This week, the big news is, an artist entered an art competition by using AI generated art – and won.
Traditional artists are not happy – to put it mildly!
There have been the usual comments about AI taking up jobs etc etc.
But let’s look at this story in more detail because in my view, it shows something much more fundamental which is often overlooked
In my view, the future of all jobs will be in collaborating with AI !
Background
The artist, Jason Allen, from Colorado, used a service called midjourney in an art competition.
The use of the tool was allowed by the competition.
More specifically, it was declared by the artist but not fully understood by the competition (that has changed no doubt).
The artist has received both praise and hate, especially from the arts community, on the grounds that his work automates the creative process.
The artist believes that the art world is in denial and that their antagonism is partly because artists were surprised at how good AI was in creating art
Also, artists believe that this method of creating art is somehow ‘easier’ than creating art from scratch.
Implications
Firstly, the easy part: yes, the art world should and will create a new category for AI-assisted art.
But here are more implications
- Prompting AI could be a skill in itself
- The skill of prompting AI could have useful applications beyond art, such as in overcoming dementia
- Artists are likely to develop unique promoting styles
- Note that Jason Allen was unwilling to declare the exact prompts he used to create the image
- The creation itself is not as simple as people think. Allen selected his top three renderings out of over 900 options. He amended aspects such as perspective, composition and lighting, The final output created by AI was also amended digitally.
Crafting a prompt for the AI is trickier than people may think. “It’s like a word game,”
Source: https://www.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/08/31/ai-painting-wins-at-colorado-state-fair-pueblo-artist-explains-jason-allen/65466872007/
But most importantly, generating images is already superseded by generating videos using prompts. Runway created text to video
Below are images created by midjourney
What can we learn from all this?
I think the future of ALL jobs will be in collaborating with AI !
