Suggested Materials for Any AI Art Apologists

Back at the tail end of 2021, I remember stumbling upon a random image on Twitter. It was clearly something procedurally generated, a vague resemblance of an object, blurred shapes that roughly evoked a prompt that acted as the piece’s title. It was intriguing to look at, and as such when I discovered that it was generated from a mobile application called Wombo.AI, I couldn’t help but download it and play with the new toy.

At the time, I really thought it was just going to be a toy, which given historic trends and the eventual end result was perhaps foolish. This magic black box of an application was simple enough in nature. You’d give a series of words, select a style, and the computer would comb through its database and assemble a hasty pastiche. It was never particularly distinguishable, but if you asked for a castle, you’d get something like a tall building. Animals would be a distorted show. It was an interesting thought experiment more than anything, a place to give an idea a prototype form. Unfortunately, Wombo quickly announced that it would be using its proprietary to mass generate Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs, and quickly the interest waned. It was one thing to play with a toy, it was another to willingly participate and enable volatile cryptocurrency practices that prioritize mass generation of images and pretending that they were immune from copy-paste tactics. Early in 2022, Midjourney entered the scene, and Midjourney was remarkably more powerful than anything…