🖼️ Art professors start creating guidelines for using AI.
Plus, Shutterstock inks deal with OpenAI and rolls out a generative AI toolkit.
In today’s email:
Art professors start creating guidelines for using AI.
Shutterstock inks deal with OpenAI; rolls out a generative AI toolkit.
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🤓 2 Big Stories About AI
1. Some art professors start developing guidelines for using AI.
Art instructors are grappling with how to introduce AI to students, while still learning about the subject themselves. Some professors have created AI art guidelines for their classes, while others are encouraging students to explore the technology freely for the time being.
The 🥩 of it:
New York University Professor Winnie Song has created AI art guidelines for her students in preparation for the 2023 spring semester.
With the rapid rise of automated systems such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E 2, art instructors are trying to figure out how to broach the topic with their students while still learning the intricacies of AI art themselves.
“My worry was that they would use the AI generators to come up with mood boards and references of things that don’t exist in real life. So I just set a policy where, within the bounds of this class, it’s discouraged to use the generators,” Song told Motherboard. “I really didn’t ever imagine that it would get to this point where people would be, like, trying to legitimize it as a craft.”
AI-generated art has flooded the internet since users began generating elaborate images with just a written prompt, or producing highly stylized portraits by uploading a few selfies.
With the growing sophistication of AI generators, it is also creating tangible dilemmas for art educators who want their students to develop skills that go beyond typing a phrase into a text prompt and turning it in as their own work.
The ways professors have been introducing AI art in the classroom varies between classes and disciplines, but instructors aren't the only ones thinking about the products of AI art generators. Art students are also dealing with the effects of AI art saturating the market for artists and what that could mean for their careers.
As AI-generated art becomes more prevalent, art educators are grappling with how to teach it to their students. Some educators are discouraging the use of AI generators in their classes, while others are encouraging students to explore the technology and develop their own personal approaches to it.
The use of AI generators has raised questions about the nature of art and the creative process, as well as concerns about students passing off AI-generated images as their own work.
Some educators are worried that they may not have the knowledge or resources to teach AI art effectively, and that they are being left to "pick up the pieces" after AI art generators are released by these companies.
Students are also thinking about how they could use these tools as part of their processes. Rhode Island School of Design painting student Julia Hames said they played around with an AI generator for inspiration.
“For a while, I didn’t have any ideas of what to paint, so I’d just put in random prompts into Wombo to see what it created,” Hames said. “I didn’t really like anything, but maybe it could be used for that because the images are so absurd and it just lets you into this uncanny valley that honestly humans can’t even get to sometimes.”
AI is going to stretch the possibilities for artists 10x if they learn to become great at writing prompts. Websites like Behance, Pinterest, and DeviantArt will become nonessential for inspiration when they can type exactly what they’re looking to create and watch as it come to life in seconds. If even used to build mood boards or get out of an artistic rut, I see a future where artists begin to love what AI can do for them.
2. Shutterstock inks deal with OpenAI while competitor Getty Images prepares to fight AI in court.
While Getty Images begins a long battle against AI, their biggest competitor Shutterstock just rolled out their own generative AI tool in partnership with OpenAI.
The 🥩 of it:
Shutterstock, the stock photo and media company, has announced a new feature for customers of its Creative Flow online design platform which allows users to create images based on text prompts, powered by OpenAI and Dall-E 2.
One key feature is that Shutterstock says the images are “ready for licensing” right after they’re made.
Shutterstock is embracing the use of AI to build images and is setting the company up in opposition to Getty in terms of how it is embracing the new world of AI.
Shutterstock's competitor, Getty Images, is currently involved in a lawsuit against Stability AI, maker of generative AI service Stable Diffusion, over using its images to train its AI without permission from Getty or rightsholders.
Shutterstock has announced an expanded deal with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp parent Meta, which will be using Shutterstock’s photo and other media libraries to build its AI datasets and to train its algorithms.
Shutterstock is positioning itself as an “ethical” partner, with promises of paying out to artists whose images have been used to feed these new services.
“Shutterstock has developed strategic partnerships over the past two years with key industry players like OpenAI, Meta, and LG AI Research to fuel their generative AI research efforts, and we are now able to uniquely bring responsibly-produced generative AI capabilities to our own customers,” said Paul Hennessy, Chief Executive Officer at Shutterstock. “Our easy-to-use generative platform will transform the way people tell their stories — you no longer have to be a design expert or have access to a creative team to create exceptional work.
This story reminds me of Metallica fighting Napster while younger bands learned how to use it to grow their fanbase. I think we’ll look back in 5 years and see how bad this decision was for Getty Images, while Shutterstock continues inking new deals and becoming known for their work in AI.
#teamshutterstock all the way.
