If you ever wondered about artificial intelligence and mulled over a few moral issues related to it, we are ready to congratulate you: your interest in the phenomenon predicted and petted by dreamers and science fiction writers of the last century is quite strong. Our time is, so far the best one for inventing and implementing AI into any – or every, whatever you like it – sphere of our lives. You can’t deny it: without AI, life would not be the same as we already know it. In a way, we are already used to it very much.
Animators, artists, and image makers, speaking broadly, also experienced the presence of such tools in their respective fields. Here’s the thing: AI-based image generators recently became a boom. It is not like only people that wanted to play with the image-making tool that works by its own mysterious rules use it, but also professionals. This is another chapter of this age-famous dilemma called ‘“AI vs humans”, as many see that, but we actually look at it with curiosity. It is a wide field to experiment and become better.
Not only we: millions of users are excited about it. However, this new technology really is a breaking one. We don’t quite understand what AI-generated art means for our future, and what impact it will have on the future of this sphere, as well as on our thoughts and standards of aesthetics.
Four services have been most popular —Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, and DALL-E— and let us people to create with AIs more than 20 million images every day. Astonishing, interesting, mind-blowing, and scary. You feel it? We are going to talk bout this phenomenon from different points of view — there is a lot to talk about and look at after all – so sit comfortably, we are about to roll.
Cocreation or cheating?
There was quite a story when this AI generator helped Jason M. Allen to win the Art prize. 
His fascination with the tool was absolute. He would make one image after another, and finally submitted one of them for the art prize. And won.
Here’s what Kevin Roose wrote in New York Times regarding the incident: “But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo.,didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics. Mr. Allen’s work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took home the blue ribbon in the fair’s contest for emerging digital artists — making it one of the first A.I.-generated pieces to win such a prize, and setting off a fierce backlash from artists who accused him of, essentially, cheating”.
Many artists were furious about the situation: Mr. Allen didn’t use any artistic skills to win the prize. It is actually pretty easy: you just have to write a few words to ask the AI generator to create something. For example, Stable Diffusion depicts itself like this:
“Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input, cultivates autonomous freedom to produce incredible imagery, empowers billions of people to create stunning art within seconds”.
It means only one thing: you have to be good at the art of… commanding the AI generator with precise captions, but not more than this. Huh. For many people, what Allen did wasn’t cheating. It was more or less the act of shared creation. Cocreation.
Collaboration between a machine that consumed millions of images – well, because it can – and developed its own intellect. Not the consciousness, but the powerful generative ability to playfully roll out visuals.
“The sobering secret of this new power is that the best applications of it are the result not of typing in a single prompt, but of very long conversations between humans and machines. Progress for each image comes from many, many iterations, back-and-forths, detours, and hours, sometimes days, of teamwork—all on the back of years of advancements in machine learning. AI image generators were born from the marriage of two separate technologies.
One was a historical line of deep learning neural nets that could generate coherent realistic images, and the other was a natural language model that could serve as an interface to the image engine. The two were combined into a language-driven image generator. Researchers scraped the internet for all images that had adjacent text, such as captions, and used billions of these examples to connect visual forms to words, and words to forms. With this new combination, human users could enter a string of words—the prompt—that described the image they sought, and the prompt would generate an image based on those words”. Kevin Kelly, Wired
However, cocreation or not, AI-image generators already took a ban. Yes! Not from some random guys who fear the robots and the future, but… Getty Images. They demand from users to create real art. Not just writing words that AI would “translate” into a piece of art, but being an artist in a traditional sense of this word. Should Art contents have this rule, too?
This is one of the impacts we predict: soon Art contests would have to exclude people like mr. Allen to make art-making – in the boundaries of certain contests, at least – only about humans. Every invention is invented twice: by its creator – or in our case, it is better to use the plural, creators – and again by its users, who after all give it a breath of life by simply using it. With AI generators, it is more or less the feature of our time. It would be quite hard to imagine the world at this particular phase without it.
