The Case in Favor of AI Art

This piece goes out to traditional artists who are ethically opposed to AI art in general. It began as the longest Facebook comment I have ever made in response to someone who told me “Midjourney steals from artists, too.” I will preface this by stating that I have no compensatory relationship with Midjourney. I am a paid subscriber and Midjourney enthusiast who doesn’t care for any other AI art tools currently available, so I am a bit of a brand evangelist. With all that in mind…

The Problem with Image Datasets

Existing datasets used to train any AI art tool currently in existence contain images basically scraped from the web without any consideration. These are the only sizeable image datasets that currently exist. They do not have to be the only datasets that ever exist. The people developing Midjourney and other AI tools are not the ones who compiled these datasets, they use them for training their AI algorithms.

Midjourney is — and I am biased, but I do think it’s the objective truth — the most ethical AI art tool in existence. Its founder cares about ethics and has expressed his wish to work to make his AI algorithm work with and for artists as well as the hobbyists that make up 70% of the user base. (Over 4 million users right now, and 30% are working professional artists, but that’s still the minority.)

One of Midjourney’s interpretations of the text “AI art is art,” created and edited by Karistina Lafae. There is a strong bias toward women’s faces in current AI models, particularly white women’s faces. This is a bias that needs to be addressed in future AI art models.