Artists want to be able to post their work online without the fear “of feeding this monster” that could replace them.
Robots would come for humans’ jobs. That was guaranteed. The assumption generally was that they would take over manual labor, lifting heavy pallets in a warehouse and sorting recycling.
Now significant advances in generative artificial intelligence mean robots are coming for artists, too.
A.I.-generated images, created with simple text prompts, are winning art contests, adorning book covers, and promoting “The Nutcracker,” leaving human artists worried about their futures.
The threat can feel highly personal. An image generator called Stable Diffusion was trained to recognize patterns, styles and relationships by analyzing billions of images collected from the public internet, alongside text describing their contents.
Among the images it trained on were works by Greg Rutkowski, a Polish artist who specializes in fantastical scenes featuring dragons and magical beings.
Seeing Mr. Rutkowski’s work alongside his name allowed the tool to learn his style effectively enough that when Stable Diffusion was released to the public last year, his name became shorthand for users who wanted to generate dreamy, fanciful images.
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