Sophie Ashdown

This was our last week of the term and it has gone by so quickly. 

This week we focussed on AI which is a unique but meaningful topic for artists these days.  It seems like every day there are more and more AI generated images coming out and they are getting better all the time.  There are still tell-tale issues with AI generated images of people because AI cannot seem to accurately reproduce human hands.  However it is only a matter of time before that changes.

In the session we reviewed five different images and described what we saw.  It was interesting how everyone described the images in different ways.  Some described what they felt was happening, or purely what they saw, or what the artistic style/value was, or even what political/social commentary was being made.  It demonstrated that everyone has their own perspectives on what they see and how they think or feel about an image.

We moved to my favourite part of the session which was to review eight different images and decide whether they were produced by a human or AI.  Some were obvious as to which they were, but some were harder.  I managed to get 7/8 correct, but I imagine that in time that it will become a lot harder to discern which is which.

In terms of AI usage myself, I’ve used ChatGPT to help answer questions and to get itinerary ideas when travelling, but I had never used an AI image generator.  So it was really interesting to see the different qualities of AI generated images, and I was impressed with myself that I only got one wrong.

We had a really interesting conversation about the impact, practicalities, and risks of AI images. Personally I think that there is a negative impact to artists in that many businesses that need images quickly (eg. newspapers and online news sites) will naturally turn to AI for images that support their articles, instead of getting a digital artist to create them. I think there will be a period of adjustment where some art-related careers will go to the side but at the same time there will be new art-related opportunities as a result. For example when computers were first invented, everyone worried that so many jobs would be replaced, and indeed some were, but in fact it created an enormous new realm of jobs. I hope this will be the case for AI also.

Looking at the different AI image sites, I’m going to do some experimenting  to see what responses I can get.  I’ll report back!