Could you see a scenario in which your clients simply bypassed you and used Midjourney themselves to create the image they wanted?

I ask because this idea seems to be almost an article of faith among many AI Art enthusiasts- they are convinced that AI art in the near future will eliminate the role of the human artist in most commercial contexts.

Personaly I don't find this idea credible for a number of reasons- not the least of which is the fact that very often people who commission art don't really have a clear idea or vision at the start of a project, which is why they hire an artist in the first place.

A commercial artist is not simply a device for rendering images- there is a collaboration involved that current AI image generators lack the ability to provide.

And there is a real problem- at least in my view- with the idea that words and images are fungible- they really are not. Even the most detailed and comprehensive written description of a face is a poor substitute for a simple photograph. No one ever commisioned a portrait by sending the painter a written account of what the subject looked like- because we all understand that the idea of creating art just by talking to your tools is like the idea of playing the piano while wearing mittens- entertaining perhaps, but sadly lacking in the precision required to get the job done.

I think you are right about fine art- having tried to sell in this market for a long time it's very clear to me that quality, at least in terms of craftsmanship and technique, are completely irrelevant. The perfect proof of this is the trend in some high street galleries to sell the visually illiterate scribblings of celebraties as having some legitimate aesthetic value, when in reality it's simply the 'brand recognition' of the celebrity that is the real and only 'value' being offered for sale. ( The perfect example of this being the famous Cricket player who made his 'Art' by throwing balls covered in paint at a sheet of paper- this is not a made up story. To be fair the balls in question were cricket balls, so there was some kind of obscure link between the marks he made and the skill for which he was actually famous.)

The interesting thing about AI Art is that the opposite situation might occur- you could have images that exhibit a high degree of apparent skill and technique- yet be seen as having almost no value because they were so quickly and easily made.

The analogy here might be the golden leaves of autumn scattered in their millions on the ground- each one is actually unique in it's pattern and even beautiful in it's way, but none are regarded as having an real value.

There will be no qualitative differences.

But are quality and value the same thing?

I saw a post from an author who was worried that he might be sold cover art by someone using an AI art generator posing as a Human artist.

What worried him was not that the quality of the AI image would be worse, but that it would be impossible for him to tell the difference, leading to a scenario in which he was tricked into paying more than he should for the work.

What's noteworthy about this post is the instinctive seperation being made here between the quality of the image and the value of that image.

In his mind the AI generated image had far less value than one made by a human, even though both may be of equal quality- the reason being-I assume- that the AI image required little time and effort to make when compared to a human made image.

So humans seem to allocate value to a thing not only based on it's quality but also on the degree of cost and effort required in it's creation- AI Art is seen- rightly or wrongly- as being a cheap low effort activity , and as a result the products of AI art are likely to be seen as having low value no matter how well executed they may be.

How this perception of AI Art as having low value will impact on it's adoption as a commercial solution is not yet clear. In some contexts it may not matter at all, while in others it may matter a lot.

The potential danger for companies using AI Art is that the message it sends to their consumers may be a negative one- ' In this product we have used the lowest value art available in order to save costs'

So here's the thing; If the main reason you are using Art in your product is to enhance it's perceived value in the eyes of your customers, it makes no sense to use a form of Art that those customers may see as having low value- you end up doing the opposite of what you intended. And in a world where anyone can create AI Art in a few minutes what value will we place on Artworks created using an AI?

One ironic consequence of AI Art may be that some companies not only avoid using it but make a point of the fact that they only use human made art, enhancing the status of human artists as a source of high value as well as high quality artworks.

The very things that make AI Art so attractive from a production point of view- it's fast and it's cheap- may be toxic from a sales perspective if- by using it- you convey the impression that you neither respect or value your own customers.

I just searched for 'A Dragon fighting a warrior' on the Lexica site and then typed the same search term into google image search. (Lexica.art is a library of AI art)

What you find is a continumm with some truly incoherent images at one end and some brilliant images at the other. For some of that progression I would say that the human made images and the AI made images overlap- are of equal quality and coherence.

But at a certain point the best of the human made Art does stand out as clearly superior, but not because it is better in terms of technique- at least not mainly.

What does distinguish the best human art is the way that the images have been structured and composed. Where AI seems to fail at present is in it's ability to tell the story of the image in a strong coherent way- and this same failing is often seen in the work of non professional human artists too.

It's not clear to me how any evolution of the current AI generators solves this problem, because the domain involved is non verbal. So no degree of refinement in the language model will grant access or control to this level of the image creation process.

