#25: AI-created Images

Ian Bowie
Hello and welcome to AI unfiltered with me Ian Bowie and our resident expert, Michael Stormbom, where we will be talking about everything to do with AI in our modern digital society and what the future holds for all of us.

Ian Bowie
DALL-E is ready. I got my invitation and I’ve been playing and I think you have too, haven’t you.

Michael Stormbom
I have indeed. Yeah, way too much.

Ian Bowie
Probably more than me. Yeah. I’ll tell you what, though. I mean, I think it’s absolutely incredible. I mean, this this this this technology that makes it work oh, my goodness, blew me socks off. But I mean, basically, for anybody who doesn’t know what DALL-E is. It quite simply is an AI art program. You give it some instructions of whatever kind of picture you would like it to create for you in whatever style so you know, you want manga style, comic book style, traditional style. It’ll do it for you. The problem that I’ve been having is is coming up with the kind of instructions that it will draw what I had in my head because it gives you lots and lots of examples. I mean, there’s amazing pictures as examples on DALL-E and you think my God, you know, whoever came up with, I guess it’s the developers probably. And I’ve seen some of the stuff that you’ve done Michael and its streets ahead of what I’ve been able to come up with so far.

Michael Stormbom
I did one where it was create a picture of an otter riding a wave in the style of Hokusai. So then it generated that, so was pretty, pretty impressive. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
No, but I mean, it’s it’s just amazing. So much fun to play with.

Michael Stormbom
It is so much fun to play with and it gets quite good results. But well, it’s all about the data. So they have access to large amounts of images with sort of descriptive captions. So they basically create a model that sort of goes in the opposite direction and you give it the the caption and then it generates the image from that. Okay, that takes a little bit of like you have an idea and then you’re write out the idea so possibly takes a couple of tries until you get it into such wording that DALL-E will understand it the way you understand it.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, yeah. Is there a foreign language version or is it only in English?

Michael Stormbom
I believe they’ve only trained it with with English. But I mean, you could conceivably just you know had some machine translation to it, and then that will be it.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, well, depending on the accuracy of the machine translation. Possibly, but ya know, so you could input, draw 1970s Formula One car driven by a monkey…

Michael Stormbom
in the style of Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali.

Ian Bowie
Or abstract. Yeah. That’s quite cool, isn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
Besides DALL-E, there are also a couple of other solutions available to the public that I think we should mention. So one is DreamStudio, which currently has an open beta you can sign up for on the web, and the other one is Midjourney, which you can reach through the Discord messaging platform. So that’s three players being made available to Republic in the past few months alone, so starting to be quite a crowded market. And I think what’s especially exciting about this all, for me, at least as an ML practitioner, is that you can freely download and use the machine learning model that powers DreamStudios application. And with enough machine power, you can even run it on your own computer. And it’s fairly easy to do so even without a lot of experience in machine learning and with just some basic coding experience, so I think it opens up a lot of interesting prospects in being able to work with the model directly. There are of course terms and conditions and safeguards to avoid generating offensive content . Well, of course be afraid of misuse, you know, deep fakes and all that sort of stuff.

Ian Bowie
People will start copying Picassos. To be quite honest with you..

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, well, I mean, of course, there’s the potential of misuse for example, I don’t know create an image of Barack Obama clubbing a baby seal or something, right. Or something, I mean, yeah, right. For the record, he has not clubbed a baby seal. But I mean, as an example of potential misuse of this.

Ian Bowie
I mean, come on. I mean, you know, you’ve you’ve only got to look at cartoon artists and what they get up to, but of course, it’s obviously a cartoon so it’s not looking like a photograph or anything like that.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I think yeah, for one thing is of course if you do stuff for satirical purposes. But of course, a means of manipulation. There’s of course, well, of course, I mean, nothing prevents a person who’s decently skilled at Photoshop to do that anyway, but….

Ian Bowie
That just made me think of it though, because what one of the magazines that I subscribe to, I don’t know if I should be doing saying this. It’s called The Spectator. It’s Britain’s oldest magazine, actually. And their cartoonists are nothing short of amazing. I mean, I mean, they’re incredible. And if you’ve got this DALL-E 2, you only need imagination. You tell it in the style of a cartoon, and you’ve got your front page cover.

