How AI and artists can coexist as collaborators rather than adversaries?

MONTY GOULD

The discourse concerning ‘art’ created by artificial intelligence seems to be fast approaching a consensus. Computergenerated art has at its best been an exercise in creating absurd surrealist memes, such as the twitter viral “Court Sketch of Godzilla on Trial” by DALL-E Mini. At its worst, AI art has been a method by which freelance artists are being driven out of work, such as “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” by Midjourney which won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, much to human competitors’ dismay. Using AI to create ‘art’, or at least images, is not new however, the ease with which these images can be created has drastically decreased whilst the quality has drastically increased. Andy Baio does a comprehensive analysis of the various dangers this advancement holds, ranging from reducing “demand in some paid creative services” to “opening up new avenues for deepfakes, misinformation, and online harassment and exploitation”. If we believe there is an ethical responsibility on artists in the creation of their art, which is perhaps an unreasonable belief, can we find an ethical and constructive use for AI within the field of design?

Beginning a search for this tool should start with a brief look at how these image generators work. Many of the most popular generators (DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Nightcafe, Stable Diffusion) use Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network and Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (VQGAN+CLIP) – a maths-heavy acronym that isn’t particularly meaningful for anyone outside of machine learning circles. Breaking this down, we have an image generator process in VQGAN and an image discriminator process in CLIP; VQGAN creates the ‘art’ and CLIP decides how well this ‘art’ meets the prompt the user has supplied, feeding back to VQGAN who tries again. The first iterations of this process involve grainy nothing canvases that CLIP squints at and says “I guess it kind of looks like an erupting volcano painted by Van Gogh?”, or whatever the prompts was, before VQGAN returns a new iteration and asks “How about now? Hotter or colder?”. This repeats until we have an VQGAN image output that can fool CLIP (and discerning humans) that what they are seeing is the real deal. The success of this process relies heavily on how well-trained the process is, which is primarily a function of the quantity of images it has been fed as reference. This dataset routinely demonstrates societal biases seen in online image catalogues – for example, disproportionately returning photographs for cis-men when searching ‘CEO’, or white people when searching ‘professional hairstyles’ - and searches and inevitably contains copyrighted material, like original art and photography. Artist RJ Palmer told BBC News’ Chris Vallance that “AI is not just like finding inspiration in the work of other artists: This is directly stealing their essence in a way".

The 3 main considerations we want to consider in creating an ethical use of AI in design (alongside concerns about the quality of output, well-covered elsewhere) are as follows:

• AI should not replace an artist but instead be another tool a designer could utilise, like a new set of brushes or an idea journal.

•AI should not mimic an existing artist but instead at most reference styles and concepts, with personal touches added by the designer, like seeking inspiration from a gallery visit. • AI should not be trusted with solely directing output but instead work under supervision and guidance from an (ethical) designer, like a master directing an apprentice.

With these in mind, we can craft a VQGAN+CLIP+Designer approach in which the designer inserts themselves into the AI process to ensure these considerations are met. This concept, known as Human In The Loop (HITL), has been applied in many machine learning environments to improve transparency, incorporate human judgement, and lessen the need for ‘perfect’ algorithms. The existing literature has, however, been much more focused on the improvement of decision-making/outputs through HITL, rather than viewing it as an ethical necessity.

We begin with creating the prompt for the ‘art’; the designer here comes up with a broad idea and refines it through conversation with an AI. This issue of I, Science is around creativity, so the designer wants to produce something that represents the theme. They let a chatbot finish the sentence “The overlap of technology and creativity can be represented by a painting of…”

"...Charlie Chaplin and a music box that plays Modern Musical Instruments (1935) by Gerald Landgrebe

...the artist and the child looking at the light switch at the bottom of the artwork

...one giant code, from which our knowledge is being redefined and our creativity evolved"

The AI struggles to stay on topic here, but the designer likes the idea of a painting of code, something we rarely see outside the medium of a pixellated screen. The designer takes this idea and brings it to Midjourney, an image generator and discriminiator as we described earlier, prompting the AI to create fuzzy shapes that iteratively approaches the prompt “a beautiful impressionist oil painting of computer code”the outputs of this can be seen in progress and finalised in the first two images.

The designer appreciates the AI framed pieces, but much prefers the computer setup included in the second option. The designer returns to the AI for variations on that image-the finalised outputs of this iteration can be seen in in the third image.

The designer instructs the AI to now upscale the favoured option from this batch, so it is a higher resolution for use-seen in in the fourth image. They can then import it into their design software of choice (which may have its own AI tools) to add their personal touches to the piece and shape the output to their requirements-seen in the fifth and sixth images.

When appraising this approach against our stated considerations, we can at most say that damages have been limited rather than completely averted. Has the designer robbed an artist of the opportunity to fill this magazine page with their original art? Has the designer stolen the copyrighted content of historic and contemporary impressionist painters as well as stock photography companies? Is there enough involvement on the designer’s part to claim this ‘art’ is theirs or does it belong to the generator? Or to nobody?

I started an AI-designed-graphic-tee-sidehustle earlier this year, called GraphicAI, and attempted to use this design process and principles throughout. I am certainly doing my best to be ethical, but there may be something inherently flawed in AI ‘art’ and design that I cannot overcome. Should this endeavour grow in success, the size of this moral dilemma will certainly grow with it.

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