Have you ever envisioned Charles Darwin facing off against a dragon and its army of video game characters while astride Napoleon’s horse? You may spend years or even decades getting an education in art and design to make the tableau yourself, though. Maybe you might get around everything by employing one of the numerous AI art generators that have recently been the focus of a lot of public attention.
Users can enter a prompt on websites like Dall-E, Midjourney, and Steady Diffusion, which first appeared in 2021 and 2022, and from which the generator extracts keywords it uses to search through or “scrape” databases of images and other existing artworks on the internet. A neural network then use an algorithm to decipher connections between the source art in.
Then there is the effect AI has had directly on the art market. Together with the “artists” who utilize the tools, galleries all around the world are gradually adopting AI-generated art. The impressionist painting of Edmond de Belamy, which was autographed with a section of the algorithm used to create it, was sold at auction by Christie’s in 2018 for US$432,500 despite being earlier estimated to be worth around US$7,000.
The text-based generator Dall-E was used by New York-based gallery Gagosian to create prints for Bennett Miller’s exhibition this month. According to the gallery, Miller’s prints “engage the history and format of photography to pose questions around the nature of perception, reality, and truth – an inquiry made newly urgent by revolutionary innovations in computing.”
