For many years now, artists have continued to utilize the most recent technologies in their designs and ensure that they are up to recent trends. From clay molding, stone carving, and cave painting to the recent approaches that are used in digital art and illustrations, as well as AI-generated paintings. There has been a continuous shift from one trend to another among artists globally.
Today, artificial intelligence makes digital art and illustrations to feel a lot different from what it used to be. There are many computer algorithms that now take up roles that were mostly covered by human power in the past years. This goes beyond the conventional approaches that are used in streamlining certain design methods.
Most of the time, AI helps in discovering solutions even without any form of human intervention or AI in digital art and illustration. Another thing to note is that AI algorithms now help in generating artistic works that are mostly seen as the peak of human creativity. This only leaves one to wonder what role artists will play in the nearest future when artificial intelligence handles digital art and illustrations.
In addition, it’s worth noting that traditional portray and artificial intelligence portrays are interrelated, and they are mostly complementary to each other. With that said, we’ll continue with the key things you should know about artificial intelligence and the future of digital art and illustrations.
How artificial intelligence is revolutionizing digital art and illustration
Apart from the use of different AI tools, it’s worth noting that AI helps in ensuring that artists stay creative, which is a great addition to the art business world today. Its potential in art allows for constant diversification within the business landscape in artificial intelligence.
There are so many ways that artificial intelligence enhances digital art and illustration, as well as introduces multiple changes for artists. This includes the following:
- AI makes it easier for artists to predict the price of a masterpiece, thanks to the assistance of predictive pricing that AI offers.
- In addition to predicting and evaluating the fee of different artwork, it also helps in forecasting the value of future artwork piece
- AI assistance allows artists to avoid repetitive tasks. It also makes it possible for artists to devote time to focus on newer and innovative ideas.
- Data is a core thing for AI tools, and it makes it easier for artists to feed data and obtain a better outcome. With this strategy, AI tools can mimic the styles that are used in different artworks.
How AI has made a difference in the digital art and illustration world in 2022
One of the indicative signs that the future of digital art and illustration is promising can be seen from the different achievements that AI has made within the year 2022. These differences are all very unique and a pointer to the fact that there’s more to expect in the nearest future.
Here are some of the ways that AI has made a difference in 2022:
Sketch-and-paint GAN (SAPGAN)
Alice Xue, an undergrad scholar at Princeton University, proposed the GAN-based model – SAPGAN. This is a model that helps in generating Chinese landscape artwork, and it doesn’t require any conditional input.
Basically, SAPGAN contains GANs, PaintGAN, which is used after the part-to-portray information, and SketchGAN for a specific part of maps. Researchers show that more than 240 Visual Turing Tests on SAPGAN artworks show that they are not correct compared to human artwork. This is with 55% frequency that outperforms artwork from GANs baseline.
Banksy street art
This change was seen in September 2022, and it was introduced by the artist Banksy and this was after a strenuous AI training routine around the use of street digital artwork and illustrations with different iterations. Today, there are more than 256 masterpieces that are available for sale, thanks to this innovation.
Al Gahaku
This is a common AI artist tool on the internet today, and it works by converting images into renaissance paintings. Al Gahaku was introduced by Sato, a full-stack developer, in March 2022, and this was via Twitter, the micro-blogging platform.
AI art studio platform
This concept was introduced into the digital art and illustration scene in May last year. It is an AI art studio that allows digital artists to easily discover the use of generative AI as the work within their innovative process. Basically, this is to ensure that AI is accessible to artists, considering the different cases that they are faced with regularly.
AI tools that recreate art
MIT researchers in June last year introduced a completely different AI machine that can help artists easily synthesize time-lapse movies of paintings. Today, this is now called Time craft, and it is a neural community version that is utilized widely in sequential conditional variation auto-encoder framework.
AI and the future of digital artists
Digital art and illustrations have been utilized for many years now, and it has seen record sales of more than $69 million, different endorsements, and blockchain from different big names.
Today, a lot of money is being generated on the blockchain, and there are many speculators and collectors that are attracted to it more than ever. Within this growing trend and increasing diversity, like the non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This is now considered to be a bullet-proof digital signature that offers more authenticity to digital art and illustration.
