So THIS is what has kept you out of trouble (?) since Wednesday. Fascinating! And your conclusions feel like a bit of a relief. Wanna discuss copyright?
A friend and I were trying to get less biased results from Midjourney and it really resists efforts to avoid specific, culturally-hot stylizations. "Woman with dark hair and eyes" produces an army of clone girls (clearly between 10 and 18 years of age) with the same shape mouth, face, nose, light dusting of freckles, and..... LIGHT EYES.... The darkest eyes are medium caramel hazel. Similar attempts to prompt a male face (no race specified) with dark eyes gives you unlimited portraits of Timothee Chalamet from different angles and differing amounts of tanner applied. No variants ever stray from this weird idealized facial standard. Apparently the training the AI gets is subject to an enormous amount of bias, whether conscious or not.
Marian, I am a HUGE fan. (I have all your books, too.) Glad to see you exploring the AIs. I think you'll find this piece I wrote for Wired about image generators to be resonate with your notes here. Particularly its kin to what we do when we photograph. https://www.wired.com/story/picture-limitless-creativity-ai-image-generators/
This is one of the most interesting things I've read about AI in a while. I've felt a lot of conflict about AI image generation since it came into the public consciousness this summer. I'm a game designer who relies on freely-available public domain art and stock images to illustrate my games. When I find something good, I feel a thrill similar to the one you discussed here.
When I first encountered Dall-E, I was like, "This is amazing! I can make awesome art for any project I want!", but it quickly left me feeling hollow. I'm not sure if this is because of the uncanniness of the images—there's always something slightly wrong about them—or because the ease of generating them robs me of the collector's feeling of discovery. After much back-and-forth with myself, I've decided that I'm okay using AI generated art as a substitute for clip art, but otherwise I'm going to stick to what I can find in the public domain. And I've also started learning to draw as my own little protest in favor of human-created art.
Saw this article in PRINT magazine and came here to leave you a comment.
It's great to see an artist's take on MidJourney, and to read your conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses.
I've been exploring and fighting with MidJourney and, like your friend, giving in or giving up pretty regularly. But it can conjure some terrific stuff.
The bias is very pronounced. One day I decided to create images of gray hair - long, beautiful gray hair. After a few iterations, I thought I should add some ethnic diversity but no matter what prompts I added (except for African American) I got the same young, pert Caucasian faces. Hmmm.
Another weirdness: I was creating images of vegetables and fruit and I added "glamorous lighting" because I wanted very attractive food. Instead, I got images of a young, pert Caucasian girl. Hmmm.
Last weirdness: I was creating Valentine's Day images - plump Valentine's Day hearts - and MidJourney also included an image of a Corvette with flames coming out of the sides. ??? Hmmm.
Keep reporting your explorations, findings and conclusions.
So THIS is what has kept you out of trouble (?) since Wednesday. Fascinating! And your conclusions feel like a bit of a relief. Wanna discuss copyright?
Great piece... may I share this link and a few of your fantastical images?
A friend and I were trying to get less biased results from Midjourney and it really resists efforts to avoid specific, culturally-hot stylizations. "Woman with dark hair and eyes" produces an army of clone girls (clearly between 10 and 18 years of age) with the same shape mouth, face, nose, light dusting of freckles, and..... LIGHT EYES.... The darkest eyes are medium caramel hazel. Similar attempts to prompt a male face (no race specified) with dark eyes gives you unlimited portraits of Timothee Chalamet from different angles and differing amounts of tanner applied. No variants ever stray from this weird idealized facial standard. Apparently the training the AI gets is subject to an enormous amount of bias, whether conscious or not.
Marian, I am a HUGE fan. (I have all your books, too.) Glad to see you exploring the AIs. I think you'll find this piece I wrote for Wired about image generators to be resonate with your notes here. Particularly its kin to what we do when we photograph. https://www.wired.com/story/picture-limitless-creativity-ai-image-generators/
Very interesting questioning read.looking forward to the next one.
I love the baby seal ❣️
This is one of the most interesting things I've read about AI in a while. I've felt a lot of conflict about AI image generation since it came into the public consciousness this summer. I'm a game designer who relies on freely-available public domain art and stock images to illustrate my games. When I find something good, I feel a thrill similar to the one you discussed here.
When I first encountered Dall-E, I was like, "This is amazing! I can make awesome art for any project I want!", but it quickly left me feeling hollow. I'm not sure if this is because of the uncanniness of the images—there's always something slightly wrong about them—or because the ease of generating them robs me of the collector's feeling of discovery. After much back-and-forth with myself, I've decided that I'm okay using AI generated art as a substitute for clip art, but otherwise I'm going to stick to what I can find in the public domain. And I've also started learning to draw as my own little protest in favor of human-created art.
Saw this article in PRINT magazine and came here to leave you a comment.
It's great to see an artist's take on MidJourney, and to read your conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses.
I've been exploring and fighting with MidJourney and, like your friend, giving in or giving up pretty regularly. But it can conjure some terrific stuff.
The bias is very pronounced. One day I decided to create images of gray hair - long, beautiful gray hair. After a few iterations, I thought I should add some ethnic diversity but no matter what prompts I added (except for African American) I got the same young, pert Caucasian faces. Hmmm.
Another weirdness: I was creating images of vegetables and fruit and I added "glamorous lighting" because I wanted very attractive food. Instead, I got images of a young, pert Caucasian girl. Hmmm.
Last weirdness: I was creating Valentine's Day images - plump Valentine's Day hearts - and MidJourney also included an image of a Corvette with flames coming out of the sides. ??? Hmmm.
Keep reporting your explorations, findings and conclusions.