Generative AI: imagining a future of AI-dominated creativity – AI News Update

AI-generated media has reached an explosive tipping point. Even before the debut of OpenAI ChatGPT electrified the internet, the research lab has captured the attention of the art and design world for its Generative AI system, GIVE HIMallowing anyone to create images of anything their heart desires just by entering a few words or phrases.

Over the past few months, over a million users have signed up to use FROM-And betaand the company is further expanding its reach by offering a APIs so that creators, developers and businesses can embrace this powerful technology and further explore its creative potential. Meanwhile, AI-generated work continues to disrupt other corners of the cultural landscape, the six digits sale of the generative portrait at Christie’s in 2018 to this year’s controversy attribution from a first prize to an AI work in a competition for emerging artists.

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The arrival of AI creations in the highest realms of the art world and the proliferation of user-friendly AI software like DALL-E 2, Mid Road And Lens renewed the debate on creative production and ownership, and prompted attempts to provide practical answers to questions previously relegated to the realm of theory: what differentiates a machine-made painting from a work of art? How do we as creators, curators, collectors, consumers attribute meaning and value to art? And perhaps most critically, what impact will generative AI technology have on the future of human creativity and artistic expression?

The instability of art

As Walter Benjamin wrote in “THE Work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction”, the reproductive and creative technology of the modern world causes all art to be separated from its primitive, ritual and sacred contexts, making the editing, copying and remastering of art a constant feature of art itself , so that in the modern world, art no longer speaks to eternal concepts of beauty and aesthetics, but to a constant flow and an ever mutable and changing instability.

For AI-generated art, this instability is reflected in the liquid, malformed, lo-fi, and sometimes unsettling qualities of artwork produced by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

Unsurprisingly, there have been significant backlash of artists and creators, many of whom argue that generative art is plagiarism and that it threat human creative agency and artist livelihood. Others, like the famous designer jessica Walshare less concerned about these anxieties: “There will always be a backlash any time a tool threatens people’s jobs,” says Walsh, “But the reality is that AI is already here, and it will continue to have an exponential presence in the creative world.”

In the music industry, for example, digital editing has become the norm: musicians like brian Eno And Aphex Double has gained notoriety over the past few decades for using tape loops and computers to create ambient or generative music, while sampling is the cornerstone of popular modern music genres like hip hop, pop and electronic music. By 2022, most of pop music’s top-selling artists used autotune and compression to varying degrees in their music, essentially correcting the organic anomalies of the individual human voice.

Credit where credit is due

Much of the debate has centered around the issue of credit and creative authorship: who is the artist of works produced by an algorithm, written by a coder, and remixed with photo editing software? While we don’t typically credit the underlying tools used to create, such as Photoshop, specific hardware, font foundries, or auto-tuning, that standard may already be changing. Many AI-generated artworks even bear the creator’s “signature” – often a scrambled string of code or text – in much the same way a human artist signs their name to indicate authorship.

The rise of AI-dominated imaging has prompted tech giants like Adobe, Microsoft And Cloth to launch their own generative product features – and while the massive image hosting site Getty Images proclaimed that no AI-produced content will be allowed on its servers, the platform admits that the moderation of this policy will rely on users to report images suspected of being “fake”.

And so, with this rapid spread of generative AI into the creative and business landscapes, could we be entering a world where a bit of editing via AI, like a film photographer editing scans in Lightroom or using filters, becomes so commonplace that it is a subtly coercive requirement to produce art at all? Or, as proponents of generative AI predict, will the technology prove empowering for artists, spurring creative innovation through increased production capacity and accessibility?

Another framework through which we might attempt to understand or predict the future social role of AI in the creative industries is the debate over the production and consumption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the foods we eat. In the same way that we certify the products we consume as organic or non-GMO, will there ever come a time when we declare our creative works to be entirely generated, partially augmented or made with zero digital technology?

Perhaps the better question is: will we be able to tell the difference between AI-generated work and human-created art – and will we care? A 2017 Rutgers Study showed that the majority of participants were unable to distinguish a clear preference for human versus AI-generated works. Perhaps when it comes to taste, the perceived ability to distinguish AI from human effort could be the marker of refinement and distinction.

Where will the art of generative AI take us?

If we value creativity and what is inherently human, will we ever see machine-generated creativity dominate and purely human creativity have higher cultural and economic value? Or, as in the case of the music industry, will the standardization of AI instead shatter the artificial/human creative binary, fundamentally reshaping consumer preferences and public attitudes regarding production and art consumption?

In his nearly century-old essay “Work of Art,” Benjamin suggests that it is in the nature of art to transcend the formal limits of the technical paradigm in which it was produced; in this way, art is not a function of technology, but a generative force behind it, driving innovation and longing for a world that does not yet exist.

Brendan Cieko is founder and CEO of Cuseum.