Michael Stormbom
Theoretically, yes. I do think it’s important to point out that all these models have, of course been trained on on existing images. So photos that someone has taken, paintings that someone has painted, illustrations of someone has drawn and so forth. So human beings and human imagination, and creativity. It’s all about the data, and an enormous amount of human work that has gone into creating that data. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, of course, it can, of course, be a tool for example, conceptual designs, for example, why not?

Ian Bowie
Again, you see a tool for conceptual designs, then it’s suddenly going after the engineers and the designers, because then anybody can become a designer. You’ve just got to have an imagination for something that you want to create. Yeah, you tell the algorithm and presto, you’ve got it.

Michael Stormbom
So this can be a tool for sort of just realizing that imagination or visualizing. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. I mean to somebody like me, who has a huge amount of imagination, and creativity.

Michael Stormbom
But yeah, I would…

Ian Bowie
I would love to get my hands on something like this.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, if you’re a children’s book author and just write the illustrations put in the text and then it does the illustrations for you, in the style of famous children’s book illustrator…

Ian Bowie
Or in the style of whatever Yeah, I suppose. Quentin Blake, you know, who illustrated most of Roald Dahl stuff, so yeah, absolutely.

Michael Stormbom
Or we’ve been talking about the, like, different concepts for card games. So how about the algorithm designs the cards.

Ian Bowie
Designs, the actual playing cards?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, so you have to you know what the cards will say and you tell it to, okay, draw me this and put it on the card.

Ian Bowie
Or an original set of tarot cards because I’m quite into that as well.

Michael Stormbom
AI tarot cards would be interesting.

Ian Bowie
Wouldn’t it just? Oh, I hope they commercialize this.

Michael Stormbom
Well, I mean, that’s the whole point,they’re gonna start charging people for using it of course yeah.

Ian Bowie
Well, yeah, of course. But I mean, still, depending on how much you know, the upfront fee is. But I can, oh, I can see huge amounts of potential for something like that would be quite interesting actually, is to take one of my already illustrated stories, and just give it the story and see what alternative illustrations it would come up with. Yeah, that will be quite interesting. And then you can do a like for like comparison.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, why not?

Ian Bowie
Wow, that’s absolutely amazing. Yeah,

Michael Stormbom
It would be interesting to try with different types of texts input as well.

Ian Bowie
Film scripts.

Michael Stormbom
Film scripts. Yeah. And then you can take it one step further and like make animated movies out of it automatically. Generated voices generated dialogue, generated everything.

Ian Bowie
Whoa.

Michael Stormbom
Wouldn’t that be cool.

Ian Bowie
That will be amazing.

Michael Stormbom
We could create our own animated…,

Ian Bowie
Pixar. With two people. Yeah, it is true innit. Yeah. You could. I mean, Pixar Studios only needs two people.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, well, I mean, there’s quite a lot of people working on those movies.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, yeah. There. But we would just need lots and lots of algorithms. Yeah. Yeah. Write me a story about toys that come alive at night.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, so first, the scripts and then you take then you take DALL-E. Just the next version.

Ian Bowie
And then it drops it off. Blimey. Yeah. But of course, I mean, it would draw it probably wouldn’t be able to animate it, would it?

Michael Stormbom
Well, not at the moment, but imagine the future in the future and animations automatically create your

Ian Bowie
your own cartoon books out? Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
And create your own comic book. Absolutely.

Ian Bowie
There’s a whole new world opening up to me here.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. Actually, that would be quite interesting. I mean, not at the comic book market is all that large, but generate the images automatically based on the script.

Ian Bowie
You have or the I don’t know how big the comic book market is. But I know there are a couple of specialists. I mean, for example, in Helsinki, there’s a specialist comic bookstore. I know in the old town of Stockholm, there is another one. So I think it’s a niche kind of market. So it’s still you know, it’s a market.

Michael Stormbom
I think the artwork is the most difficult part

Ian Bowie
What is the genre illustrated novels. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Illustrated novels. Yeah. Graphic novels.

