Over the past few months, we have witnessed an incredible proliferation of AI-generated images across social media. As the novelty factor is slowly wearing off, it is time to talk about the impact on creative industries.
Recently, an artwork generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) has won an art contest at the Colorado State Fair in Las Vegas, US. Entitled Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, Jason Allen’s work was produced using Midjourney, an AI image generator, and it was awarded the blue ribbon in a category open to emerging artists.
It promptly set the art world ablaze, splitting the crowd and dragging into the conversation a broad range of voices—from art pundits, designers to AI ethicists. While the aesthetic merit of the outcome can hardly be contested, the tug of war over intellectual authorship vs. technical ownership rages on.
This conundrum is not new. In the past, the invention of photography arguably contributed to the evolution of painting from a pursuit of faithful reproduction to one of creative interpretation. Rather than displacing artistic merit, a disruptive new medium could boost it into new directions.
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As an architect and spatial designer, I can’t help but wonder how AI will impact my profession’s future. Before I elaborate further, I will make a voluntary admission: I am all for using AI. I started exploring Midjourney, an AI art generator, as soon as it became broadly available through Discord, and I found myself down the AI rabbit hole within a matter of minutes.
Visual communication is essential for designers, and here I was, able to generate with a few lines of text the most unpredictable—if not utterly unlikely—spatial environments. What could have taken hours or days to draw, model, and render mere months ago, now was being generated in front of my eyes in a matter of minutes. It all seemed suspiciously easy.
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