Hey there, and welcome to spacematic.net. Thanks for stopping by! Long-dormant as a blogger, I’ve re-imagined this site to concentrate on my current interests: AI art, humor, and music.

Currently, there are a number of controversies surrounding AI art:

The future of art

• RAPID ADVANCEMENT: Many artists are rightly concerned about how these new tools will impact their ongoing livelihood. As a writer, I can sympathize. During many interactions with ChatGPT, I’ve been taken aback by its command of language and its eloquence. Visual art models are similarly adept – not yet perfect by any means, but the potential is obvious. If AI can generate art and text at such an impressive level now, we can only assume that it will improve until models are developed that can out-paint, out-write, and generally out-create humans. But what do terms like “out-paint” actually mean?
• WHO IS THE BETTER ARTIST: The subjectivity of experience appears to provide sufficient barrier against any anxiety concerning which entity possesses the creative or aesthetic upper hand. It can be argued that the intention of a conscious mind is the required driver behind a legitimate artistic enterprise, and that what we currently see in AI art is a complex yet mindless “remix” of the dataset the GAN was trained on.
• SHEER VOLUME: The speed advantage cannot be argued; machines have humans beat at the starting line by that metric. The pace at which AI art models can generate quality work is already intimidating. If AI art is accepted into the mainstream (I’m not even sure what that means), will such a sudden inflow of artistic expression somehow dilute the value of art in general?

Attribution and ownership

• “CONTRIBUTORS” TO THE DATASET: The whole process starts with the dataset, consisting of a library of images and text descriptions scraped from the web. This includes images by artists ranging the spectrum from the anonymous painters of the Lascaux caves to the starving and as-of-yet unknown DeviantArt account holder. The model is fed this data for use in generating new images. Currently, the law is struggling to catch up to questions of AI art ownership rights and whether attribution is in order if an art generator serves up an image in the approximate style of a human artist. Are there valid concerns on ethical grounds from artists who never consented to have their work used to train such a model? Probably, but the reality of the internet is that any public unprotected material is generally accessible to anyone, for any purpose.
• COMMERCIALIZATION: Is it right for a private company to use AI art generators to create work for commercial use, given that the model was trained on data scraped from artists who never explicitly agreed to have their work used commercially?
• UPENDING AN INDUSTRY: The easy creation of photographic and artistic compositions will likely result in many businesses opting to generate their own assets for digital and print material, greatly reducing the licensing income of large stock image repositories. Throughout the digital age, we have seen entire industries wither due to automation and innovation. Will these businesses manage to adapt in a rapidly-changing environment, or will they fold due to sudden irrelevance?

With the above in mind (and knowing that other controversies and dilemmas abound), I personally view AI art generators as collaborators to help me jumpstart my own creativity. It’s not in me to generate an image and take the same measure of pride in it that I would a painting which took years of study and countless hours of labor to create. I’ve chosen to work with these tools as part of a larger multimedia endeavor. I have no interest in using the technology to recreate or emulate any particular artist or style. Instead, it’s my goal to utilize AI to help me illustrate impossible scenarios, alternative histories, Mandela Effect-style story concepts, and inject life into pre-existing stories I’ll be sharing here. Also, due to the zany nature of some of the output, I’ll be sure to comment on “gaffes” and other entertaining material I happen to encounter.

Ultimately, I’m doing all of this for my own entertainment, but it would be a marvelous bonus if I happened to get a chuckle or two out of you as well.

Mike Griffin