AI in creative media development has indeed become a controversial topic and although I understand the plight of artists, I also understand that once Pandora’s box is opened it cannot be closed. With these changing environments one can only but adapt and implement these new tools to their design process. Here is an example of how AI can help speed up the design process for professional digital artists.
Say you need an image of a fantasy king; you generate a prompt-based image after enough calibration with the embeddings, hypernetworks and models of the AI and select the one which seems the most clean, ‘art-like’ and satisfying.
At first I was thrilled at the result I got, I thought it was almost flawless, saved it to my desktop and called it a day. It was not until weeks later upon checking it for imperfections to see how flawed it really was. Extra buttons, unrecognizable blobs in the background, imperfect eye, gibberish embroidery and most noticeable the hands, which as many who study art AI know is a hurdle it struggles to overcome.
Yet this is more than manageable for digital artist knowledgeable in creative suite software, below is one of my end result iterations of the prompt-based image, where I have fixed and removed many of the imperfections. As you can see, this could definitely pass as client satisfactory work.
Program: Photoshop (2021)
Medium: Wacom 21UX & Stable Diffusion
This realization of AI imperfections made me reflect on how fast people have been groomed to consume media nowadays, we are exposed to so much through social media and the internet that we only glance at things, we don’t slow down to appreciate the quality and detail of work anymore, as such much AI art is considered permissible but were you to slow down and look at it properly, you’d see how different it is from a classic piece of art, where an artist puts a lot of detail, precision and soul down to the smallest detail. Detail has purpose in traditional art, whereas in AI its just promp data proximity based generation.
That being said, I would summarize art AI down to one word, ‘terrific’ as it is both terrifying yet impressive and thus terrifyingly look forward to the advancements it will make further down the line. An essential tool for any digital artist’s creative process.