Posted on November 5, 2022 Posted by John Scalzi
I’ve been playing with the AI art generator Stable Diffusion, and one of the things it lets you do is use a photo for reference. So I went ahead and popped in a couple of pictures of Krissy to see what would come up, and as a text prompt used various iterations of “queen” and other references. The pictures that came out don’t look like Krissy (nor did I expect them to, I had the setting for fidelity to the originating photo set to low), but they do look cool. What they mostly do is make me wonder which artists the AI was trained on, and if I can hire them to do some work for me.
Because, of course, that is the thing: These AI generators have been trained on various artists, many if not most still alive and producing work. I’m happy, for the purposes of my own amusement, to play with these art robots and see what comes out, and show off the results on my non-commercial outlets. But when it comes time to commission art for paid work, or for the house, or wherever, it’ll also be time for me to pay up for actual living humans making art. Support actual humans, folks! You might be one yourself, after all.
— JS