. Generative models based on text prompts have been an ever-increasing source of interest for researchers, investors, and users alike.

The AI art community—built around text-to-image models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion—keeps finding new intriguing concepts at the research level. One recent example is Riffusion, a novel approach that leverages Stable Diffusion to make music in real-time using text prompts (demo on Gradio).

pharmapsychotic @pharmapsychotic

tried out riffusion during the AiArtChill space

AK @_akhaliq

A @Gradio Demo for Riffusion, real-time music generation with stable diffusion is out on @huggingface Spaces by @fffiloni demo: https://t.co/19plTSmIVa prompt: "a cat singing jazz music in a new york club" by @SanderSchulhoff https://t.co/cE8lBmjY0d

Generative AI has also reached the consumer level. Ready-to-use models emerge every month: Lensa is at the top of the Apple store—although it’s not free of problems—and Sharif Shameem just released Lexica Aperture.

Sharif Shameem @sharifshameem

Polaroid portrait of JFK posing in the White House Oval Office with Marilyn Monroe, color polaroid, historic photo

People come up with more use cases in search of market fit. And the open-source industry seems to be cutting artists some slack:

Spawning @spawning_

Excited to announce that @StabilityAI have stepped up to honor artist opt-out requests in advance of the training of Stable Diffusion 3! 🧫🦾🎇 Artists, register your opt-outs at haveibeentrained.com Full explainer video here: youtu.be/SMMjqKWLsbc

However, not everything is good news for AI art.

The conflict between traditional artists (that is, anyone who's a visual artist of some kind but doesn't use AI in their work) and advocates of AI's applications on visual art is growing beyond repair.

This week it’s reached the tipping point.