Will AI Art Help or Hurt Artists?

Plus how AI creates art

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Dear subscribers,

Imagine creating an entire painting by typing a few sentences.

That’s exactly how Jason Allen, an entrepreneur, created AI art that won first place in a recent competition. The internet exploded after hearing this news, with some claiming that Jason joined “a marathon and drove a Lamborghini to the finish line.”

I’ve been playing with AI art myself and it’s mindblowing. Let’s dive into:

1. How does AI art work?

2. What can AI art create?

3. Will AI art help or hurt artists?

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How does AI art work?

AI models use reverse diffusion to generate images

Here’s the “explain like I’m five” version:

1. Billions of images are scraped from the internet. These images, along with their text descriptions, are saved in a database. Here’s a data explorer for “Ghibli”.

2. The AI model uses this database to train through reverse diffusion. Diffusion adds noise to an image (from the dog to random pixels). Reverse diffusion turns noise back into an image. So if you type “Dog on the moon” the model knows how to mash “dog” and “moon” images to create a single piece of art.

corgi on the moon, very detailed, focused, colorful, trending on artstation ; 8k

To learn more, check out this thread or watch this video. To repeat the obvious:

The AI model trains by using images from other artists without their permission.

As you can imagine, this has some ethical implications.

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What can AI art create?