Are Midjourney and Dall-E already the creatives of the future?
Newspapers and companies are starting to use images generated by artificial intelligence software such as Midjourney or Dall-E and photographers, creatives and illustrators denounce the danger of seeing their rights as well as their work disappear. Le Monde article
Former US President Donald Trump grappling with police officers, Pope Francis wearing a white puffer jacket, Emmanuel Macron in the middle of a demonstration… While images created by artificial intelligence (AI) have been circulating on the Web for months , writes Le Monde , these latest shots, produced by the most recent version of the Midjourney image generation software, have caused some confusion.
Like the texts of the ChatGPT software, the realism of these images, however fictitious, has impressed the general public. But it has also shaken up the image world, which is now concerned about the future of the work of photographers and illustrators.
The fact that the press sites have adopted this tool has not reassured them. Le Figaro , for example, used Midjourney to illustrate a web article on March 26, only to backtrack the next day and replace it with a photo.
SOME NEWSPAPERS SUCCESS TO AI-GENERATED IMAGES AND OTHERS DO NOT
The monthly So Foot , for its part, has decided to use the software by default, due to lack of financial resources, if it cannot find a satisfactory photo. “Out of 6,000 pieces of content published since November [2022], we've used Midjourney a dozen times, specifying it,” says Pierre Maturana, the editorial director.
“We are a minimalist media, with minimal means,” agrees Pablo Pillaud-Vivien, editor-in-chief of Regards magazine, which also uses AI. On March 25, the Swiss newspaper Blick also took the plunge, declaring that "none of the people who appear in this photo generated by artificial intelligence exist".
The trend is also affecting communication and advertising: the first page of the latest Récréa Mag , the cultural calendar of Grenoble, published in October 2022, has been "designed" using Midjourney, as well as the Nutcracker poster of the San Francisco Ballet at the end of 2022. In early March, Coca-Cola invited Internet users to use Dall-E 2 – a software developed by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and a competitor to Midjourney – to generate creations, the best of which will be used by the brand.
Others have already set strict limits: the newspaper Libération will not use "AI-generated images, except for topics directly related to AI". This line is similar to that of Le Monde , where the publication of news images produced by AIs is also prohibited. The New York Times , for its part, indicated in a red banner that the illustration of an article about AI was… “generated by an AI”.
Even in powerful image banks, opposing strategies are emerging. Getty Images announced in September 2022 that it will refuse to archive AI-created photographs, while Shutterstock has entered into a partnership with OpenAI starting in 2021: the image bank allows Dall-E software to be trained on its database and puts available to its customers the image generator.
CREATIVES WORRIED AND IN REVOLT
The rise of Midjourney, Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion or Imagen (Google) is, for some, "catastrophic" from an economic point of view, in the words of Stéphanie Le Cam, director of the Ligue des auteurs professionnels. Artificial intelligence will likely lead to the emergence of 'fast creation', like 'fast fashion' in fashion: prices will be brought down,” he says. Customers will wonder why pay €500 for a book cover when, with a monthly software subscription of €20, they can illustrate the entire collection.
“We're doing it twice,” says photojournalist Boby. We risk being replaced and use our photos to feed the software training database. It looks like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Some well-known artists, such as Magic playing card illustrator Greg Rutkowski, have even complained that their work is mimicked by software, which can generate an image "in the style" of a designer.
“I found 22,000 entries in Midjourney for pictures with my name on it,” Jean-Baptiste Monge said on Facebook. This illustrator, known for his trolls, is a member of Egair, a group of professionals who are calling for "regulation" and a ban on using software on images without the "consent" of their creator.
Similarly, Stéphanie Le Cam considers the idea of granting artists only an "opt-out" right, which authorizes the use of their images unless they object, to be "delusional". However, this is the regime that applies, the European Commission ruled on March 31, building on the 2019 EU Copyright Directive. French Minister for the Digital Transition, Jean-Noël Barrot, is not against the idea of new measures related to copyright in AI, but not to the European regulation "AI Act" currently under discussion.
AN ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUE
For many, including Thierry Maillard, legal director of ADAGP, the society for the management of copyrights in the graphic and plastic arts, "there is the question of the remuneration" of the images used to train the AI. The idea is reminiscent of the "proximity rights" negotiated by the media for Google or Facebook to use extracts of their content. But what would each artist get?
“We shouldn't exchange a copyright for a cheap remuneration right”, warns Stéphanie Le Cam, who is open to “transfer negotiations”. The contract between Shutterstock and OpenAI therefore provides for a "remuneration", but of an unknown amount… In the meantime, some publishers and the media are calling for AI creations to be rejected in a "collective charter".
In the long run, how will this software impact my images? "We cannot deny that this tool exists, it must be used to stimulate a creative dynamic," says Pillaud-Vivien. Adobe, the publisher of the famous graphics software Photoshop, has launched Firefly, presented as an assistant for image editing.
Some take a darker view: “Will young people still want to go to art school? For the Swiss photographer Niels Ackermann, "the real problem is not financial, but philosophical, it is the relationship with reality". And, in a world “where the fake could soon be everywhere”, the media could, paradoxically, reinforce their raison d'être by becoming havens where photographs are real…
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/midjourney-e-dall-e-sono-gia-i-creativi-del-futuro/ on Sun, 16 Apr 2023 05:48:46 +0000.