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I love these so much.
Miniature Calendar is an incredible ongoing project by Japanese artist Tatsuya Tanaka, that features beautiful miniature dioramas of everyday life using common household objects such as food, cloth, stationery, electronic devices, and even masks.
Source: Japanese Artist Creates Amazing Miniature Dioramas Every Day For 10 Years | Digital Synopsis
Art is a social thing. So it does not surprise me at all that people are upset that an AI-generated artwork won a competition.
However, after spending some time today (and in previous weeks) messing about with Midjourney and DALL-E 2 there’s a real talent to ‘prompt-crafting’. You can create amazing things, but not just by whacking in a bunch of words. Unless you’re very lucky.
Perhaps a ‘competition’ isn’t the best way to show off art. And perhaps selling individual works isn’t the best way to fund it?
A synthetic media artist named Jason Allen entered AI-generated artwork into the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition and announced last week that he won first place in the Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography category…
Allen used Midjourney—a commercial image synthesis model available through a Discord server—to create a series of three images. He then upscaled them, printed them on canvas, and submitted them to the competition in early August. To his delight, one of the images (titled Théåtre D’opéra Spatial) captured the top prize, and he posted about his victory on the Midjourney Discord server on Friday.
Source: AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans | Ars Technica
It is genuinely amazing what you can create these days with an AI model by simply inputting a few words of natural language. Craiyon (formerly DALL·E mini) allows anyone to do this right now, but there’s also previews of much more powerful models that will be available soon.
As Albert Wenger asks, what does this mean for creative people? I don’t think technology ever completely replaces but rather augments. So I think we’ll see even more artists work with AI models to create amazing things.
During my run today, I was thinking about how awesome it would be to generate running music perfectly suited to the route I was going to run. That’s entirely possible if we continue along this trajectory!
Recently we have had several breakthroughs, first starting with large language models that can tell stories, and now with DALL-E2 and midjourney, two models that can generate amazing imagery based on textual input. For example, here is an image “imagined” by midjourney based on the prompt “Sailing across the alps”
It is mind-bending to sit with this image for a while. A machine created it and did so within a space of minutes, yet it is full of imagination and detail and could easily be on the cover of a book or the walls of a museum.
So what does it mean that we now clearly and demonstrably have creative machines?
Source: The Meaning of Machine Creativity | Continuations by Albert Wenger