Ian Bowie
Graphic novels. Thank you. Yeah, I think graphic novels. Again, that’s another maybe niche market. Yeah. And then of course, we go back to my favorite chess, not educational materials. Yeah. You know, they’ve done studies with children who have for example, learning difficulties. That if you turn material into a comic strip style, suddenly you’ve cracked it, and they enjoy it. They love it. They learn from it. It’s just about how you present the material.

Michael Stormbom
We should make the AI Unfiltered comic book where we present different…

Ian Bowie
I think we should. Yes, yeah, why not? Be a laugh?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, if we can get some algorithm to generate images for us as well, then we’re all set.

Ian Bowie
It’s absolutely incredible. And I mean, I mean, I don’t know what other people might think. But I mean, to me, this is just another creative tool. I mean, yeah, for sure. I don’t have a problem with this. You know that if, because again, you know, it’s not… Okay. So the tool writes the story, but there would be no story without your creative imagination. Or prompts. Absolutely. You know, so, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
I don’t know. Did we speak about this one? There was this piece of, of AI artwork that was sold at auction for $400,000. So an AI generated, like painting, sold at Christie’s for like, 400,000.

Ian Bowie
And it wasn’t an NFT, no?

Michael Stormbom
No, no, not an NFT but just an AI generated painting, and I think also sold as such, so I thought it was quite interesting. That was a couple years ago, so was it… I’m gonna just go look at my notes here… in 2018. So that’s a lifetime ago in in the AI world. But yeah.

Ian Bowie
Well, I mean, it’s what we were talking about the other day about writing a best selling novel, isn’t it? And using AI to do it. We talked about this. Our idea wasn’t to tell anybody. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Except we did. Yeah. But same principle. There’s actually a teaching the algorithm with things that have been done before.

Ian Bowie
Do you not think that that is just an example of the fact that there is just… Well, I was gonna say far too much money in the world, but actually, in reality, I think it’s more that there is a lot of money in the world and a lot of it seems to be in the wrong hands. I mean, 400,000 for something that’s been generated by a machine Yeah, I think that’s a bit over the top.

Michael Stormbom
That is a shall we say a tad over top, for sure. I assume, of course, the novelty of the thing, I guess affects the pricing as well, but yeah, well, is anything worth 400,000…

Ian Bowie
You’ve got bloody paintings going for 40 million, never mind 400,000. But I mean, all right. If it went for 400,000, there must have been an agreement with the owner of the algorithm that they wouldn’t create another identical painting or drawing or….

Michael Stormbom
I’m not sure it’s some sort of art collective that was behind it. They have done other like AI generated artwork as well. So I guess that’s…

Ian Bowie
I’m just trying to, I mean, what why would you pay 400,000 dollars or euros or whatever it was?

Michael Stormbom
Why, indeed, we can only speculate.

Ian Bowie
Well, no, I’m just trying to think you know that. I mean, you could start churning them out, couldn’t you? I mean, all right. That’s 400,000. Let’s make another one.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, that’s the beauty of AI, run the algorithm a second time…

Ian Bowie
The more there is of something the less it less valuable it becomes. It’s supply and demand isn’t it. If you’ve got something original, long as you can create value in the minds of enough suckers with enough money. You’re going to sell it, but if suddenly there’s 100,000 of these things out there. Their value diminishes.

Michael Stormbom
Well, yeah, I mean, so I mean, of course, this particular artwork might be unique, but of course, then the very concept of AI generated art is surely not unique anymore. Or even artwork generated by that very algorithm.

Ian Bowie
I’ve got, I’ve got a friend and he’s an artist. And he creates what he calls digital art. So basically, he creates paintings on his computer, and then prints them out onto canvases, and then sells them. And we had this discussion years ago, because he felt a little bit that it was fraudulent. You know, he was saying, Well, do you think this is really art and I said, Well, you know, you’re creating it using a computer admittedly, but it’s still your creative talent, which is responsible for the end result. So as far as I’m concerned, yes, it is art.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I mean, the computer is just a tool. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
But he still has a problem charging big money for his works. I mean, you know, he can he can print things out onto canvases, and that they can be two meters by two meters, you know, so quite substantial pieces of work. But he still doesn’t feel comfortable asking more than maybe seven or 800 euros for something if it had been painted using acrylics or oils directly onto a canvas of that size would easily come with a price tag of several 1000. But for some reason, it’s not just his head, and he’s the artist. It’s in many people’s heads that somehow the value diminishes because it was originally created on a computer and then printed off on a printer. So…

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I wonder if it’s also then about the scarcity. So I mean, you can then easily create an identical copy of the other thing, couldn’t you?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, but he doesn’t I mean, but basically, you know, he prints one off. That is the original. And that’s it.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, but does he then destroy the source files after the fact?

