/w=32,quality=90,fit=scale-down){kind=small}
©CAAS, Made on Midjourney
It wasn’t long ago when everyone was talking about how AI was going to automate blue collar jobs — every AI news article seemed to be about the end of truck drivers.
But things have taken a bit of a turn, and today, the creative community such as illustrators, musicians, writers, and photographers are wondering how their careers will be impacted by AI.
2022 will be remembered as the year when the AI art revolution began, and there’s no sign of it slowing down.
What started as creating some cool fantasy sci-fi artwork to show-off on social media, is now spreading to the production of magazine covers, stock art, photography, and poster designs.
While illustrators are nervously watching the rise of text-to-image transformers improve at a rapid pace, the film-makers, musicians, videographers, and 3D artists are keeping an eye on AI-to-media transformers on the horizon… like Godzilla appearing in the ocean heading towards Tokyo.
Prompt: Godzilla in the horizon rising from the ocean, Made on midjourney
I couldn’t resist.
The AI Artist
But not all artists are viewing this movement as doom-and-gloom, some artists see this as an opportunity to use AI as a creative tool.
Some artists use AI as a means of inspiration, composing in different styles and formats to help foster new artistic ideas.
Other artists collaborate with AI art via mixed media, either inputting their own art and using AI for remixing, or starting with AI generative art and editing the output. Creative Inpainting is becoming a sophisticated new art method.
Like photography did for painting, artists will begin to create new forms of artwork never imaginable before, stretching the boundaries of what seemed impossible and creating new kinds of artforms.
Creativity As A Service
With Stable Diffusion going open-source, we now have an onslaught of websites, tools, platforms and Google colab notebooks that include AI art creation. Free AI art creation websites are popping up everywhere.
Here is a curated list of tools that have appeared in just a couple of months!
Basically every time I check my Twitter, YouTube or Medium feed, there is a new AI tool or website being mentioned.
Enterprise Companies Jump In
In addition to open source and startup companies, enterprise corporations are jumping into the AI services world as well.
Microsoft is integrating DALL-E 2 into its products, adding it to their Azure OpenAI Service. Azure is already offering OpenAI deep learning models such as GPT-3.
During Adobe Max 2022, Adobe featured a plethora of new AI features as part of their creative cloud suite. That includes their AI Sensei technology that operates across the Adobe platform, including Adobe Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.
This is one of the features which uses AI to automatically transform 3D scenes using styles from 2D artwork
Click here if you want to see all the excerpts from Adobe MAX on how AI is enhancing the future of creativity via Adobe tools. It’s pretty impressive.
Meta has showcased Make-A-Video, a new AI system that lets people turn text prompts into brief, high-quality video clips.
Google is releasing Imagen, a text-to-image generator, but it’s worth noting that their Colab notebook technology has been amazing for experimentation. They also have Tensorflow and ML kit for mobile.
How This Changes Things
I’m reminded of when Instagram started including artistic filters and suddenly everybody‘s photos became more interesting.
Adobe’s tagline is ‘creativity for all’ and I think that’s what AI is going to bring to the masses. The opportunity for everyone to be creative.
Those who are already working as creatives, and who have spent the time to learn their craft, will excel even more with AI.
AI will elevate creativity for everyone.
If you liked this article, hit the follow button for more articles like this in the future.