For some of months I’ve been privately experimenting with Midjourney, and I’m constantly witnessing an enthralling, almost incredible evolution. As I’m using it quite intensively (2638 images generated so far) I’ve reason to believe that I’m also partaking in its ‘training’ 🙂
Self-awareness?
That’s a big word and IMO applying it to today’s AI would (still) be a gross overkill. However in those three months the improvement in composition and quality of the outcome were really astonishing – the ‘thing’ is definitely growing up and learning a lot!
As it may be expected, pretty often there’s plenty of post-processing and upscaling work to do and you end up with an image quite different from the original one. But not always. Sometimes all you need to do is to prompt the bot with the proper wording over and again until you like it, and then to touch up the final outcome just a little: in the end you find yourself thinking “OMG, that’s exactly what I had in mind!”.
I’ve read a lot about millions (or billions) of images being ‘stolen’ from their creators to train the AI – implying that everyone should be entitled to the correspondent royalties. But is it really theft, or are those images just used as machine-learning to point the AI towards some kind of independent creativity?
I’d rather go with the latter, also in view of the incredibly fast evolution of Midjourney.
Just consider…
Think for a moment: when you take a pic of a cathedral do you really wonder if you should pay a royalty to the bishop, or maybe to the architect who designed it? And does such a thought bother you when you photograph the work of a painter from the past, or a car whose logo you’ll remove in the post-processing, or someone on the street who agrees to it with a smile?
Now don’t you tell me that you aren’t drawing inspiration from somewhere when you create a work of your own – maybe from dozens of watermarked images, or from the pictures on an ancient book, or from a scene you just saw and found worth using, or, or…
Drawing inspiration is a human quality and this sort of empathy is the very base of creativity: you create from the world that surrounds you – no world, no creation.
I’ll agree, it’s quite disconcerting, even disturbing, to apply such concepts to a non-human entity, a mere ‘thing’ made of metal and silicon chips. But we shouldn’t forget that this ‘thing’ has been designed and made by humans, and humans are those who use it as the tool it is.
Setting aside philosophy, since this kind of images of mine were received well by Adobe and started selling promisingly I selected some and uploaded them to my Gameover’s Atelier. For the time being I limited my choice to simple subjects that I however find attractive and looked at from an unusual point of view. Should anyone be interested, they can be purchased pretty cheap – outrageously cheap indeed (50% down!) if bought before coming Christmas 😀
I had plenty of fun choosing and commenting them, and I’ll keep adding more and more every day.
Note: the opening image on top was initially created by me with Midjourney’s bot and carefully touched up. The Florentine merchant depicted there doesn’t exist and never did; nor can you buy a “Pear Computer”, to the best of my knowledge 🙂