With its amazing technical level and creative ability, AI painting has become one of the top concepts in the technical field at home and abroad. In just over a month, countless AI paintings have been produced, and AI is aggressively attracting mankind. Pride in the field of artistic creation to launch an impact.
In the eyes of some, this may be another level of “Omnic Crisis”. How far has AI painting developed? Will it really be a powerful enemy of human imagination and creativity? With doubts, I also opened an AI drawing software and entered entries such as “artificial intelligence”, “art” and “creation” in the prompt keyword section. After dozens of seconds, a surreal painting was displayed in front of me:
A gigantic robot stands silently, with complex mechanical devices connected behind it, and the brilliant colors and icy steel in the space complement each other.
Source: Baidu Wenxin ERNIE-ViLG
When AI becomes an artist
It wasn’t that long ago that AI painting really started to catch the public’s attention.
On August 31, 2022, an American game designer named Jason Allen won the first prize in an art competition at the Colorado State Fair in the United States. The winning work is called “Space Opera”. This painting is a standard space opera-style painting, except that it was created by AI.
“Space Opera” was created by Jason Allen using the AI drawing software MidJourney, and was generated after nearly a thousand attempts. Once the news was released, it quickly aroused heated discussions in the global art field, and the use of AI to participate in the competition brought “Space Opera” and its authors into a verbal attack. Coincidentally, also in August, a reporter from the American media Atlantic Monthly also got into controversy for using MidJourney to create article illustrations, and a global AI creation discussion kicked off.
Whether AI should compete with people on the same stage really needs to be further explored, but what really attracts the public’s attention is actually the super-high level of AI paintings: whether it is “Space Opera” or “Atlantic Monthly” Several AI illustrations , have reached the point where they can be confused with the real, whether it is composition, lines or colors, they are all natural and smooth, and there is no mechanical rigidity in the stereotype. People are surprised to find that AI painting has developed to an unimaginable level.
On the Internet at home and abroad, AI drawing has quickly become one of the hot topics. AI drawing products such as MidJourney, Disco diffusion, and Stable Diffusion have begun to be known by more and more people, and a large number of AI drawing works have been produced. For a time, AI painting has swept social media platforms at home and abroad such as Weibo, Twitter, Facebook, etc. People are amazed at the ultra-high creative efficiency that a painting can be generated within ten seconds by only entering a few keywords in the software At the same time, I am amazed by the fineness and stylization of AI drawing products: no matter what style or subject matter, AI will always come and give back high-level works of art.
In fact, since 2012, AI drawing in the true sense has begun to develop, but in the early days, the effect of AI drawing has not made great progress. Looking back at some early works of AI drawing software, you can only use magic. , Rough to describe. Until 2015, in the face of the platform period of GAN (Generation Adversarial Network) deep learning model, the academic community proposed the Diffusion model, which provided a new idea for AI drawing:
AI can paint by “denoising” through deep learning of other pictures. With the widespread application of diffusion models and the development of AI deep learning models in recent years, the “tipping point” that belongs to AI drawing has finally arrived.
Starting in 2022, the iteration speed of AI drawing is astonishing. At the beginning of the year, the AI drawing software Disco Diffuion began to emerge in the field of AI creation. However, in terms of the details and production efficiency of the paintings, Disco Diffuion still has a lot of room for improvement, and its AI paintings are far from reaching the point where it can compete with artificial creation.
But changes are coming soon. In the next few months, DALL · E 2 and MidJourney have been tested one after another, and they have been able to generate accurate and beautiful characters; in July, the advent of Stable Diffusion shocked the world, compared with predecessors. , Stable Diffusion has successfully solved the problem of details and efficiency. Through algorithm iteration, the fineness of AI drawing has been improved to the level of art, and the production efficiency has been increased to the second level. The threshold of equipment required for creation has also been pulled to the civilian level. By mixing the fake with the real, in one go, and everyone can use it, AI has finally done it.
For AI drawing, a revolutionary moment has come, and thanks to the open source nature of Stable Diffusion, global AI drawing products have ushered in rapid development. This AI creation discussion is precisely because the public intuitively feels the impact of the technological wave. AI drawing is entering thousands of households, and the public opinion boom is also coming.
set off a storm of public opinion
For most ordinary people, AI drawing creation is undoubtedly a novel experience. Just enter the prompt keyword and you can generate the pictures you want. Especially in fields such as ACG, you can use AI drawing tools to create two-dimensional style illustrations. , and even comics have become the norm for many people.
