Midjourney made its debute on March 14, 2022 (Learnopencv.com, 2023). I first heard about the generative AI through a friend last year and didn’t think much of it at first. So I set up my laptop and had to watch a video how to set up an account through Discord and thought, what if I don’t have to make paintings myself anymore but just ask the AI to make a design for me?
After figuring out how Midjourney works, I started generating objects to football stars to landscapes in different styles and was amazed how a prompt could be generated within 60 seconds (!). My experience with the generative AI was positive although I noticed it has trouble with generating humans, tekst and numbers so it’s not an end product yet in my eyes (Cetinic, 2022). But it’s definetly getting there and what would this hold for the future?
The outlook for Midjourney would have an affect on the whole painting community. Before Midjourney I would paint on canvas as well which takes quite a few hours to days to eventually finish. While this AI can do it within seconds. Obviously the first try will rarely be what you’ve had in mind, tweaking the prompts still saves so much more time. And that is what I also started doing, I started generating more images with AI instead of painting myself so it can be a bit of a discouragement to traditional painters at first. Afterwards I thought it would be better to use the generated images as inspiration and keep painting in the “traditional” way. I even went further and uploaded some AI generated images to a canvas producer and made a 1.20 m by 0.80 m physical canvas which I have in my room.
All in all, I think that eventually embracing AI as a useful tool for the future outlook could add value to our lives but shouldn’t discourage the affected fields. But rather think of novel ways how to add these tools to our lives.
References:
Cetinic, E., & She, J. (2022). Understanding and Creating Art with AI: Review and Outlook. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 18(2), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3475799
From Pixels to Paintings: The Rise of Midjourney AI Art. (2023, February 28). Retrieved October 16, 2023, from learnopencv.com website: https://learnopencv.com/rise-of-midjourney-ai-art/#:~:text=Midjourney%20first%20debuted%20on%20March
Very interesting blog post! I think painting is a very interesting application of GenAI, and definitely a field where its implications are worth discussing. Personally, I do not think that GenAI will replace the ‘traditional’ way of painting (as you so nicely put it), but as you said, I think it will take on more of a supportive role. Painting is about feelings, creativity, and an artists’ personal touch, style, and story. I do not think that AI will be able to fully mimic these features and attributes, or at least, to the extent that it will be indistinguishable from real artists’ work (of whatever level). Therefore, I believe that the role of GenAI in painting lies more in the field of providing inspiration to artists (e.g., to get over a creative block).