Ian Bowie
Of course, I mean, it’s a trust thing, isn’t it really, I suppose. Of course he wants to keep them as a portfolio. But it’s the same thing with this 400,000 euro algorithm derived picture. You know, if…

Michael Stormbom
You just had to take their word for it, that they’re not gonna make a… No, indeed.

Ian Bowie
You’d have to destroy the algorithm wouldn’t even really because that’s the thing that created the picture.

Michael Stormbom
Well, basically, yes, yeah.

Ian Bowie
We’re not going to do that. Are you? I mean, goodness knows what that cost to develop. So I mean, you could actually now, I mean, the latest thing seems to be these NFTs, non-fungible tokens. So you just need an algorithm to start churning those things out, and off you go. You know, I mean, but I mean, it’s like you’ve got a worker who can work for you 24/7, 365 days.

Michael Stormbom
Well, yeah. I mean, if you have that, an AI algorithm that can churn out paintings. You don’t need to fetch 400,000 every single time. But if you can fetch 40,000 every time.

Ian Bowie
Or even 400 and just sell a 1000. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
And you can easily have the algorithm generate a thousand paintings per day, easy peasy.

Ian Bowie
And then so let’s say you have 200 pieces. You put it together as a collection. And just sell it to the first sucker with a couple of 100,000 that comes along.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, well, I mean, we can sell the, we can call the source recording of this podcast episode. We can put it up and attach an NFT to it and sell that as the original source recording.

Ian Bowie
Absolutely. The original source recording. I like it.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. Well, that’s one way to monetize to podcast. Let’s think on that one.

Ian Bowie
We are now entering a realm and I think it started with gaming, where people are willing to spend real money buying things that don’t actually exist.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, and I mean, that’s common in all those mobile games and in several of those games to have like, multiple different currencies and tokens and bucks and, and whatnot. So no, definitely yeah. And I mean, that’s all created to get people to spend real money on the game. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, I think there’s also, I mean, we we have spoken about AI, sort of replacing human beings as the creators, but, I mean, I think there’s also an opportunity for combining or creating new forms of art, AI enhanced art in a way.

Ian Bowie
Doesn’t even need to be out. I was just actually looking on the table here. All the funny little things that I’ve got lying around, like my toy cars, haha. And you know if you would hook up an AI system to a 3D printer, you could actually get the AI to then start designing funny little things that people might like to buy and then print them off.

Michael Stormbom
Well, conceivably, you could. I mean, the step from AI-generated artwork to just AI 3d printed, well not AI 3D printed but AI creates the 3D model…

Ian Bowie
I don’t know, toys for example. Chess pieces.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, why not?

Ian Bowie
Yeah. knives and forks, whatever. Actually. I think the cost of 3D printing, as far as I know, is coming down quite substantially. So actually, yeah, you know, if you had an AI algorithm that had been taught how to design a certain range of products, for example. All it’s going to cost you after that is the cost of the materials that are used for printing it. In actual fact, I mean, there is a potential here for a lot of little small businesses isn’t it really.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I mean, I think here in Turku, we actually have some competence based around 3D printing even.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, no, but I’m thinking you know that. I think we talked about this. Well, we have talked about it. AI is coming for you. It’s coming for your job. But it might take your traditional job, but it might create another opportunity for you to start a little business.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, no, no, indeed. I mean, that’s what we’ve been talking about before, will AI create more jobs than it destroys? I think that’s the… but I think there’s plenty of opportunities with jobs around AI or making use of AI, that’s for sure.

Ian Bowie
You’ve been listening to me Ian Bowie, and my colleague, Michael Stormbom, on AI unfiltered, and for more episodes, please go to aiunfiltered.com. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai