AI - the new frontier in art, but some artists are sceptical

Falah Faisal | NT

Bengaluru: With every new change in technology there are early adopters and those that resist the change. On social media in the past few month, AI generated artworks are really the rage with artists pushing boundaries of their imagine with a few simple prompts that create mind blowing pieces that reimagine what Mumbai would look like if cyborgs were present in the 90s or of lost Bollywood Sci-Fi films which look almost realistic.

The realism of which might give your goosebumps. One of the artists creating such art is Varun Gupta with his series Cyborgbay which was created using Mid Journey, a server on Discord. “When the fourth version of Mid Journey came out, I saw artworks by fellow AI artists, one of whom was Prateek Arora, which inspired me to create my series.”

You have to describe the scenario, the city and any other filters you might want to add to it, then pick from four options that the software presents and ask the software to refine the one you like. “It is a great pre-visualization tool that will help artists generate hundreds of images and when it improves I hope to make comics with it. The future is AI,” says Gupta. But not everyone is as optimistic.

Some are concerned about where the images the AI is using are sourced from. Sreehari Sivadasan shared a story on Instagram criticizing AI art. “Artists aren’t opposed to AI, but how the creators of the AI are sourcing the data. They use Latent Diffusion where images are converted into noise and from that new images emerge. A lot of work coming out of AI is in the style of other artists who are not being credited or getting remuneration,” says Sreehari, who feels the sourcing of data needs regulation.

Another concern is that AI art could hinder the emergence of new artists and might replace them on some levels with news organizations and studios using AI generated art for their articles. Prasad Bhat who also has been using AI art for some time now says it all comes down to ideation.

“It depends on how unique your style is and how you establish that. Then even if AI copies you, people will know that it is your style. I think AI is capable of much more but right now we are using it just to make Darth Vader in KR Market.”

“There have been other innovations in the art field which have forced the artists to evolve and I feel to survive artists will have to evolve and incorporate these technologies into our workflow,” concludes Sreehari.