AI Art is the new buzzword in the air, the new kid on the tech-block, the easy-peasy graphic tool everyone’s tinkering with, and so a couple of weeks ago, I threw caution to wind and dived in head first into the mushroom garden of AI Art Apps. I tried out Google’s Deep Dream, Night Cafe, and StarryAI.

What Google’s Deep Dream did to the dog image I provided, isn’t something I wish to dwell upon, but here’s the image that StarryAI generated when I gave it the following inputs.

  • Text Prompt: Learner of the Future
  • Art Movement: Cubism
  • Medium: Oil Painting

I’m not sure if it conveys much of what I had hoped it would, but it’s not a terrible looking image either.

AI Art generated using the StarryAI app - Learner of the Future.

So how’s AI Art made?

Definitely not how an artist would make.

Let me quote from the June-July issue of The FOUNT Magazine. 

“The programmer-artists use GANs or Generative Adversarial Networks to help the computers “learn” what a particular kind of art is, by going through thousands of images of that type of art. Such “learned” computers then take an input from us (the users) in form of either image (as is the case of Google Deep Dream) or text (as in StarryAI,) and combine it with their “understanding” of a particular art movement (cubism, surrealism, romanticism,) artist (Dali, Picasso, Turner,) medium (oil on canvas, woodcut, charcoal,) etc., and then produce a work that brings everything together.”

And why is it important that we know?

Technology-wise, we the instructional designers exist on the threshold of the old and new. It’s true that we needn’t be graphic experts, but we must have a fair overview of the different technologies that are used in the creation of graphics and the authoring of content.

So if you’d like to explore AI Art in more detail, I recommend reading the June-July issue of the FOUNT magazine. If this is still the current issue, you won’t be able to download it from the website. However, if you subscribe to the FOUNT magazine, next issue onwards, you will start receiving your link to download the Free PDF of The FOUNT – the  ID magazine for the evolved learning professional. So please go ahead and subscribe 🙂

Read “AI Art and Content – Should Content Creators and Instructional Designers be Worried?” here.