There are aspects of image creation that rely on shared cultural understandings to be effective, so you would need a different kind of AI to solve this problem, one that understood that the simple term 'A Dragon fighting a Warrior' is a narrative idea that might involve such subtle concerns as the 'eye lines' between the protagonists (do they seem to be looking at each other?) the ways in which their individual postures and gestures interact to describe the nature of their relationship to each other ( Are they together? Or are they in opposition to each other?) And these concerns multiply exponentially as the scene becomes more complex and more characters and elements are added to the mix.

It seems to me that something approaching a true AGI would need to be involved if these kinds of concerns are to be addressed by AI Art. But I'm no expert, so I'd be interested if anyone thinks this is wrong- do the current models have the ability to incorporate these kinds of abstract concerns in their output?

I have seen those and they are amazing-but seem to rely on multiple images of the same existing object to generatethe 3D model

The real trick would be to create a convincing 3D model from a single image of something that did not exist- something imaginary.

If an AI were able to do this it would be replicating what a human concept artist might do when presented with a single sketch as a starting point.

I've seen people using very simple sketches as prompts which work ok to get fairly simple compositions that try to match the sketch. I haven't yet seen examples where the inital sketch is more sophisicated and includes things like specific lighting or perspective foreshortening- but you may be right that some hybrid input of human plus AI may evolve in the future- it's an interesting idea.

I'm less convinced on the AGI side. At present AI Art is a kind of trick- it looks impressive but is less than it seems to be because the AI has no actual understanding of the things it is depicting- it deals in patterns of pixels that correlate to word combinations- it has no idea that these patterns represent volumes in 3D space that have surface material qualities that interact with the light sources in the scene.

To be a truly viable substitute for human artists AI would have to move beyond 2D and be able to understand that the scenes it generates are abstractions from a 3 Dimensional reality.

I can at least imagine a sort of autonomous version of Blender or 3D Max that in response to a prompt then builds a complete 3D scene, including geometric objects, textures, materials, light sources and volumetric effects like mist and ariel perspective- and from this render 2D images from any perspective desired.

The thing I find harder to imagine is how such a system could conjure 3D representations of imaginary objects and scenes that do not exist- where would the training data come from to make this possible?

I can do that with photoshop already, with considerably more control over the final image.

There is a basic problem with your proposition that in the future AI Art programmes will offer a similar level of control as a graphics tablet. If that were to happen then in order to exert that control the user of the AI would need skill and experience to do so. And people who use skill and experiance to create images are called 'Artists'.

So increasing the ability of an AI to respond to more complex and nuanced instructions does not eliminate the need for a skilled human , it makes that human more important, since they will be required to craft those complex and nuanced instructions.

In order for your prediction that skilled human Artists will not be required in the future to happen, you need to do the opposite of what you propose- you need to take control away from the human and give that control to the AI- so it is the AI that controls what the final image looks like, not the human.

In this scenario the human is more like an 'art director' who instructs the AI as to what he wants to see, and the AI is smart enough to deliver that result. But it is rare that a 'first pass' result will be exactly what the Art director requires, so a process of interation and refinement then takes place with the final Art being an emergent property of this process.

I'm not saying that this may not one day happen- but it cannot be achieved by increasing the control of the Art Director- it can only be achieved by increasing the comprehension of the AI- it is the AI's ability to understand the subtle nuances of the Art Directors intent and to implement that intent faithfully that will determine how useful AI Art will be as a replacement for human Artists.

But this level of comprehension does not exist in the current models and something akin to true AGI would seem to be required.

The limitations of text to image are not technological, they arise from the inherent impossibility of encoding visual information precisely using words alone.

If you tried to generate a self portrait using an AI by inputting only a text prompt description of your face it would not result in a recognisable picture of you- only a generic image of someone perhaps similar to you. And this would hold true no matter how skilled you may become in writing prompts and no matter advanced the language model used by the AI to interpret your prompts.

So text to image is never going to be anywhere near as precise as drawing tablet when it comes to the editing of digital images.

To be clear I did not say that AI art would be seen as having low quality, I said it would come to be seen as having low value- a subtle but important distinction.

For example an author recently posted a question about how he could avoid being 'ripped off' by an AI Artist. His problem-as he saw it- was that he might be charged a high fee for something that took only minutes to produce by someone who pretended to have done the work themselves without using AI.

This- he seemed to feel- would be to steal from him by pretending to offer something of high value while in reality supplying something of lower value.

But the fascinating aspect of this situation was that the quality of the image was not at issue- in fact the very root of his problem was that he would not be able to tell by looking at the image how it had been made.

What this tells us is that AI Art will be seen as having low value not because it's bad art, but because it's so very quick and easy to make. Humans tend not to place a high value on anything seen as quick and easy to make.

No improvement in the quality of AI Art will prevent it's being seen as cheap low value Art when compared with art made by humans. How this perception will impact on the marketplace is another question. In some contexts such as greeting cards, for example, people will not care how the art was made- they just want a pretty picture.

