Power of a prompt

Updates are continuous, and the quality of results is astounding, in a wide variety of genres from classic fantasy illustration to futurist acrylic painting. In many cases, the result is indistinguishable from a human work. Moreover, it all happens in a matter of seconds. With an hour or so, a sketch artist with half an idea in their head can generate literally hundreds of high-definition images.

The one thing Midjourney continues to have difficulties with is hands. In the image archives, or datasets, used to train the program, whole hands are rarely visible because they are often grasping something. As a result, the software doesn't "get" how to draw them, often leading to bizarre results.

It's now certain that we are facing a revolution comparable in scope to the advent of photography or digital graphics, argues programmer and writer Gregorio Magini. How we should relate to this revolution, however, is up for debate. We still don't fully understand all of its implications.

Theft of authorship

Critic Demetrio Paparoni told Galápagos magazine that there are no real risks to artists, because the artist will always remain the one who inputs commands to generate images — even if this allows a person who can't even hold a pencil to generate fifty Diego Vélazquez-esque paintings in minutes.

Illustrator and cartoonist LRNZ, born Lorenzo Ceccotti, disagrees. LRNZ sees the advent of these image generators as a threat to all graphic design professions. His doubts about the new technologies are not only artistic or technical, but also ethical: companies that make the software, and charge to use them, have trained their products on billions of images online, without asking permission of any of the image creators.

Midjourney now “knows” countless artists and can therefore draw in their style. This dataset no longer exists in a literal sense: after training, the AI works on its own, without searching for images in some database, as if it were “imagining” images that resemble a given artist. Can we therefore afford to legitimize this “theft” (as LRNZ calls it) of images? Many artists argue that we can’t. On Art Station, a large portal of mostly amateur illustrators, creators have been in an uproar about the use of artificial intelligence.

Risk of deepfakes

Then there are other problems inherent to the technology itself.

One is indistinguishability. A Midjourney image is already in many cases indistinguishable from those made by a human being. This can be the source of scams (an illustrator selling images made in seconds with Midjourney), and there have already been cases of art contests won with AI-generated works. This problem encapsulates others — like the possibility of easily creating deepfakes (videos of real people modified by AI) — and may only be solvable through a sort of paradox: soon, only AI will be able to detect work made by AI, just like the androids in Blade Runner.

There's also the question of rights. Every time Midjourney generates an image, it does so only because it has been able to use a dataset of billions of images. Each image from Midjourney then belongs in some way to each artist in the dataset, to whom copyright should be acknowledged, even if their individual contribution to the dataset was minimal. For now, there is no solution for the many authors who have asked to be excluded from the dataset. Once Midjourney has learned, it cannot unlearn.

One can at best hope for an exclusion in the next version.

The author question

It is also difficult to understand exactly how much an AI-generated work is created by the person who types the source text and presses the enter key. Is this person an artist? They do not draw or paint: they type a string of text. Are they a programmer?

It seems more like something between a DJ, who mixes other people’s tracks, and a curator or decorator who sets up an exhibition or furnishes a room, choosing from what they have available.

Certainly, “prompting” is a very easy art form. A smattering of artistic knowledge and sufficient good taste are enough to quickly generate thousands of aesthetically satisfying images. It is likely that, in the near future, the prompter — with their writing, evaluating and selecting activities — will slowly be considered an artist. This is what happened with photography as the numbers of photographers grew and the medium was refined — the result of a process that has gradually made it possible to distinguish amateurs from professionals and artists.

“Prompting” is as difficult as searching for something on Google Images: type in words and images emerge. But it is understood that in art, technique has lost its value, replaced by the idea — which is now everything, or almost everything. So can we deny that, in arranging images in a narrative order, selecting and reassembling them in a certain way or even just giving them a title, one is not in some way making art? Hardly.

People are already testing the bounds of automation, like programmer and writer Massimiliano Geraci who has devised a prompt to use ChatGPT — the chatbot launched by OpenAi, the manufacturer of Dall-E — to take rough ideas and produce textual prompts optimized for Midjourney.

Legal action 

Beyond all this, the fact remains that Midjourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and the other AI, while opening up new technological and artistic scenarios in our world, are being enriched by huge datasets composed of images taken without permission (although it could be argued that even an artist visiting galleries takes without asking just by looking at art). This has become intolerable for an increasing number of artists, to the point that some have decided to try to take on the AI-makers through political and legal means.

In Italy, the artist LRNZ leads this movement, along with artists Sio, Francesco Artibani, Paola Barbato, Elena Casagrande, Manuele Fior, Ariel Vittori and others. They plan to launch a major crowdfunding effort to “support the legal costs necessary to have the way these companies collect their data regulated at the European community level.” They have already raised more than €30,000 of their €70,000 goal. With the help of a specialized law firm, they aim to create binding European regulations for companies that produce image-making software.

Artists v. Midjourney

Others are already trying to do this.

On Jan. 13, artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz sued Stability AI (the maker of Stable Diffusion) and Midjourney, claiming that the companies infringed on the rights of millions of artists to train their software. Getty Images has also joined the lawsuit.

Will their claims succeed? As Terminator, not Blade Runner, teaches us, the victory of humans over machines is never assured.

But would it really be a victory? According to Francesco D’Isa, there is a risk of unintended consequences effects: “If the claims of Getty Images and the illustrators are successful, they will not eliminate these technologies from the market as some hope, but will create monopolies,” he explains. “The big tech companies that can afford to buy immense stocks of images will be able to develop artificial intelligence; the others will not.”

It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that well-equipped parties are on both sides — and that among the three major text-to-image software companies, the only one not to have been sued is OpenAi, which is backed by Amazon Web Service and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Not a small amount of economic and political power.