Animation as one of the main mediums of our time, and also one of the fast-developing visual languages, is impossible to picture with no relation to AI. How it’s going to affect the work of the studio – like ours, for instance – and whether we feel it is right to use it while creating another animation for a client, we will tell you in the next part of this article. Now, let’s take a look at the technical side of AI generators.
The best AI image generators
It is easy to recognize now that the question of AI generators isn’t purely about art, but is more epistemological. Deep learning shows that certain area is complex that our human minds cannot fully grasp. Machines seem to tackle the task better than we are. The most sensational AI generators that made many of us sit in awe were the ones we already listed here. Let’s take a look at each one particularly.
DALL-E — is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. The platform reacts only to your words that can include not only the subject of the “painting” but also a style. Besides, after you received an image, you are free to modify it – to move some details into the other part of the picture or so. There is also the “Surprise me” button. A phrase will appear in the search bar, let’s say, without your help.
NightCafe is one of the big names among AI art generators. It is in possession of more algorithms and options than other generators, and very easy for novice users to start creating things. The platform offers:
- You own your creations
- Many algorithms
- Special controls for advanced users
- Big community
- A possibility to organize everything into collections
- A video creation
- Buy a print of your artwork
Jasper Art is the new feature of Jasper AI that has been introduced in August 2022. Only in a few months, it became super popular. For 20 bucks per user, it offers the following services:
- Create unlimited unique images
- No watermark on images
- Different styles available
- Create images with a simple description
- Creates four images at once
Dream by Wombo might be less popular, but it is still extremely useful and worth trying. Unlike other AI image generators, it offers unlimited image creation: no restrictions on its features, and it is entirely free.
Pixray – no, it is not a creation of Pixar – is a text-to-image generator that presents itself as an API, browser website, and PC application. We say this tool would be better for tech-involved people.
Still HUGELY enjoying the @pixray webtoy. This is "a painting of cats eating cheese" pic.twitter.com/dmY89a9jJy
— Kate isn't really here any more (@katebevan) November 30, 2021
Deep Dream Generator is more about creating realistic images. If you are looking for an AI image generator that creates pictures with photographic quality, there it is. Use it. The platform offers three styles to choose from – Deep, Thin, and Deep Dream. There are also multiple painting styles, image preview, and digital analytics for those who care about stats.
Artbreeder is a using a method of all generators as a defining one and obvious: it uses a combination of pictures to create a new one out of them. As you see, each AI generator offers different aspects of the same thing: to create an image that possesses certain atmosphere, style, and particular level of realism. Everything else is what we already ady used to — free or advanced plan, lots of features, image to video converter.
We’re hard at work on a new way to make generative art, and are excited to share our first prototype!
Create any scene you can imagine with a simple collage and a prompt.
Try it out! https://t.co/rWd5JK2ES1 pic.twitter.com/Fgw8Zk4aJ9
— Artbreeder (@Artbreeder) July 14, 2022
Summary
We found AI generator rather exciting: providing the additional perspective, helps us to move and evolve. But we are having a hard time believing that AI is somehow outplaying humans. Why? Artificial Intelligence requires the work of people. To adopt a variety of aesthetics and visual styles requires the materials people upload and have created before. What we are waiting for is the self-presentation. For AI to create presentations about themselves. The reason is this piece by Almira Osmanovic Thunström:
“On a rainy afternoon earlier this year, I logged into my OpenAI account and typed a simple instruction for the research company’s artificial-intelligence algorithm, GPT-3: Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text. As it started to generate text, I stood in awe. Here was novel content written in academic language, with references cited in the right places and in relation to the right context”.
AI generators show us a certain truth, if you’ll take a look at it from a certain angle. It shows that creativity — at least some types of it — mostly about synthesizing things. Of course, it makes us wonder whether AI, using this type of creativity, would ever invent a new style. But so far it acts like many of us in this respect – we see many things and by combining them together we create something else.
The big difference though is how much we can consume. People learned how to generate creativity in deep-learning neural networks. It makes us considerably higher than AI itself — if there are those who fear AI and its abilities. While we are creating the second part of this article, preparing for you even more material to think about, you can play with the AI generators we have listed here and write in comments your thoughts. That’s not it!