However, if you are selling a product where the Art it contains is seen as a measure of the quality of the product, and you use low value AI Art in that product, this could be a problem because the message it sends is that you don't care enough about your product- and by extension- your customers, to pay out for higher value art made by humans.

None of this is especially rational of course- but humans are not entirely rational beings. One might say to that worried Author 'why do you care if the Art took only two minutes to make- if you like the Art and had already agreed the price?' And from a purely rational perspective he should not care. But- the fact that he paid a high price for something that took only minutes to make feels to him like stealing- and in a contest between rational thought and feeling, feeling will win out every time when it comes to human beings.

So the Impacts of AI in all it's aspects may not be as expected due to this variable- it may turn out, for example, that the perception of AI Art becomes so negative that it's use in almost any context will become seen as toxic and damaging to any product it is used in. Not saying this will be the case, but it could happen.

So don't be so quick to dismiss your own species in your enthusiasm for it's putative replacement- humans are nothing if not unpredictable.

I agree, this is why I think the term 'Artificial Intelligence' is a bit misleading. A better term would be 'Simulated Intelligence' because what these programmes seem to do is leverage speed and processing power to mimic-but not really replicate- the way that real intelligence works.

So you get this initial impression that something genuinely intelligent is at work only to find that this was something of an illusion, and that what you really have is a highly specialised system that does some things extraordinarily well, but other quite simple things are beyond it's comprehension.

I think this may explain why so often developments in AI seem to promise so much and yet so often fail to deliver. I am still waiting for that self driving taxi to pull up outside my house, but so far no luck.

Your english is good and what you say is true- for a lot of people AI Art will work well, if all they want is something fairly generic.

I was really addressing the application of AI art in a professional environment where expectations are higher and the ability to make very precise altertations to an image is vital. In this scenario a 'pure' AI Artist, who has no other artistic skills, would find it very hard to meet their clients demands.

This does not mean AI will not be used by professionals, it already is, but for the foreseeable future the limitations of a 'text to image' interface will mean that human artistic skills will be required in addition to the use of AI.

The simple truth is that using a graphics tablet with pressure sensitivity I have a degree of precise control over how my digital image looks that words typed into an interface simply cannot match.

I'm sure that you are right that AI art will be cheaper than human artists, so cheap in fact that the perceived value of AI produced Art will be nearly zero.

The question then becomes; if you are trying to market a product in which artwork is an important indicator of that product's quality, do you use cheap AI Art, or do you use human artists? If the common perception is that AI Art is an indicator of low budget production values then using human artists may in fact be the better choice from a marketing point of view.

It's also true that while AI's can create a large variety of 'styles' in terms of technique they are limited in terms of framing and composition. This may not be apparent when viewing images in isolation- but when a lot of AI art is seen together certain patterns are visible that make these images look similar to each other. So there is a detectable 'look' to AI Art that may become a problem if you want to present your product as being unique in any way.

I suppose my point here is that Art is not a commodity like potatoes or cabbages- and so using Art that is seen as having low value is not always going to be the best thing to do. Ironicaly it may be that the sheer volume and low cost of AI produced art will lead to it's being avoided by those wishing to present their product as a high quality offering

As an Artist my first sight of AI art was a real shock and it is an amazing achivement in many ways.

But I will push back a bit on your predictions as to it's impact on the visual creative fields and would be interested to know if you think my reasoning is sound, or if I am misunderstanding something.

It seems to me that a major problem with text to image tech is neatly expressed by this very definition-'text to image'. How viable is this concept?

For example- we could probably now create a 'speech to image' camera in which the lens has been replaced by a microphone- and to take a picture with this camera you would simply describe the scene in front of you and the AI would than recreate that scene based on your words.

Would this actually work? I would say 'up to a point'. The image you got would probably roughly approximate the scene in front of you- but it would be far from a photographic rendering of that scene. And this would hold true no matter how developed the language model used by the AI became, because this limitation reflects the limits of words to accurately define visual phenomena.

This is why your passport has a photo of you, not just a written description of your face- no written description could be accurate enough to be used to identify you.

So if, as an artist, I cannot accurately communicate my intent to the AI because I must use words to do so, then I have given up the almost complete control I currently have using a drawing tablet in exchange for a far more crude interface.

In return I gain an AI 'assistant' that will interpret my words and from them attempt to create the image I set out to make- but this represents another loss of control as the AI's take on my words may not exactly reflect the meaning I intended them to convey.

So in terms of using AI as a tool to create final image output I think this is unlikely due to the inherent inability of 'text' to precisely define 'image', at least at the level of granularity required for professional work. As tools for idea generation AI have a place- but as replacements for the 'manual' skill that human artists bring even to the creation of digital images I don't see how this would be possible, at least not using text as an interface.