Computers v Humans?

Will art directors and clients, including magazine editors, accept AI-generated illustration? The jury is decidedly undecided.

Someone in the “AI Art Universe” Facebook group called it “art harvesting.” It’s an intriguing analogy: sprouts planted by many people are ‘scraped’ into a giant blender that sorts and readies them to be grown into exotic new gardens. But it’s more than a poetic analogy. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, way bigger than a garden. It’s a jungle of fields and plantations, meadows and forests filled with fantasy characters and creatures, scenes and settings that could be in the distant past or the far future or another galaxy. And it’s springing up, morphing, regenerating before our eyes. Some of the results are dark and ugly. Some are eerily beautiful. And all you have to do to participate is type a prompt that describes your vision. A minute or so later, a suite of images springs up on your screen, ready to be enhanced by you (and, apparently, by anyone else).

I trolled around for a while, trying to find an AI-generated garden “good enough” to show as an example. I settled on this Alien Landscape credited to Bryan Price on NightCafe.studio. With it came a 25%-off-my-first-month offer. Ah yes, another income-generator for someone who is not me, i.e. for NightCafé and all the similar…