At the Tate Modern in London last month, visitors walked through the exhibition rooms soaking in the short, multicolored brushstrokes with which French artist Paul Cezanne created his still lifes, portraits and landscapes and marveling at his creativity, talent and impact on 20th-century art.
But now, a century-plus after his death, artificial intelligence technology is able to replicate his work in seconds.
In fact, today’s AI systems can create any image in any style — from impressionism to cubism to pop art. All they need is a detailed prompt.
The creative world is abuzz with potential. Previous progress in AI made it possible for computers to compete with humans in analytical areas, leaving creative work to the artists, writers, and designers. Now, however, the new field of “generative AI” is giving machines the ability to create works that are completely new, drawing inspiration from the vast amount of online data and knowledge that has accumulated over centuries.
This has the potential to revolutionize human creativity, experts say, making professionals from software engineers to writers to artists dramatically reassess how they work.
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The incursion of AI into the arts raises questions about how important human input will continue to be in the creative process. Can there be art without an artist? If the art is created by a machine, to whom does it belong? What are the hidden dangers to society and humanity? The Times of Israel spoke to experts to try and shed light on some of these issues.
The overall conclusion is that the creative industry has no choice but to embrace AI. Rather than ousting human artists, the technology will collaborate with them to create new kinds of works, further stretching their inventiveness and creativity and together creating something entirely new.
‘Paint by numbers’ in the AI age
Artificial intelligence — the tech that gives computers the ability to learn — has been around since the 1950s. But over the last decade the field has enjoyed a renaissance made possible by the huge amount of data available online and the higher computational power of chips. Advances in the field over the last 10 years have enabled computers to analyze datasets and find useful patterns to solve problems, with the machine often outwitting the human brain. Creativity, however, has remained mostly in the domain of artists.
Now, software programs such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are making huge strides forward in creativity. And while these tools used to be available only to researchers and a small group of invitation-only testers, an earthquake is underway: They are being publicly released and can be easily used by all, in what some say is becoming a “democratization” of creativity.
An image generated by DALL-E, a deep learning model developed by OpenAI, to the prompt: ‘Dutch football team rejoicing in World Cup win in the style of Van Gogh.’ (Image generated with the assistance of DALL-E)
On November 30, OpenAI, an AI research company co-founded by Elon Musk in late 2015 and backed by Microsoft, …….