In generative AI imagery’s short lifespan it's been on a rollercoaster ride from excitement to pillory and back to excitement. With each update to leading generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, the excitement grows, but – and especially in the creative community – so does the unease.
These concerns go back to the source – and I mean the literal source of all that imagery training data these systems used to build their models. The open internet provided a vast source of original creative data that OpenAI, for instance, used to train DALL-E. Artists discovered that their work was being used without their consent or their control. Anyone who’s used these systems knows they do not duplicate art; instead, they use their training to create something new, though they can ape anyone’s style and, in some cases, regurgitate – at least in part – the content they were trained on.
