> FYI

> I am a junior software developer who has a degree in software engineering. I am not a CS student who spent years learning computational programming to start writing my own AI startup or a founder of some OpenAI wrapper (not that it’s a bad thing!). I am just someone who is intrigued by what this all means and where this might go.

For starters I want to preface this by saying that ultimately the answer is Yes. AI generation is getting to a stage where both bad actors can generate images and videos of things that fundamentally haven’t happened, like the president of the United States swearing at children or even simply shaking hands with an opposing party leader. It also allows bad actors to point at real footage and just say “it’s AI!” And cause people to actually second guess what they are watching.

But this isn’t what I want to talk about.

You see, the more AI improves and becomes more mainstream; along with the barrier of entry lowering; I started to think: “What makes an artist an artist?”. I don’t think this question is really easy to answer, you could argue that before; it was someone who had a vision and brought that vision to life, either through a canvas or carving into stone. Then came the Information Age, which now allowed people to draw on a seemingly infinite digital canvas. Those that draw on an iPad are still artists, there is no doubt. 

However, the next leap is going to be *prompt engineering*

What is prompt engineering?

> Prompt engineering involves designing and refining input prompts for generative AI models to achieve desired outputs. It involves crafting questions or statements to guide the AI to produce relevant, creative, or informative responses.

So what does this really mean? It means that someone will keep writing instructions to the AI model so that it can output exactly what the person wants. An example of this can be found below:

The prompt

*The Chinese style landscape painting has rolling mountains as the background, the mountains are stacked on top of each other, the distance is different from the height. Clouds wreaked between the peaks, creating a hazy and mysterious atmosphere. In front of the mountains, there is a huge ancient castle. The stone building is magnificent, majestic and solemn.*

Art style:  Art Nouveau

The result

It truly is quite something, and if you were to sit me down and show me this I would say you were very talented. But you see; this was created using a machine, an AI model. All someone did was write some words (known as a prompt) and clicked the create button. Does this make you an artist?

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The How

Before we get into the conclusion of this piece I want to take a moment to talk about how this technology works, and what it also means for artists.

For a generative AI model to work it needs to be trained on some input data, a lot of data. Where could we get this data from? The Internet.

These models are being trained on artists work, without their permission and we have seen situations like this happen a few times:

[AI art tools Stable Diffusion and Midjourney targeted with copyright lawsuit](https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart)

And although there are more things artists can do to opt out of these models using their work, it can’t erase what it’s already trained on. So it begs the question:

Is it even ethical to use these models?

I don’t think I can answer this question, I think it’s entirely down to our own individual beliefs and perspectives but it is something we should all be thinking about before we happily go off and produce these images; especially for profit.

As we continue down this path of researching more models, creating more images and diverging into the video format, we need to think deeply about what art really means to us as humans and what a world full of generative “art” really looks like and if it’s one we want to embrace…