CREATIVE GENERATIVE AI
Generative AI is quickly becoming a vital tool for artists. Read on to learn about what generative AI art is, how to create it, and how you can use it in your practice.
Prompt: Three eiffel towers in desert with river; photorealism
There is more than one kind of generative artificial intelligence.
For writing anything from poetry to an email, there are large language models, which are trained on text, and help people generate copy. To create illustrations, painterly creations, logos, and more, diffusion models trained on images help people make artwork of all kinds. Many of the popular generative AI tools use one of these models.
Artists use generative AI to make a variety of different artwork, from poems and stories to creations that look like analog paintings or photographs, and more. The speed and flexibility of generative AI enables creators to jumpstart and finish projects more quickly and opens up all kinds of exciting new avenues for creative expression, like an AI painting or surreal imagery.
People create art from the things that surround them — trees in the forest, cityscapes, their own reflection in a mirror. Generative artificial intelligence also takes in lots of information in the form of words and images, and uses those to create artwork from a prompt.
The technology that powers this ability is called a neural network. A neural network is a mathematical system — an algorithm — that finds patterns in big sets of data. When you prompt an AI generator to depict a tree, it’s using the information it has learned about what trees look like to create a new image. And it’s your guidance as the artist that refines those images even further – telling it to generate a pink fir tree, for instance, or a tree blooming with tropical flowers. These tools are packed with information, but it takes the imagination of the user to create artificial intelligence art.
Artists have been experimenting with forms of artificial intelligence in their work for decades, pondering the implications and AI art use cases of such technology long before the general public was.
Artist Vera Molnár began experimenting with early programming languages to produce randomly generated artwork in 1968. Considered a pioneer in generative art, her geometric creations are included in major museum collections.
Flash forward a few decades, and you can find AI generated art within the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2023, the museum displayed the exuberant, ever-changing artwork of Refik Anadol on an enormous screen. The abstract creation was made with artificial intelligence trained on artworks held within the museum’s collection.
AI artworks have been auctioned by Sotheby’s and exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Artificial intelligence has been folded into arts course curriculum at institutions like Columbia University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
These are just a few examples of how artificial intelligence has impacted creative work. Like other technological advances, AI has inspired artists to explore both how art is created and what is defined as art.
Prompt: a beautiful gallery oil painting, red, jade, orange and grey, sharp lines and blended tones
Generative adversarial networks (GANs): GANs are a set of two neural networks, trained on the same data, that work together. One generates a photorealistic image and the other tries to figure out if that image is real or created. For instance, the first may generate an image of a horse and the second would try to determine if the image was a photograph or digitally created. This helps the system make more realistic images.
Variational autoencoders (VAEs): A variational autoencoder is made up of two neural networks working in tandem, each with a different job. One is an encoder, which takes in information, and the other is a decoder, which is able to reinterpret that information into all new content. Like GANs, they produce photorealistic images.
Image synthesis: Image synthesis describes the act of creating new images from large datasets of other images.
Creative coding: Artists who create the programs that generate their artwork are described as creative coders. The intent of creative coding is not to produce a functional result, but an expressive one.
With generative AI it’s easy to get outside your artistic comfort zone. Explore new looks with Firefly’s AI image generator by choosing options from the Style menu like Steampunk, Layered paper, or Stippling.
Use generative AI to quickly create mockups for clients or reference images for your artwork. Use Firefly powered tools like Generative Recolor and Text to Pattern (beta) within Illustrator to quickly iterate on your art and create stylish motifs.
Invite a friend to edit one of your artworks using Generative Fill in Photoshop, a Firefly powered tool that lets you select any part of an image and replace it using a simple text prompt. With generative AI, you can create with others like never before.
Generative AI gives you access to more types of artistic expression. A skilled graphic designer using AI can try their hand at making dramatic edits to a photograph or a total beginner can experiment with multiple kinds of artmaking using Text to Image.
Prompt: infinite intricacy fractal pattern, hyper-realistic, science_fiction, 4k
