Will Dall-E scrap photographers, creatives and artists?
Dall-E, OpenAI's artificial intelligence image generator, is simple, cheap and within everyone's reach, but what about those who have done their job of creativity? Facts, comments and insights
If you can dream it, Dall-E (maybe) can do it. The OpenAI artificial intelligence (AI) image generator, which takes its name from the fusion of Salvador Dalì (the artist) and Wall-E (the Pixar robot), in fact allows for just 15 dollars to create hundreds of ”. Just enter a text input and Dall-E provides a series of images produced on the spot.
But what implications will it have?
THE EVOLUTION OF AI IMAGE GENERATOR
AI-generated art is nothing new, but tools released last year – Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion – have allowed even amateurs to create complex, abstract or photorealistic works by simply typing a few words into a box of text.
However, according to theNew York Times , for some critics “what makes the new generation of AI tools different is not just the ability to produce beautiful works of art with minimal effort” but “it's the way they work”.
HOW DO THEY WORK
Applications such as Dall-E and Midjourney were in fact built by retrieving millions of images from the web, and then teaching the algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and to generate new ones with the same style.
“This – explains the newspaper – means that artists who upload their works on the Internet could unintentionally contribute to the training of their algorithmic competitors”.
THE IRRISTORY COST
In addition to being extremely easy to use, Dall-E is also economical. In fact, access to the basic service is free and offers 50 credits for the first month and 15 for the following months, but if you want to experiment more, with just 15 dollars you can buy packages of 115 credits, which correspond approximately to 460 images, to add to the free ones.
THE IMPACT ON NEWSPAPERS, PHOTO AGENCIES AND ART
"As a former director, I know that this figure is capable of putting any photographic agency or illustrator out of the market", wrote the journalist and former director of the newspaper Domani Stefano Feltri today in his newsletter Appunti , reflecting on the impact and objective advantages of AI image generators.
It is therefore not surprising that photo agencies are moving accordingly. If the historic Getty Images, with its archive of 80 million images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of footage, has decided to ban AI-generated images from its site, Shutterstock has instead signed an agreement with OpenAI to sell them.
QUESTION OF ETHICS
As noted by Andy Baio, technologist and writer quoted by the NYT , Dall-E is "at the limit of magic in what it is able to conjure, but raises so many ethical questions that it is difficult to keep them all under control".
In fact, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters justified the agency's decision by stating that it wanted to protect its clients from the concerns that are emerging about the legality of AI-generated content, which refers precisely to images or illustrations by artists and photographers independents who have not given their consent.
“I think we are seeing organizations, individuals and companies behaving recklessly […] There are real concerns regarding the copyright of the results of these models and unresolved rights issues regarding the images, image metadata and the individuals contained within them,” added Peters.
WHAT OPENAI SAYS ABOUT JOBS AT RISK…
Coming then to whether and how many jobs are at risk due to the use of AI image generators, what OpenAI itself declared when it presented the Dall-E 2 version last April is significant.
“Although Dall-E 2 has purely non-commercial purposes today, it could have significant economic implications in the future. The model – reads the press release – could increase the efficiency in the execution of some activities such as the editing or production of archival photographs, which could replace the work of designers, photographers, models, editors and artists”.
…AND THE FIRST EFFECTS
So what will become of those who carry out creative jobs? In this regard, the story of Jason M. Allen told by the NYT is interesting.
Allen won an emerging digital artist award at the Colorado State Fair last year, however, he used neither canvas nor brush but only the Midjourney generator becoming one of the first AI-generated works to win such an award and sparking a fierce reaction from artists who accused him of cheating.
However, while the author empathized with artists who fear AI is leaving them out of work, he also added that their anger shouldn't be directed at the people who use Dall-E or Midjourney to make art, but at the companies choosing to replace human artists with artificial intelligence tools.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/dall-e-rottamera-fotografi-creativi-e-artisti/ on Thu, 13 Apr 2023 10:51:25 +0000.