The Future of Artistic Creation: A Look at AI Art Tools (With a Dose of Humour)

I was playing with #Midjourney with the kids this morning to create visuals to go with jokes from a football jokebook they got for Christmas. The results were pretty impressive, given we spent 30 minutes on them.

Q: Which famous football player always leaves his stuff laying around on the floor?

A: Messi

Q: What is it called when a dinosaur gets a goal?

A: A dino-score

Q: What position do ghosts play in football?

A: Ghoulie

Q: Why did the chicken get sent off?

A: For persistent fowl play.

Final thoughts

A.I.-generated art has been around for years. But tools released this year have made it possible for rank amateurs to create complex, abstract or photorealistic works simply by typing a few words into a text box.

These apps have made many human artists understandably nervous about their own futures — why would anyone pay for art, they wonder, when they could generate it themselves? They have also generated fierce debates about the ethics of A.I.-generated art, and opposition from people who claim that these apps are essentially a high-tech form of plagiarism.

I don’t suspect AI art generation is the end of human artistry. It’s another tool that can be used, and I think it will be interesting to see what happens with it as we go along.

About Midjourney

Midjourney is an independent research lab dedicated to advancing the creative capacities of people by examining new thought mediums.

Midjourney’s AI bot creates images based on textual descriptions similar to Open AI’s DALL-E.

Midjourney’s team is led by David Holz (Founder Leap Motion, Researcher at NASA, Max Planck) and 11 full-time staff and with advisors from Apple, Github, etc.,

You can use Midjourney’s bot from the Discord server (https://discord.gg/midjourney) as well as on any other Discord server where it has been set up.