In AI creation, prompt words are very critical. In order to generate better AI paintings, many netizens will share practical AI prompt words, and some even list a “creation dictionary” to escort beginners.
Compared with humans, AI’s imagination seems to have no boundaries, and it can almost meet all the needs of creators, but some too “strange” needs make AI paintings show more peculiar effects, such as human body deformation, line dislocation, in some parts With the creation of AI drawing products with uneven levels, AI paintings have once become a source of happiness for many people. In all kinds of AI strange pictures, netizens happily experience the difference between carbon-based creatures and silicon-based creatures.” Aesthetic Difference”.
At the same time, there are still many people who AI-based various classic meme pictures to fully integrate Internet pop culture into new technological elements. With the blessing of AI technology, people experience the joy brought by the stitching of elements. Various AI drawing stalks have also been produced one after another. The most classic is a question and answer screenshot, which explains the reason why AI painting can surpass human creation: “Because you teach it to learn it really learns”.
So far, various discussions about AI drawing seem to be full of humor and wit, but for many true art creators, the rapid progress of AI drawing has become a full “horror story”, and a global-level debate has opened. curtain. The core of the topic is the topic that has been discussed countless times: whether AI can replace humans. But unlike before, the impact of AI drawing technology has already appeared in the industry. When the future really comes, all problems have to be put on the table.
On October 11th, a topic topped the Weibo entertainment list. The topic word was # Laotiheye#, passers-by who couldn’t figure out the situation thought it was some kind of domestic entertainment. In fact, it was a domestic issue. A fierce confrontation between the top painters in the ACG painting circle, and the origin of the debate is AI. The wind of AI drawing is indeed blowing big enough, not only to make the long-silent painting circle lively, but also to bring the discussion of enclosure self-cute into the public eye.
The ins and outs of things are simple. More than ten days ago, Lao Lei, a well-known painter in the circle, expressed his opinion on AI painting, believing that AI will replace some lower-end painting methods in the future, and expressed his agreement with this, saying bluntly, “If you don’t have your own things or remain unchanged, you will definitely be rejected.” substitute”. The ACG drawing circle shook abnormally under the impact of AI drawing, and the discussion of “AI replacing the painter” was rampant. As one of the top painters, Lao Lei’s remarks stirred up a thousand waves, which quickly triggered the ACG drawing circle. Hot discussion.
On October 11, He Ye, a painter who became popular with the style of hunting and curiosity, expressed his views on Weibo, thinking that people who paint should not be divided into high and low ends, and responded to Lao tired’s remarks on the side.
The confrontation between the two top players also made the topic on the hot search list. With the continuous fermentation of the discussion, the well-known painter Hua Chuicai also joined the “battle situation”. Discuss drawing issues. On the 12th, with the end of the CG painter Wuhe Qilin, this debate reached its peak, and the public opinion storm caused by AI was more concretely displayed in front of the public.
The event ended in a relaxed manner. People watched top-notch painters quarrel and eat melons happily. Serious discussions seemed to be dispelled, but in fact, for the entire industry, serious discussions are very necessary, because the impact of AI painting is real. changing the art industry.
AI painting spear and shield
Going back to the point of contention between Laolai and Heye, the biggest problem brought by AI painting is the replacement of painters.
From the perspective of the painting industry, whether it is an independent artist, a cartoonist, or a game original artist, it is still a labor-intensive industry, and it is very dependent on “talent” resources, and the entry of AI will inevitably have an impact on some painters in the industry. Under the high level of AI paintings, most painters below the waist face a very direct threat. After the explosion of AI painting, many painters expressed anxiety. This is not only a kind of survival of the fittest, but also implies the creator’s inability to compete with unbalanced competition under powerful technology.
In fact, the entire design and art industries are indeed actively embracing AI for painting. Now there are jobs related to AI drawing. In many related discussions and memes, art, design and other positions will bear the brunt and become eliminated by AI. In the game and animation industry, the use of AI is becoming more and more common. Many industry insiders believe that with the recent revolutionary development of AI drawing, the industry will also undergo earth-shaking changes.
