Not really, I’m just being dramatic.
In Stable Diffusion, I entered this prompt and set it to 50 steps (the default is 25):
sunrise over a verdant field in the countryside. Oil on canvas.
And I got this lovely pastoral scene about a minute later:
And I thought, “How long would it take me to actually paint this, even using a digital canvas?” It would not take about a minute. It would take many minutes. It would take hours. It would take time to experiment with colour and tone, adjusting texture and light. But I feed the text into the AI and it produces something that is actually pretty good–probably better than I could do (I was never great at using paint as a medium) and it gives me pause and think about all the articles out there raising flags over AI-generated art.
I must ponder this. I currently think of AI-generated art as an actual form of art, but a different one. It requires a human hand to do anything (ostensibly, at least) and the prompts can result in dramatically different results with some seemingly minor tweaking. There is art in the crafting of the prompts themselves. But still, I get why people are concerned. This stuff is already shockingly good, and we are in the early days.
Does this mean some guy will no longer have to paint hundreds of black velvet Elvises to make a living? That it can be done in moments by an AI instead, freeing him up to do something more meaningful, possibly with orphans? Or does it just mean this guy has lost a job?
Ponder, ponder.
(And yes, I will do a black velvet painting of Elvis prompt later.)
(Also, amusingly and fittingly, the spelling checker did not recognize “Elvises” and suggested “pelvises.”)
