"It's just a tool..." "It's like using photoshop..." "Artists complained about cameras in the same way...": When it comes to art there's a huge difference between a tool that assists you while you retain full control over your output and a tool that does work for you. Generative AI does not 'assist' in the process. It does a portion of that process for you -- a very important part of the process when it comes to art. Looking up photographic references or using other art as inspiration is absolutely not comparable to telling generative AI to show you something. One requires you to still participate in the thought process of putting the pieces together using your own interpretation, the other feeds you a result that is simply the average of everything it found relatable to your prompt. You are watering down creativity/vision and letting the AI have input over the very foundation of your process -- which poisons the whole process forward.
A camera literally does the work for you.
You press a button and voila, you have an image. Rendered in full detail.
How is looking up photographic references and using AI to generate something different?
The end result is you are shown references of objects/scenes.
It's still up to you to then use this reference to create something.
"One requires thought process" no it doesn't it requires literally the same input. You open up Google and type in what you want to see and you get given images of it. That's literally no different to opening up Gen AI typing in what you want to see and getting given images of it. If you want to say you have to look through pictures on Google and pick ones that are good... The same is true for Gen AI where it churns out a lot of images and you have to pick the ones that look good.
The
ONLY issue with Gen AI comes down to how you utilize it.
We have a lot of bad actors who use it to replace the creative process, by having it outright produce the final piece, or they trace over/personally fix a generated piece. This is very bad and people who do this are rightfully called out.
But there's the ethical use where it merely assists in the creative process. Instead of roughing out sketches of different scenes or designs, you can have AI churn them out instead. You then still just use them as a reference for an idea, you don't trace over them, you don't copy them, they're just a representational example of a particular thought used to provide insight into how to decide in what way you'll create a final piece.
Of course, there is the argument that artists can just sketch things out in no time at all... Though there's always the possibility of Gen AI being more useful for non-artists. Such as a Director who might have an idea they want to convey to their artists but lacks the skill to draw it, so they use Gen AI to crank out something that conveys that idea and then the artists use it as a prompt to draw their own concepts for the Director to look through.
