Will AI Replace Me?
As the interest and controversy grow around generative AI tools, I wanted to put some of the image generators to the test to see what sort of limitations they have and how that could impact on my profession negatively as a risk or positively as a useful tool.
I tried a few different tools: DALL-E 2, Adobe Firefly and Midjourney, and to my eyes Midjourney produced the best results for impressive, dynamic imagery with minimal artefacts. It was also the most convincing as it was often very difficult to find the usual tell-tale signs of AI generation. However it has limitations. For example. This first set of images was generated with the prompt "a girl wearing a white dress, dancing barefoot in a sunlit field, painted in a realistic style".
The second set of images were my many failed attempts to generate a picture book styled illustration with two teddy bears in a kitchen. I used increasingly more complicated prompts with different descriptors and it just couldn't get a handle on the style I was aiming for. In most cases it didn’t seem to understand that the teddy bears were toys, even with careful language choice. It also kept rendering each variation in a similar high-contrast style that was reminiscent of Photoshop’s classic Poster Edges filter. Some of the bears looked downright creepy.
My conclusion from this short session of experimentation is that the tech is amazing, truly amazing, but I don't think I need to be worried about my job just yet. There is real potential for these tools to play a significant role in creative processes but it's clear to me the human factor is still crucial and will be for another year or two at least. We still need to be the one to make decisions on what makes a good image and what doesn’t. We need to be the ones to dictate the subject matter and the style. AI isn't replacing us in the process, it's just helping us to speed up the exploration stage before committing to creating a final work. For many people, AI will also allow them to express their ideas in a clearer, more effective way.