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Throughout human history, technological progress has made some workers obsolete while empowering others. Workers in industries such as transport and manufacturing have already been strongly impacted by advancements in automation and artificial intelligence.
Today, it’s the creative sector that’s on the line. Visual artists, designers, illustrators and many other creatives have watched the arrival of AI text-to-image generators with a mix of awe and apprehension.
This new technology has sparked debate around the role of AI in visual art and issues such as style appropriation. Its speed and efficiency have triggered fears of redundancy among some artists, while others have embraced it as an exciting new tool.
What is an AI text-to-image generator?
An AI text-to-image generator is a software that creates an image from a user’s text input, which is referred to as a prompt. These AI tools are trained on huge datasets of pairs of text and images.
DALL.E 2 and Midjourney have not yet made their datasets public. However, the popular open-source tool Stable Diffusion has been more transparent about what it trains its AI on.
“We did not go through the Internet and find the images ourselves. That is something that others have already done,” said Professor Björn Ommer, who heads the Computer Vision and Learning Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Ommer worked on the research underpinning Stable Diffusion.
“There are now big data sets which have been scraped from the Internet, publicly available. And these we used, mainly the LAION datasets, which are out there, consisting of billions of images that we can train upon,” he told Euronews Next.
LAION is a non-profit organisation that collects image-text pairs on the Internet. It then organises them into datasets based on factors such as language, resolution, likelihood of having a watermark and predicted aesthetic score, such as the Aesthetic Visual Analysis (AVA) dataset which contains photographs that have been…
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