Another interesting thing is that NFTs help in connecting artists and collectors together, and this eliminates the need for middlemen. It’s also a lot easier for digital artists to make money directly from the sale of their work today, especially after it has been sold. One of the ways digital artists now make money from their artwork is by selling them on stock illustration platforms like illustAC.
Even though NFTs have their own shortcomings today, they have significantly helped in propelling digital art and illustrations. This leaves one to wonder if NFTs will be around in the next 50 years and beyond.
Understanding when digital artists started making history
It’s hard to say who the first digital artist was, but going back in history, digital art and illustration gained entry to the design scene during the 1980s. This was the time when computer engineers started using digital art and illustrations to describe AARON, which was a paint program.
For emphasis, digital art and illustration is an art that is generated by a computer, drawn or scanned by a tablet, and in many cases, it is with the aid of a mouse or stylo. This is the simplest definition of digital art that you can get today.
During the mid-1980s, Andy Warhol, an American artist, director, and film producer created multiple digital artworks and doodles, ad this was via a Commodore Amiga home computer. In the 1990s, it was already possible to download videos and media files on the computer, and this offered more creative freedom to artists.
The talk about digital art and illustration is not restricted to these origins alone. We can go as far back as the 1960s when John Whitney used different mathematical functions in creating amazing artworks. Many years have passed, and now, we are basically on the threshold of artificial intelligence-powered editing tools that artists now use in creative ways to express their respective ideas.
Animations and motion graphics are other areas of interest that can be traced back in history. John Whitney was also the first to use the term motion graphics in 1960, and this was to design a graphic that was put into action. Basically, motion graphics utilize the typography, photography, and illustrations to deliver visually rich compositions with impressive storytelling. It involved creating a unique interaction between illustrated objects, backgrounds, and characters.
Understanding the risk of commercializing AI-generated images
AI-generated images are quickly becoming popular today because of the increasing availability of text-to-image models. With these models, anyone can create images from a text prompt. This also brings multiple possibilities for users, especially in terms of generating content for commercial purposes.
Even though users can have the right to commercialize images, there are still legal concerns around AI-generated images. This is mostly in terms of who actually owns the images and if there’s any infringement on copyrighted works. There are different reports online showing that people risk getting sued from using AI-generated images, but here’s what you should know.
Copyrighted images
Text-to-image generators like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E understand the relationship between images and the words that describes them. After a user types a prompt, the AI model proceeds to create images according to the prompt. This is mostly based on how the model describes the text and combines different attributes, styles, and concepts.
For example, a tool like DALL-E 2 is only trained on 650m images, and this is from a combination of different sources. Even though they are licensed, they don’t make their dataset public, which raises concerns about the presence of copyrighted materials in them.
These are the main concerns around commercializing AI-generated images. These tools are tried with random images, and in some cases, they are likely to be copyright protected.
Lack of fair use
From a copyright perspective, there are so many problems that can result from the use of AI-generated images. Basically, artwork that appears to be protected will need to be transformative to be legally protected. If an artwork qualifies as fair use within the legal defense, it means that the use of such artwork wouldn’t be considered a copyright infringement.
However, there are a lot of confusion around fair use protection, especially when it deals with AI generated artwork.
Lack of ownership or legal support
Another point of consideration is with legal support or ownership. Most of the AI models that you’ll find mostly claim that anyone can use the images they generate for different purposes. However, there’s still confusion about the party that owns the image.
OpenAI usually specifies that users can lose certain rights, especially if they breach the content policy or terms of the company. With other AI models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, it’s different, and ownership mostly lies with the company, even if they are for commercial purposes. These are also concerns around the use of for AI generated images, especially for commercial purposes.
Conclusion
The use of AI generated artwork usually raises questions about who should own the copyright. Today, AI is widely used in creating images, most of which are inspired by human-generated art. These are the main reasons why there are growing concerns around who owns the copyright of AI-generated artwork.
However, despite all of this, what’s certain is that AI holds great promises for digital art and illustrations, and this is why we have taken the time to go through some of the most important things that you should know about AI and what the future holds for digital art and illustrations.
Today, there are so many ways that people apply digital art and illustrations in their designs, and many of these are AI-generated, or they can be half-half. We believe that in the near future, AI images will find their own positions with no more copyright concerns. However, in the mean time, stock images still have their own values for commercial use.
If you are wondering where you can get illustrations for commercial use, we recommend checking illustAC.