ART AND TECHNOLOGY
Technological advances have been providing comfort and speeding up processes for decades. Everyday we come across computer artifacts and processes that help us. We opt for online documents instead of spreadsheets and piles of physical documents.
At the checkout in supermarkets we can choose self-service, without the need for someone to intermediate our purchases. In the artistic world it is no different. This world has also gone through great innovations. Today we can choose to be traditional artists who work with materials such as pencil, paint, brushes, or digital artists, who use the same baggage of knowledge as traditional artists, but now aided by software and a drawing tablet. The figure of the digital artist and designer has become very present in the entertainment and marketing industry. These new technologies and tools in the field of art have in a way even contributed to the democratization and access to the artistic medium, since it is cheaper to buy a drawing tablet than to buy oil paint, just for an example.
Some technological advances are far better received than others and much is questioned about their ethical and human value. AI’s (artificial intelligences), for example, surprise and frighten, imitating human intelligence to perform tasks and furthermore improving the performance of that task with each new collection of data. This is very disturbing on several levels, a system that can perform its activities better than you. Is that possible?
Although AI’s are associated with a negative element that will replace human activities completely, at their core they are not meant to be that way, but rather a super powerful data analysis mechanism whose goal is to actually improve human skills and contributions, not to replace them.
“In the field of art studies, it is becoming more and more important to search for a thread that is neutral and as universal as possible, in order to understand an ideological component that can be revealed in the ideological attitude inherent to the use of new technologies. We try to understand how the meaning of images is coordinated and why we need, want and require images. Finally, we go through the subject’s procedures when facing digital adventures, in the imminence of understanding how we are affected by digital technology and how interaction interferes in the subject’s positioning when facing creativity aspects”.
Paulo Bernardino, Professor Dr. and PHD in Art Studies in his article, Art & Technology: Intersections.
THE IA’S DILEMMA
The last few years have been marked by the advances of AI’s in image creation based on databases, and many questions and ethical conflicts have arisen from this, both because of authorship issues and the concept of what is compiled by AI’s. Through instruction command lines for an AI it is possible to build an image with the style of a specific artist, with the faces of a specific actress, for example, and this of course inflamed the artistic community in general, mainly regarding the right of use and ownership of the image.
Rutkowski’s “Castle Defense, 2018
Compiled image of Stable Diffusion using the word “Rutowski’s”
In those examples above, we can see how one AI used artwork by Concept Artist Gregory Rutowsky as the basis for compiling. Some AI’s even offer artists’ names as the basis of creation for the compile command lines.
Recently DeviantArt gave the use of images from their database for machine learning AI’s, by default the images from their users were shared, requiring a setting not to share, but after several criticisms and user evasion they removed the option to share by default.
It is for sure that AI’s came as a powerful tool, some like mid journey have more than 5 billion images that can be used to compile and result in a new image. The biggest problem is that the artists, photographers, actresses, have not been consulted about the commercial or non-commercial use of their images. One possible solution would be the adoption of open source image banks for machine learning AI’s, without hurting the rights of the owners.
Carol Ryuuki, concept artist at Gameplan, points out that the problem is not the use of AI’s, but the use of copyrighted images. Besides, the definition that the person who creates command prompts to compile images for an AI should be considered a real artist is wrong, because this invalidates not only the visual dictionary of the artists, but also their entire learning trajectory.
POSSIBILITIES OF GOOD USE OF AI’S
In concept art there are many processes that can be aided by an AI, in the moodboards phase for example, where we list several references to create a new design, we can use an AI to create reference possibilities, and from these references we can refine and create specializations to reach a design. This way an artist or designer would be able to create thumbnails faster and make their work more efficient. In an illustration it would be possible to do tests of thumbnails and colors and from these references create original work. It is important to note that it is not the pure product of the command prompt that will be used as the final product, but the intervention of the artist or designer to create original work.
IN CONCLUSION, WILL ARTISTS BE UNEMPLOYED?
The answer is no, what will happen is an adaptation process regarding the use of AI’s in your day to day life, if you are an artist or designer. Something that the AIs don’t possess and that is inherent to the human being is something we call aesthetic sense, it is nothing more than our ability to judge, appreciate and define what is pleasing to the human senses, and this is only possible through a production experience and many years of studies.
But what will in fact happen is that as a designer or artist it will be necessary, over time to understand the AI’s as part of the production process, what we see today is very similar to the explosion of the use of 3D a few years ago, where it was thought that the use of 3D completely replaces 2D art, and what we see today are 2D and 3D artists working to achieve the best results. So just like 3D didn’t extinguish 2D and neither Digital Art extinguished traditional art, AI’s won’t eliminate the need for artists, but it is expected that they will soon become a powerful tool to empower the work of artists and designers in the entertainment and marketing industry and in the artistic world.
REF:
Arte e Tecnlogia: Intersecções
This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.
