What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on art?
Overview –
AI has been creating its own niche in art and it has cast its influence in many ways. Art, which has been the sole domain of human beings, is now being created by algorithms and that is a fundamental shift in how we view art. Secondly, art is perceived to be the reflection of the skills and thoughts of some extremely talented people like painters, music composers, and animators, beyond the capabilities of the people who don’t have such gifts. AI has made the creation of art more inclusive. Now, anyone can generate a piece of art, for example, an ornate background pattern, with a few clicks of the mouse. Thirdly, AI-generated art is being sold, like physical paintings in exhibitions, in the crypto market as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and that’s a lucrative business now. Fourthly, as AI art evolves rapidly, the difference between the art created by humans and machines is debated. However, AI has also been a collaborator in creating art. In this article, we’ll analyze the influence of AI on art in these areas and try to find out where the traditional ways of creating art stand.
We discuss the influence of art under the following headings.
Anyone can create art
The picture below is generated by the author of this article using https://starryai.com/. The author inputted text to generate an image of a mother and her child and the algorithm generated the picture.
AI-generated image of the mother and her child
AI-generated image of the mother and her child
The author is not an artist or painter. It took a mere 15 seconds to generate that. The picture looks decent enough and the website can generate randomly many more images depending on your inputs. It’s this kind of influence that AI has been casting. Anyone can be an artist now. Art is available on demand now. Anytime and anywhere.
Generative art
Generative art is art generated by the software based on a keyword or set of keywords provided by a human being. Just like a human artist improves skills toward perfection over a long period of time, the concept of generative art is based on the training of machine learning algorithms that take millions of image data over a long period of time using a technology called General Adversarial Networks (GAN). Then, such tools can generate art that was never created before. How does generative art works? A human artist enters sentences or keywords, for example, watching the sunset over the mountains, and the intelligent model uses algorithms to analyze millions of art images or visuals to produce a unique image of the sunset over the mountains. Look at the image below. It’s an image of a flower garden created using https://creator.nightcafe.studio/, one of the text-to-image generators.
Image generated by text-to-image generators
Image generated by text-to-image generators
There are many generative art tools available and the difficulty levels of using their range from beginner to advance. Some of the prominent tools are Processing, openFrameworks, Cinder, and Unity.
Generative art is generating high sales
Just like the artworks of human artists are exhibited and sold at physical exhibitions, generative art is being sold at virtual marketplaces, the currency being non-fungible tokens (NFTs). And the amount has been mind-boggling. In 2021, the generative art NFT market collected $2.57 million while in 2020, the figure was $20 billion.
It’s clear that generative art is serious stuff. Let’s take the example of https://art-ai.com/, it’s a web platform where generative art is sold and it’s the largest gallery of AI-generated art. The basis of this virtual gallery has been AI-generated art that derives from a huge collection of art throughout the historical periods. The platform deals with unique art only. Users can use a keyword or a sentence only once which makes sure that the platform has unique images only.
Difference between human and AI-generated art
The images given in the above sections highlight the quality of AI-generated art. The details, finesse, colours, tone, shapes, and other elements point to the rapid evolution of art generated by AI. When compared with art created by human artists, it’s clear that the line between the two sources of art is getting blurred. Of course, a large section of human artists contends that AI-generated art lacks expression, emotions, and details — and they’ve good reasons to say so — but it can’t be denied that AI-generated art has been making rapid strides and competing with human art. It’s difficult to judge whether AI art equals or surpasses human art. It’s not black or white. But human beings have always viewed the capability and potential of machines with suspicion. A lot has been happening on the AI art and NFT front. Many projects are being developed that has been attracting art enthusiasts and the collectors of NFT across the world. For example, Eponym is one such project where generated art is exhibited and transactions take place in NFTs. Metascapes is another such project that produces high-quality art. So much so that it’s difficult to distinguish between human and machine art. It was started by Newburn, Iurie Belegurschi, and Cath Simard, all of whom are photographers.
Collaboration between AI and human
While the qualitative differences between AI and human art are intensely debated, collaborative initiatives have produced excellent output. A study compared the differences between the Haiku poetry generated by both the AI and human poets. The study involved 385 participants. It found that the best quality was achieved when the AI and the human poets collaborated while individually, the subjective quality was viewed the same. Also, AI art has been a useful tool in many areas. Think of a writer who has written a book and before publishing, needs to design a nice book cover and some images for the book. It might not always be feasible to look for an artist or a designer. In such cases, AI art can be an incredibly useful tool. There are many more use cases of AI art utility and there is no doubt that AI and human can forge a good partnership.
Overall, it will be intriguing to observe the progress of AI in the field of art. It has already made rapid progress, something that can’t be reversed. The debate on the conflict between human art and AI art will always be there.
Conclusion
Clearly, AI has made rapid advances in the field of art, to the extent of almost equalling human art in many ways. Understandably, that gives rise to the question – will human art be replaced? That seems unlikely because human emotions, feelings, and thoughts are different things. Instead, we can look forward to increased collaboration between human and AI to produce high-quality and complex art in various forms.