On the other hand, as an industry centered on creation, AI drawing represents a powerful advantage of data and algorithms. The fact that “painting skills and styles honed over decades have been caught up by AI” has already been Happening, which itself is a kind of deconstruction of creation itself. This also extends to the discussion of AI works. Many people think that although AI painting is “fast and good”, it lacks the author’s thinking and is fundamentally lacking in soul.
From the current point of view, the underlying logic of most AI drawing products still lies in learning and copying. In fact, AI itself does not have the ability to “create”. These products need to “feed” the image data of a large number of paintings to AI, and “digest” it through continuous deep learning, and then create by understanding keywords. output.
This is faced with a variety of problems. On the one hand, from the perspective of creation ethics, there are still many ambiguities about whether an AI painting is a splicing in a deeper sense or a real artistic creation, and whether the creator is the AI itself or the operator. zone.
Under a lot of “feeding”, copyright issues also arise. NovelAI, which has exploded recently, is one example. Its AI drawing function has become popular in two-dimensional style, but its deep learning data website danbooru itself has the problem of infringement and reprinting, so many painters’ paintings are not copyrighted. If allowed to be “fed” to AI, AI may also create works in the style of these painters. Does such conduct constitute infringement? How to ensure the interests of the artist when AI is not authorized to learn? Many problems are intertwined into a network, which further confuses AI drawing.
At the same time, the field of AI painting is also chaotic. On October 4, 2022, well-known Korean artist and cartoonist Kim Jung-ki died in Paris, shocking the global painting and art industry. While countless people were mourning, someone posted a painting in the style of Kim Jung-ki that he had created through AI on Twitter, which aroused public anger. When the master just passed away, he couldn’t wait to “feed” his work to AI. Many People think it’s a form of disrespect. As for the Jin Zhengji-style paintings produced by AI, many people also bluntly said that “there is only its shape without its spirit”.
Another case more intuitively shows the difficulty of restricting the infringement of AI drawings. Not long ago, a Korean painter used to live broadcast his paintings on the T witch platform, but during the live broadcast, his draft was uploaded to the AI drawing software by a Twitter user, and the results of AI creation were posted on his account. , and does not indicate the source of the draft. After being accused of plagiarism, the Twitter user also “quibble” in the artist’s comment area, saying that his work was published much earlier than the original author’s time of writing. This move further aroused criticism from followers and further strengthened people’s reflection on AI mapping.
Of course, there are also many positive voices. Many people believe that AI drawing technology can become a high-quality creative auxiliary tool and further improve the quality of content output. Some people in the industry also bluntly said that although AI will have an impact on low-end and mid-end painters, from a macro perspective of the industry, the entry of AI can not only alleviate the supply and demand problems in the seller’s market, but also further motivate creators to improve their standards and promote the entire industry. benign development.
The development of AI drawing has lowered the entry threshold of this industry. It seems to be a process of “empowering” the public, but art is not a simple labor. Whether the chemical reaction of brain cell collision and the powerful calculation of data algorithms can represent “Creativity”, which has transcended the technology itself, has returned to the eternal topic of technology theory. At the end of the day, technology is neutral, but the people behind it are incredibly complex. Whether the creation has a soul or a more practical infringement issue, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the field of AI painting in terms of policy and ethics.
end
AI is changing the world.
While AI paintings are all over the Internet, AI has begun to “siege cities” in the entire field of content creation. In addition to AI writing, which has been discussed many times, and AI music that has recently begun to develop, what is more noteworthy is the achievements of AI in the field of video production.
2022 In September, Meta launched the Make-A-Video model, which officially entered the field of AI video production. Just like AI drawing, users only need to input a few keywords or descriptive text to generate semantic video images.
The ability of the Make-A-Video model is amazing. Although the current function is still relatively rudimentary, it has been able to produce some interesting and diversified short video content. Even the winner of the Turing Award, Yann Lecan, is very happy to take it. The content created by the stalk map has caused a lot of waves in the AI circle.
This will inevitably have an impact on the short video industry in the future. From the perspective of production efficiency and content diversification, the maturity of Make-A-Video will set off a storm in the field of video creation. After all, it can generate fake and real videos from zero. It’s as if the apes met the Homo sapiens of the Stone Age, and the technological barriers are so insurmountable.
In the field of content in the AI era, creators always have to fight against AI to varying degrees. This will inevitably bring shock and anxiety, but we should also know that they are only tools after all, and they cannot eliminate human imagination and creation.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings