A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) - A Help or Hindrance to the Artist? -- Musings on Midjourney

As somebody who's (at least somewhat) creatively/artistically inclined, I find myself absolutely stunned by the recent advancements made in AI-rendered art. However, I admit to being conflicted and of two minds over such.

Half of me has that giddy mindset of a "kid-in-a-candy-store", especially when I experiment with Midjourney -- for the unfamiliar, "an independent research lab that produces a proprietary artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions" -- or see what others can come up with.

In its current state, which is still very much in its infancy (MidJourney beta only being released in 2022), AI-generated art gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "the imagination is the limit", having the ability to render whatever the user wants, based on a unique prompt. Admittedly there is some level of SKILL required in utilizing the prompts, learning what particular kind and combination of prompts achieves the desired result. But in any case, the images that Midjourney produces -- spanning practically every genre and style and medium -- are absolutely, completely mind-boggling. See, for example, the regular postings to the Official MidJourney Facebook page.

But there's another part of me that is tentative, even fearful, for the potential impact it can have on artists and photographers and illustrators. What does it mean, for instance, when you can render a painted image in a matter of MINUTES, that would take a human literally days or weeks to produce on their own, using skills they have spent the bulk of their lives honing and cultivating as a craft?

What are the implications ... when I read that the first portrait created using artificial intelligence sold at auction in 2018 for $432,500; and that only this year, a Midjourney AI-generated painting won first place in the Colorado State Fair?

According to Kevin Roose, A.I.-generated art is already transforming creative work, both positively and not necessarily so. Some artists are less concerned than others about the impact AI may have on their careers, as in the example of an interior designer who has figured out how to use AI to streamlining their work, fleshing out prospective ideas for office-renovation in real-time. On the other hand you have stories like this:

"Initially, Mr. Waldoch planned to hire human artists to illustrate each day’s rhyming word pair. But when he saw the cost — between $50 and $60 per image, plus time for rounds of feedback and edits — he decided to try using A.I. instead. He plugged word pairs into Midjourney and DreamStudio, an app based on Stable Diffusion, and tweaked the results until they looked right. Total cost: a few minutes of work, plus a few cents.

“I typed in ‘carrot parrot,’ and it spit back a perfect image of a parrot made of carrots,” he said. “That was the immediate ‘aha’ moment.”

Mr. Waldoch said he didn’t feel guilty about using A.I. instead of hiring human artists, because human artists were too expensive to make the game worthwhile."

On the other hand, David Holz, the founders of Midjourney, was interviewed by Forbes and was largely dismissive of the idea that AI-generated art would have a negative impact on artists themselves:

... think that some people will try to cut artists out. They will try to make something similar at a lower cost, and I think they will fail in the market. I think the market will go towards higher quality, more creativity, and vastly more sophisticated, diverse and deep content. And the people who actually are able to use like the artists and use the tools to do that are the ones who are going to win.

These technologies actually create a much deeper appreciation and literacy in the visual medium. You might actually have the demand, outstrip the ability to produce at that level, and then maybe you'll actually be raising the salaries of artists. It could be weird, but that's what's going to happen. The pace of that demand increase for both quality and diversity will lead to some wonderful and unexpected projects getting made.

A generation of students graduated art schools, many of them heavily in debt, counting on relatively well-paid jobs in entertainment production, videogame production, commercial art and so on. How does the emergence of AI text-to-image platforms impact their future?

I think some people will try to cut costs, and some people will try to expand ambitions. I think the people who expand ambitions will still be paying all those same salaries, and the people who try to cut costs, I think will fail.

Of similar concern are the copyright and privacy issues involved. Take this story of fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski, who found his own original work quickly overtaken and overwhelmed online by AI-generated replications:

Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn’t his.

The article goes on to describe the experience of others -- illustrators, photographers, models, actors and actresses, directors, cinematographers" -- who are grappling with the fact that their work is being fed into the 5.8 billion dataset used by AI. It is currently the case that artists don’t have the choice to opt in to the database or have their work removed.

