Rise of AI in Design
AI, artificial intelligence, is not only used more and more into healthcare, banking systems and complexes search engine to sell you stuff. It is also making headway onto the art scene.
A couple of years ago, I remember I was impressed with a filter getting rid of red eyes on pictures automatically, seemingly by using magic! Fast forward a few lightyears, you’ve undoubtedly came across a few clever apps that will allow you to either, add any filters on your portrait for social media to create a fun animated layer on your ‘’selfies’’, animate a still image, or perhaps, you simply used a translating tool online as part of your daily routine at work.
AI is not a new thing. Right now, as I type this, my frustrating and annoying auto-correct constantly gets in the way of my bilingual keyboard, desperately trying to understand what is going on, suggesting me correction and vocabulary to complete my sentences. It is a type of AI, meaning that some program compute a certain number of variables and apply, by association, different possibilities, and probabilities to answer your needs, as close as possible. And it has been very impressive and increasingly accurate of late. A bit scary to be honest.
Apply this to art, because why not?
Website like Night Café Studio or Dall-e will allow you to describe a scene or an artwork you would like to see take shape and from there, generates a piece of art using wizardry, example;
‘’A painting of a fox sitting in a field at sunrise in the style of Claude Monet” ( from Dall-e 2 BETA)
One can sink countless hours having a lot of fun with this, typing away and excitedly waiting for a few seconds until the AI proposes its best rendition of your directions. Give it a go with celebrities…
And that’s just the BETA version for some of these AI art generators, as it’s learning to make better adjustments and more accurate matches using real life examples. I expect it’ll be like translation tools getting exponentially better, where a few years ago, the rendition of a text was rather clunky and now most tools online are very accurate, even with expressions as they have access to a bigger pool of information and corrections. Or because we’re talking about a visual depiction, I imagine perhaps the tool will allow for adjustments on the go such as ‘’ use a warmer tone ‘’, ‘’ zoom in/out’’, ‘’ pivot the point of view 20 degree to the left’’ or ‘’ refer to mood board A as a starting point’’ to create a few pieces or variations.
It does not take much imagination to foresee the possibility if you can pair such a technology with voice activation for example. One of our daily task, at SKYE studio, is the production of Storyboards. A storyboard is a rough visual depiction of a motion graphic or a video / animation scene that unfolds, a little bit like a comic book if you will. It is a lot of fun to do, but it does take a certain amount of time and talent with the pencil as you must pull out the images, as well as ‘’motion’’ directions, from your head and put them on paper to communicate different ideas and go through rounds of approval with clients. I can totally imagine myself in a few years, maybe less, pulling out a template using voice commands, and have an AI assist me to lay out the rough visual from a project I have in mind, scene by scene, and take it from there for adjustment. That would be a fantastic time-saving tool!
At the core, art, and creativity as well as creation in general is an ever-evolving art. The small strokes of pencil I thought were mistakes might take me in a completely different direction as my imagination copes to propose a solution in my mind and brings on possibilities I had not considered before. And so, as Bob Ross said:’’ There are no mistakes, only happy accidents’’ and it’s completely true. If you take out the process of exploration out of creation, you handicap your creative muscle tremendously and you shut a lot of doors and path you will never see and discover.
What is art, what is creativity without a human and the other end of the paint brush? Without falling into a much longer essay, we can tell quickly that AI is not going to replace artists any time soon. But the rise of these tools as technical assistance in pre-production, where visual supports are important to have, but sometimes time consuming and difficult to illustrate, may be of value. And so, it’s important to replace the tool with another tool. A pen, a brush, or a computer, directed by a human brain, can be largely the same and part of a creative process, one can refine and master.
It is then important to use tools, AI included, as part of the creative process and not bypass the process of creation itself. Make it part of your toolbox, your discovery journey and it can become a very powerful time saver to illustrate what you have in mind and eliminate time consuming barriers that prevent you from creating in the first place.
Need more insights on AI strategy? Reach out to us at SKYE Studio today to learn more about our services.
By: Dominic Lehoux, October 28 2022
