AI Text-to-Image Processors: Threat to Creatives or New Tool in the Toolbox?

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An image produced from scratch by a video game designer using an AI tool recently won an art contest at the Colorado State Fair, as has been widely reported. Some artists are alarmed, but should they be?

For several years, AI has been incorporated into the tools artists use daily, from computational photography in Apple's iPhone to image enhancement tools from Topaz Labs and Lightricks, and even apps open-source. But because an image generated entirely by an AI tool has won a competition, some see it as a tipping point - a sign of a coming AI disaster that will lead to widespread job displacement for those who work in creative fields such as graphic design and illustration, photography, journalism, creative writing, and even software development.

The winning image was generated using Midjourney, a cloud-based text-to-image tool developed by a small research lab of the same name that "explores new ways of thinking and developing the imaginative powers of the human species". Their product is a text-to-image generator, the result of AI neural networks trained on a large number of images. The company didn't disclose its tech stack, but CEO David Holz said it uses very large AI models with billions of parameters. "They are trained on billions of images." Although Midjourney only recently came out of stealth mode, hundreds of thousands of people are already using the service.

There is suddenly a proliferation of similar tools, including OpenAI's DALL-E and Google's Imagen. According to a Vanity Fair story, Imagen provides "photorealistic images [that] are even more indistinguishable from reality." Stability.ai's Stable Diffusion is another new text to image converter tool that is open-source and can run locally on a PC with a good graphics card. Stable Diffusion can also be used through art generator services including Artbreeder, Pixelz.ai and Lightricks.

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As a passionate amateur photographer who exhibits his work in galleries, I fear that these tools mark the end of photography. I decided to try Midjourney myself to see what it could produce and to better think about the possible ramifications. The following image was generated by trying variations on these text prompts: "An emerald green lake backed by steep Canadian Rockies + Some patches of snow on the mountains + Soft morning light + Mountains with green coniferous forest + Sunrise sun + 4K UHD."