Anyway ... no offense intended in this post to those who use Midjourney and are demonstrably very adept at guiding it to producing what they desire. I honestly remain very much enthralled by its potential and entertainment value.

But lurking in the back of my mind are the questions and the issues raised in these articles as well.

"The encroachment of the buzz."

The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time , the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he "became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read". He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. "What I'm struggling with," he writes, "is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there's something out there that merits my attention."

I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That's getting harder to find.

Johann Hari: How to survive the age of distraction The Independent June 24, 2011.

The drudgery of . . . composing an email.

For those who long for the quiet days of the handwritten letter, another advent in technological "progress." The next generation, according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (launching Facebook's "social inbox"), deems email too much of a burden:

The Facebook CEO described how he was talking to high-school students while visiting his girlfriend’s family, and they said that none of them used email because it was “too slow.”

“I said ‘what do you mean, it’s instantaneous!’ Zuckerberg recalled. “I was kind of boggled by this.” But the Facebook founder said that he realized for many users, particularly younger users, email as it exists now is “too formal” and adds a lot of weight and social friction because “you have to think of the email address, think of a subject line, write ‘love Mark at the end’” and so on. The high-school students he spoke to preferred chat because it was easier and faster, he said — in other words, it had less “cognitive load.”

The Perils of Twittering

Alan Jacobs (The New Atlantis) on the perils of twittering during a public address:

So when you set up a Twitter stream to project as a speaker is speaking, and invite people to participate in it[!!!], you are simply asking them to fail, miserably, to understand what the speaker is saying. If a speaker makes a point that you find dubious, are you going to wait to see if later stages in the argument clarify that point, or perhaps make it more plausible? You are not. You are going to tweet your immediate reaction and therefore simply miss the next stage in the speaker’s argument. Every tweet you write, and every tweet you read on the big screen, compromises still further your comprehension of the lecture. I bet that after the talk was over there weren’t a dozen people in that audience who could have given even a minimally competent summary of what [the speaker] said.

A perfectly obvious disaster simply waiting to happen. And at an internet-conference, no less.

Related

Still the best anti-Twitter rant, bar none.

"The encroachment of the buzz"

A predicament which I -- and I suspect many others -- can surely identify with in this age:

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know.

[...]

For many years, I have read, like E.I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," primarily at night -- a few hours every evening once my wife and kids have gone to bed. These days, however, after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.

From "The Lost Art of Reading", by David Ulin. Los Angeles Times August 9, 2009.

(HT: Vox Nova)

Most of my reading these days takes place on the 30-45 minute commute to / from work in Midtown, Manhattan. When I initially get home, family time w/ wife and son take precedence. When I do find a little time to read in the late evenings, I can relate to Ulin's perpetual need to un-plug and contend with the many distractions of our age.

(Still, a small victory: I finished Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes last night.)

Update! Related musings by John W. Martens, on reading the Bible:

How do you receive the word of God when you do not read? This is a strange question to ask in an age of unprecedented literacy, at a time when access to data, texts, and knowledge is constant. No longer need one rely on books taken from the library; you can carry Kindle and have over a thousand books at your fingertips. No longer need you sit at your home computer, you can bring a laptop to thousands of wireless hot spots, or simply carry your Iphone and get internet access almost anywhere. The question I pose is not a question of illiteracy as much as a reality that I have encountered with more and more people who do not like to read or read very poorly. With access to the written word at an all time high, our ability to read seems to be plummeting.

Evangelization in a Wired World - Pope Benedict and Social Networking

According to Rachel Wagner ("Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired" Religion Dispatches Oct. 23, 2008), Pope John Paul II was the first pontiff to use SMS ("short message service") technology, sending out a “papal thought of the day” to Italian mobile phone users.

Upon his elevation to the papacy in April 2005, Pope Benedict XVI followed suite -- encouraging mourners with the admonition: "Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help", and embracing "texting" during World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney, Australia.

Since that time, the Vatican has embraced the world of social-networking for the purposes of evangelization:

• In December 2008, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications endorsed the iBreviary, a prayerbook created by Rev. Paolo Padrini and an Italian Web designer for use on Apple's IPhone.

• In January 2009 the Vatican announced its own YouTube Channel.

• In May 2009, the Pope joined the Facebook community with the launch of his own app(lication), Pope2You, enabling subscribers to "receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world."

As with any form of technology, the myriad forms of "social networking" can be both a boon and a curse. The negative influences and detrimental effects were analyzed by Christine Rosen in "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism" (The New Atlantis Summer 2007):

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention—and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.

Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.

Likewise, Pope Benedict XVI reflected on the implications of social networking technology in his recent missive, "New Technologies, New Relationships: Promoting a Culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship", commemmorating World Communications Day:

The new technologies have also opened the way for dialogue between people from different countries, cultures and religions. The new digital arena, the so-called cyberspace, allows them to encounter and to know each other’s traditions and values. Such encounters, if they are to be fruitful, require honest and appropriate forms of expression together with attentive and respectful listening. The dialogue must be rooted in a genuine and mutual searching for truth if it is to realize its potential to promote growth in understanding and tolerance. Life is not just a succession of events or experiences: it is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this - in truth, in goodness, and in beauty - that we find happiness and joy. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by those who see us merely as consumers in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.

Image credit: Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

The concept of friendship has enjoyed a renewed prominence in the vocabulary of the new digital social networks that have emerged in the last few years. The concept is one of the noblest achievements of human culture. It is in and through our friendships that we grow and develop as humans. For this reason, true friendship has always been seen as one of the greatest goods any human person can experience. We should be careful, therefore, never to trivialize the concept or the experience of friendship. It would be sad if our desire to sustain and develop on-line friendships were to be at the cost of our availability to engage with our families, our neighbours and those we meet in the daily reality of our places of work, education and recreation. If the desire for virtual connectedness becomes obsessive, it may in fact function to isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development.

Friendship is a great human good, but it would be emptied of its ultimate value if it were to be understood as an end in itself. Friends should support and encourage each other in developing their gifts and talents and in putting them at the service of the human community. In this context, it is gratifying to note the emergence of new digital networks that seek to promote human solidarity, peace and justice, human rights and respect for human life and the good of creation. These networks can facilitate forms of co-operation between people from different geographical and cultural contexts that enable them to deepen their common humanity and their sense of shared responsibility for the good of all. We must, therefore, strive to ensure that the digital world, where such networks can be established, is a world that is truly open to all. It would be a tragedy for the future of humanity if the new instruments of communication, which permit the sharing of knowledge and information in a more rapid and effective manner, were not made accessible to those who are already economically and socially marginalized, or if it should contribute only to increasing the gap separating the poor from the new networks that are developing at the service of human socialization and information.

On August 6, 2009, a DOS ("Denial of Service") assault on Twitter crippled the popular social-networking site for around two hours. According to CNN, the Twitter blackout left users feeling 'jittery,' 'naked':

... for people like [Christina] Cimino, who said she "felt naked" without access to Twitter, the attacks were a serious reality check -- a chance to evaluate just how dependent they'd become.

"You know how you pat your pockets for your cell phone and your keys? Well it's that same kind of phantom [limb] with Twitter," she said. "It's like, 'I can't update! I can't update!' It's just one of those bugs that gets in you."

She added: "I was pretty upset, actually. It feels like a lifeline for me ... Pretty much everyone knows almost every detail of my life by what I'm doing on Twitter."

[...]

"Horrors!!! People will have to communicate face to face!" one user commented on CNN's SciTech blog. ...

Now that Twitter is back online, the No. 1 conversation thread on the site is called "whentwitterwasdown," where users discuss what they did without their real-time Twitter updates.

Ultimately, I suspect this week's outage may prompt disillusioned users to venture into the virtual frontiers of Flutter.