Artificial intelligence has undoubtedly taken over the digital art scene. It creates paintings at the click of a button, composes music effortlessly, and even helps you write all from a simple command. This powerful technology has captivated millions of artists from all backgrounds, and for good reason.
Just a few years before AI giants like OpenAI and Google Cloud AI began taking the world by storm, instantly generated art was mostly unheard of, but now, you need barely any skill to make a few artworks yourself. There is also an opportunity in the AI space for advanced artists, as they can use this technology to plow through all of the laborious work in designing the next great art of the world.
Of the most acclaimed AI platforms in the world, OpenAI's DALL-E is by far the most intricate software out of all of them in terms of generating images. Built with the cutting-edge GPT language model and a powerful VQ-VAE-2 autoencoder, DALL-E seamlessly creates high-quality art while continuously training itself to produce better and better outputs based on your text inputs. Its data models help it understand complex prompts (and respond to them) and associate the details of these prompts with the images that it generates.
Language models and autoencoders are a few of the countless data models that teach AI how to complete their given tasks. For instance, autoencoders are like synthesizers that shrink down information to expand back out, using an encoder, a compressed representation, a decoder, and a training system to improve its function.
Imagine you have a playlist of songs, and the encoder looks at them and figures out the key features and trends of each song. The encoder then writes down a small list of these characteristics for each song, a compressed representation of the data. This list is much shorter than describing each song in detail. Now, we have the shrunken list, and the decoder takes this list and tries to reproduce the original songs based on that list. During training, the system keeps adjusting how it encodes and decodes until it becomes good at recreating the songs accurately.
DALL-E isn't the only pioneer in digital art, as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Beatoven, and other AI software are becoming more and more capable at every passing moment, continuing to grow through ingenious data models, like auto-encoders, for example. AI outputs are constantly being refined as the technology emulates the best elements of all types of art.
You can create nearly any digital art within your heart's desire, whether you love classical art, romantic art, abstract art, pixel art, poems, or even music! Lately, AI has been used by artists and creators alike, which helped AI become widely popular not only in the art scene but in the general online scene.
However, despite AI's remarkable accolades, human artists will not be replaced nor outclassed, no matter how many times advanced AI may re-design itself. There is a fundamental of art that every artist (or any highly creative individual) is subconsciously aware of. AI can synthesize the elements of the finest art in history but cannot replicate human creativity.
The irreplaceable value of humanity's creativity comes from intertwining our logical and emotional consciousness. The complex physiological and cognitive processes within our plastic brain drive every single step we take, whether it is the thrill you feel when listening to your favorite music, the mental stimulation you experience as you're in a museum of abstract art, or even the stress you undergo as you try and understand a World War II propaganda poster.
As humans, every micro-interaction with art and the world develops our unique subjectivity. Art became such an integral part of humanity because of our burning desire to express that subjectivity in different ways, all from the foundation of a unique consciousness that cannot be copied. Artificial intelligence is powerful, but its source of strength comes from the data it is trained by. Some AI robots are built to mimic the emotions of any given person, and they can most definitely use autoencoding to mimic the style of Leonardo da Vinci, but it won't rival his creativity.
Each brushstroke that da Vinci placed on his canvas was stimulated by his human thought process, allowing him to assign a uniquely human, subjective meaning to his creations, bringing da Vinci himself to life. AI cannot even fathom such a thing as humans can, and it most likely won't be able to any time soon.
Though AI has a one major flaw, it's not bad for it to be that way. Artificial intelligence has the superpower of completing valuable work at an unreal level of speed, all without fatigue. It can also create somewhat okay artwork for anyone to share, helping even unskilled creators express their imagination.