Week 5 Notes

This week’s topics:

1. LLM’s and Generative Art (How it works)
2. Copyright, ownership and implications for creativity

To kick off our week, two exciting guest speakers from Facet AI presented in class:

Effie Jia

Effia is a designer with a jack-of-all-trades mindset. She studied art, architecture, and design at MIT and Berkeley. You can find her listening to music, hiking in the woods, and daydreaming about cabins.

Vedi Chaudhri

Vedi is passionate about the intersection of product design and machine learning. She strives to create products that make creative tools more accessible.

“Our mission is to connect the world through visual storytelling.”

Screen from Facet AI’s product

Facet AI is a company that builds ai-powered creative tools for professionals. Effie and Vedi’s presentation gave us an introduction to Generative AI and its existing biases, sparking some questions debate amongst the following product insights.

Effie and Vedi explored the future of art, describing ai-generated art as an inflection point of art that has not sparked as much debate since the invention of photography.

“Such a society, in dialog through images, would be a society of artist. It would dialogically envision, in images, situations that have never been seen and could not be predicted.”

Vilem Flusser, Into the universe of technical images

However, it is not just the medium that is getting disturbed “the concept of ‘the artist’ is getting disrupted in a way,” according to Effie. With AI generated art, “art is decentralized, accessible, a skillset of the masses ... an evolution of human communication and dialogue.”

Not everyone is as enthusiastic as Vedi and Effie about AI generated art. In “Use of AI generates questions about the future of art” video, artist express concern over a world where “Illustrators are completely replaced by apps because they can make images faster and cheaper.” Currently, the AI is trained on images scraped from the internet, but some describe this “stealing images.”