With the entry of text-to-image programs like Midjourney and DALL-E-2, we are witnessing the rise of AI in the digital art industry.
AI’s advent in digital art is no less than a treasure trove. In recent times, many artists have started their engagement in new creative practices which fuses visual art with artificial intelligence. AI is being used to enhance the art.
Who would have thought that just by typing some of the words in the text box would let you produce high-quality images.
AI generated artwork is already in use to create graphic novels, images and much more while unleashing creative possibilities for different artists.
However, this is not it. There is much more to AI in the art industry.
What is AI
AI is the talk of town for a while now. This branch of computer science includes involves advanced computer systems that are able to “learn” based on calculated mathematic approaches. Such AI algorithms then help solve problems which are not necessarily related to computers, but could be of any domain.
From data mining to robotics to machine learning to medical diagnosis, AI is everywhere. It’s a breakthrough technology giving rise to deep learning, natural language processing and even more.
What is AI Art
Recently, Jason Allen’s art, “Theatre D’Opera Spatial” won its first blue ribbon where he revealed that this was an AI generated artwork. In his artwork, he used a powerful AI generator in order to generate realistic images for a user’s command.
AI art is defined as digital art which is created by computers or algorithms rather than humans. The term “AI digital art” encompasses various subcategories, including robotic art, computational art or evolutionary art.
Where did AI artwork originate
AI artwork’s roots were found back in the 1800 and its advent began in the late 1950. However, its creative application began in the year 2010. With the advancement in the AI techniques, Google Researcher Alexandra Mordvintserv created the DeepDream algorithm in the year 2015 by studying complex neutral systems. This ultimately helped him learn visual concepts.
With that, more opportunities were presented and AI’s accessibility grew with the open-source databases (ie AI now had large datasets to train themselves on). The applications of these kinds of AI advancements helped in the growth of AI art generators.
How is AI art compared to traditional art forms
There is no denying that AI in digital art is on the rise in today’s era. Almost every artist, is applying it in their art in some form or another. However, here are still some differences between AI artwork and traditional art.
Though, on one hand, AI art has the potential of being more realistic than the traditional art forms for certain cases. AI has the ability to draw a vast library of high-quality images which is scientifically/mathematically proven to be a realistic depiction of the object/thing.
Though, the traditional artform has the advantage of being created by a human artist who is infusing all the emotions or experiences created in the work. This means that traditional art has more symbolic meanings than AI artworks which would have specific intentions. It can be argued that traditional art from an artist (like a hand-drawn painting) will always have a unique style and invoke unique emotions than anything generated by a computer.
How to make AI art
AI art can be done in multiple ways. One can easily develop images in the style of others to generate unique or appealing graphics by text descriptions. Let’s look at how AI Art came to be.
Google Deep Dream
Deep Dream was first released in 2015 by Google. This is among the well-known AI tools. Initially, this was invented in order to help scientists or engineers to visualize learned patterns of a neutral network.
Later the algorithms became a new form of art because of its dreamy psychedelic appearance of the over-processed images.
WOMBO Dream
Another way to create AI art is with the help of a mobile application called WOMBO Dream. This app creates a form of generative art from the descriptive text with the help of various styles.
The app also creates machine language technologies which combine a neutral network for generating algorithms to interpret text descriptions. Both algorithms will help learn each iteration at the request to create unique outcomes. This one is generally preferable by all the artists who want to create some kind of unique art.
GauGAN2
GauGAN2 is a new research model of NVIDIA that is going further. This model is named after a well-known painter Paul Gauguin which creates photorealistic images from the simple elements that any user can draw with the simpler graphic tools.
Artists will also combine sketches with the help of short texts to design landscapes. It is a widely useful creative tool that creates stimulating photos which is based on any input that the creative mind gives.
How is AI Revolutionising Art Authenticity?
AI does not only help in collaborating the artists to generate novel work and spark new ideas but it will also help art forgeries that are polluting the art world.
By analysing varied attributes of artworks like patterns or brushstrokes, and by ignoring attributes like paper or paint, AI is theoretically able to determine if a given piece of art is a forgery (provided it is trained with a sufficiently large dataset and has clearly defined what the “original” is supposed to look like). It determines the authenticity of a digital photograph without even the need of investigating invisible layers through the traditional methods of authenticating artwork like X-ray technology or a microscopy.
NeRF
NVIDIA’s NeRF AI is a novel AI which is able to generate a 3D environment from prompts and 2D images. It is surprisingly accurate and fast, and uses the power of its high-end graphics cards to generate and navigate the spaces in real-time.
Wrapping Up
AI is on the potential rise in the art industry! Don’t be surprised if digital art courses would soon begin to incorporate AI tools in the learning curriculum!
