AI and Design The future of creativity

The original image generator. Generates images based on text prompts AND alter an uploaded image (in-painting). General look is photographic. It can be used to:

• Generate images from a description in natural language
• Easily make realistic, targeted edits to images
• Create different variations of an image, inspired by the original

"DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs. We’ve found that it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images."

Here's a walk-through demo of its capabilities: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/#demos

Designers and artists will need to learn how to craft good prompts in order to get the best results. Check out Lexica as a source for good prompt examples.

Try it here.

OTHER AI IMAGE GENERATORS

Midjourney

General look is more painterly.

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species. We are a small self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI. We have 11 full-time staff and an incredible set of advisors.

Stable Diffusion

Stability AI is building open AI tools to provide the foundation to awaken humanity’s potential. Our values are lived by every team member and shown by everyone who excels at Stability AI. They are how we measure ourselves and our work. Our vibrant communities consist of experts, leaders and partners across the globe. They are developing cutting-edge open AI models for Image, Language, Audio, Video, 3D, and Biology. AI by the people, for the people.

Astria is another AI image generator that can be trained to produce very customized results.

How-To

• Upload 10-20 pictures of your subject. Preferably shot or cropped to 1:1 aspect ratio.
• We recommend uploading 3 photos of full body or entire object + 5 medium shot photos from the chest up + 10 close ups.
• Variation is key - Change body pose for every picture, use pictures from different days backgrounds and lighting, and show a variety of expressions and emotions. Make sure you capture the subject's eyes looking in different directions for different images, take one with closed eyes. Every picture of your subject should introduce new info about your subject.
• Whatever you capture will be over-represented, so things you don't want to get associated with your subject should change in every shot. Always pick a new background, even if that means just moving a little bit to shift the background.
• Super important - Pick a good className. Something broad that you could associate your subject with. What works best? We don’t know! Please experiment and share!
• When constructing your prompts, always include "sks className" to represent the subject.

"Artificial intelligence trained to write original, creative content. We consulted with the world’s best SEO and Direct Response Marketing experts to teach Jasper how to write blog articles, social media posts, website copy, and more..."

Luma AI is an iPhone app that allows you to turn video into 3D renderings of objects and settings.

Capture in lifelike 3D. Unmatched photorealism, reflections, and details.The future of VFX is now, for everyone! Luma AI

Runway ML is a browser-based video editing tool that leverages AI much in the same way as DALL.E, though for moving images.

Deep neural networks for image and video synthesis are becoming increasingly precise, realistic and controllable. In a couple of years, we have gone from blurry low-resolution images to both highly realistic and aesthetic imagery allowing for the rise of synthetic media. Large language models and models with shared text-image latent spaces, such as CLIP, are now also enabling new ways of interacting with software and synthesizing media. Diffusion models are a prime example of the power of such approaches. Runway Research is at the forefront of these developments and we ensure that the future of content creation is both accessible, controllable and empowering for users. We believe that deep learning techniques applied to audiovisual content will forever change art, creativity, and design tools.

Durable authors websites in minutes.

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Challenges to Professional Practice

• Will AI make human image-making and writing obsolete? Do we contribute to this outcome every time we use it?
• How do we stay relevant as artists and writers, especially in the commercial stratum of human creativity?
• How can writers and artists whose works are merely perceived as data be credited and compensated?
• Design-specific: How can AI be used as a resource that is part of the designer workflow to amplify a designer's artistry and ability to keep pace with market demand?
• Should student work that contains AI elements be considered fair game, plagiarized, cheating? Should the designers identify the AI contribution to their professors?

Ethical Challenges

• Built-in bias can perpetuate of amplify stereotypes.
• Can quickly generate and disseminate disinformation.
• Datasets scraped from the Internet are filled with "pornography, malign stereotypes, and racist and ethnic slurs."
• The work of visual artists is being integrated into the AI dataset without attribution or compensation to the artists.

The World Economic Forum has identified nine ethical challenges of AI:

1. Unemployment. What happens after the end of jobs?
2. Inequality. How do we distribute the wealth created by machines?
3. Humanity. How do machines affect our behaviour and interaction?
4. Artificial stupidity. How can we guard against mistakes?
5. Racist robots. How do we eliminate AI bias?
6. Security. How do we keep AI safe from adversaries?
7. Evil genies. How do we protect against unintended consequences?
8. Singularity. How do we stay in control of a complex intelligent system?
9. Robot rights. How do we define the humane treatment of AI?

Articles

CNN Story: AI made these stunning images. Here’s why experts are worried

The bias in these AI systems presents a serious issue, experts told CNN Business. The technology can perpetuate hurtful biases and stereotypes. They’re concerned that the open-ended nature of these systems — which makes them adept at generating all kinds of images from words — and their ability to automate image-making means they could automate bias on a massive scale. They also have the potential to be used for nefarious purposes, such as spreading disinformation.

MIT: The Algorithm: AI-generated art raises tricky questions about ethics, copyright, and security

In a paper that came out last year, AI researchers Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, and Emmanuel Kahembwe analyzed a smaller data set similar to the one used to build Stable Diffusion. Their findings are distressing. Because the data is scraped from the internet, and the internet is a horrible place, the data set is filled with explicit rape images, pornography, malign stereotypes, and racist and ethnic slurs.

ArtNews: I Make Art With A.I. Here’s Why All Artists Need to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Technology

Rather than reducing A.I., or any new technology, to a binary debate of good and bad, artists should evolve and incorporate the tool in their work like any paintbrush or canvas. A.I.’s use for rendering images follows a postmodern tradition in art, in which the final product is defined less by skill and more by the theory it posits.

c0nverse substack: AI, Artists, and the Future of Images

AI image synthesis is still in its infancy, but it is advancing with remarkable speed, and we’re not far off from a future where everyone will be using AI to generate images, all the time. If that’s the future, or even the present, where can we situate the role of existing artists now and going forward?

The other thing is, although the advancements are exciting in many ways, there are so many things it cannot do well. But people do make that hasty generalization: Because it can do something sometimes really well, then maybe A.G.I. [Artificial general intelligence, which is like the kind of flexible intelligence we humans have, and which a machine would need to be able to learn intellectual tasks at the level of human beings] is around the corner. There’s no reason to believe so.

New York Times Magazine interview with Yijun Choi.