Welcome to Prompt Gods, a 12 part series highlighting some of the creators whose illustrations and paintings have inspired the very AI that could bring the art industry to a stand still!
Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence is here to stay. Will licensing ever catch up with the technology? Will the visionaries behind the original works be remembered? It’s my hope that this series will shine a light on these people for decades to come.
So, much happened over the course of making this series, new Stable Diffusion models were released with less artists data included. A whole anti A.I movement formed in a large part of the art community (atleast on Twitter), and big and little creators alike have chimed in with their thoughts on the ethics of the tech.
For full transparency, the entirity of the art in this series was generated using prompting in Automatic1111 and the 1.5 model from Hugging Face. No img2img other than a little inpainting to fix some dodgy eyes. I wanted to explore this new technology by getting involved, exploring the tools and arising attitudes around the A.I art space.
I’ve always been facinated by technology and for the last decade have been in situations where my creative jobs have been under threat from it. I was originally a motion tracker at an animation studio that got bought by Epic, it was known that our manual tracking data was contributing to a dataset that would eventually automate our job role. Although I was a tiny part of a much bigger machine, the software I was contributing to eventually became the metahuman creator.
Knowing this was the plan, I left to develop skills in other areas which coincidentally are all under the same threat of A.I today. Instead of being fearful, I’m accepting the challenge and am trying to carve my own destiny out of this ever changing landscape by getting ahead of the curve.
And I encourage everyone to do the same. Evolution is hardcoded into the universe and we’ve existed as long as we have because of our ability to adapt. It seems the speed at which we will have to do so is increasing exponentially, making it much easier to fall behind! Don’t fall behind!
