Visual artists draw from visual references, not words, as they imagine their work. So when language is in the driver’s seat of making art, it erects a barrier between the artist and the canvas.
I’ve gotten into AI assisted art in the past month. I would agree that a pure text-to-image approach does imply a lot of creative control given over to the AI tool - sometimes that results in happy accidents, sometimes that leads to very generic looking generations.
There are a wealth of tools and techniques at an artists fingertips (and free or cheap) that help constrain the generation to a visual thinker’s sketch or apply style to the image. Most AI platforms incorporate image-to-image and serviceable artworks can be generated from a very rough sketch of a composition. Text-to-image can be constrained with extensions like controlnet (automatic 1111, stable diffusion) where you can take a reference image or a black and white image of diffused shapes indicating depth and have the generated image tied such that you can have very predictable compositions.
Pure text-to-image, I see the writer’s point. However that’s really only scratching the surface of what can be done and not a fair assessment of “AI art isn’t suited for visual thinkers” in my opinion. Taking an AI output and tossing it into photoshop (or Krita) as a foundation to be worked on is also a valid path - you could then take that worked image and then do image-to-image on it and see what you get. To me, it’s more of a collaboration with the tool of AI rather than an all powerful genie. If I have a strong visual idea in my head, I sketch it, or even photograph me doing it and use that as a base for the AI to work with.
I will add though, that the downside of AI assisted workflows is feeling less connected to the art - I didn’t spend the time with the image to feel out each piece and it’s quirks. The image appears, and I have to pour over it and touch it up to feel more ownership of the result.
Add comment