Transcriber: Rahaf Abu Sieni Reviewer: Zsuzsa Viola
Which one of these two paintings
do you think was made by an AI?
A soulless, emotionless computer.
Take a moment to really, really think about it.
Just with a show of hands.
Who thinks it’s this one on the left of the lady in red?
Who thinks that one’s the fake? Okay. A lot of you.
Who thinks it’s the landscape on the right?
What if I told you that these were actually both generated...
(Clamour)
by an AI
that can create images, artworks,
paintings like these from just a simple text prompt?
You might have heard of these things before.
You might be amazed by them.
You might be scared of them.
You might be wondering how AI has evolved from this.
To really understand the answer,
we first have to try to understand how these AIs actually work.
There are two main AI models that are used to generate images,
the first of which is called a generative adversarial network system.
And this system consists of two algorithms.
The first generates an image,
and the second does its best to figure out if it’s real or fake.
And together, they improve each other
and, ultimately, the quality of the final image.
And a lot of early AI image generators, like Dall-E one and two,
used this model, used this system.
However, by today’s standards, it’s pretty slow and inefficient,
which is why nowadays we use something called a diffusion model.
And a diffusion model works
by being fed just hundreds of millions of human images and artworks,
each one with a caption to describe what the image is of.
The images are then noised or effectively blurred
to the point where to us they just look like static.
And the AI then learns how to denoise the image
or create something that looks at least similar to the original
from the noise version.
And this is how it can generate new images.
When provided with a text prompt,
it searches its database for a noised image that best matches it,
and then it denoise the image,
creating an entirely new one
that hopefully matches what the prompt described.
So, what are the implications of this sort of software?
Well, there are obvious advantages to it,
such as being able to complete a sketch instantly, to see what it might look like,
or being able to visualize anything you want.
(Laughter)
However, this does come with some potential risks,
the first of which is that these AIs are biased
because, as I’ve just explained,
these AIs are trained on a human data set.
They have a skewed concept of what things should or shouldn’t look like.
For example, Midjourney is the most popular
and arguably most powerful AI image generator out there,
and when I prompted it to create an image of a handsome man,
it generated these.
Four images of a white man with brown hair.
And this isn't the AI's fault exactly,
but rather an effect of human and societal bias showing within the AI.
And we have seen examples of this in the past,
such as when facial recognition technology would only recognize white faces,
but it could pose a more serious ethical problem in the future.
As more and more people use AI to generate their images,
minority groups might be represented less and less in the media.
Another potential danger of these powerful, powerful programs
are deep fakes.
Anybody can pretty easily create a convincing deepfake of any celebrity.
For example, Kanye was never a doctor,
Taylor Swift was never a school teacher,
and the Rock was never a janitor.
(Laughter)
And actually, you don’t even have to be
a famous celebrity with tens of thousands of photos already in the database
for someone to make a deepfake of you.
In fact, most AIs can be fed just one.
For example, I’ve never been to space.
And although this can be fun to play around with sometimes,
it does mean
that anybody can spread disinformation about anybody else they have a photo of
by putting them in an incriminating or even explicit setting,
which could pose a serious danger to personal privacy.
The third and final danger of these AIs that I’m going to talk about today
is their effect on human artists.
Although it’s great to be able to complete a sketch instantly
as many times as you want,
or be able to visualize anything that you have in your head,
it does mean that to do those sorts of things,
there’s no need to hire a living, breathing human artist anymore
when you can get it done far quicker,
easier and cheaper with an AI.
The same goes for photographers.
Why would you hire an expensive photographer
when you can generate unlimited stunning images, instantly?
And although it’s too early to get real data on this sort of thing,
how AI is actually affecting human artists,
it is expected by many experts, like Greg Rutkoski,
Grace Mendenhall and Takashi Murakami,
that AI will have a significant impact on human artists, especially freelancers,
and could damage or even end some of those careers.
For example, this AI-generated artwork made by Jason Allen won
the Colorado State Fair for digital art a few years ago,
and this AI-generated photograph made by Boris Eldagsen won
the Sony World Photography Award in 2021,
both of which are human art competitions.
And although both winners turned down their prizes,
it just goes to show how indistinguishable AI art can be
from its human counterpart, as we also saw at the beginning of this talk.
So,
what should we think of these AIs?
Are they good? Are they bad?
How are they going to affect art?
Well, I think, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that these AIs are incredible
and have so many different uses and opportunities, and initiatives.
But we do need to all keep our head on a swivel about it.
As in, we need to use it ethically, ourselves,
and do our best to call out people who don’t.
And as for what it’s going to bring for the future of art?
Even though all of these experts I’ve just mentioned
are saying that demand for human art will just continue to decline, I disagree.
When the printing press was invented,
people feared it so much that they ran around destroying them.
When the digital camera and when digital art were invented,
experts said that it was too mechanical to be considered real art.
And yet, over time, and more importantly,
once the human element was injected into these things,
they became widely accepted and became just more weapons in an artist's arsenal.
And that’s why I think the same thing will happen with these AIs,
because an AI is a computer.
It’s incapable of real thought or emotion.
And at the end of the day, on its own, it can only generate visuals.
Not real art.
Thank you.
(Applause)