A.I. image generators have been unleashed upon the world and there is no going back. With the release of A.I. art generators, this era marks the beginning of a new kind of artform, namely A.I. Art / Generative Art / Generative A.I. Art etc. With a completely new type of art form here comes the need to coin a name for this new medium of expressing imaginations.
What is Synthography?
Synthography is the new artform of creating & editing images synthetically (AKA “AI generated Art”). This term was first coined by Elke Reinhuber.
She first mentioned this term in her article named ‘Synthography – An Invitation to Reconsider the Rapidly Changing Toolkit of Digital Image Creation as a New Genre Beyond Photography’
Many people has a misunderstanding about how A.I. generated images are created. Most think that the A.I. simply combines, merges or collages the images from the internet and creates a composite of them. But that is simply not the case. It actually synthesizes raw visual data into new images. It has watched millions of art pieces, art styles, read the captions associated with them and learned which words associate with what type of images. You can say it’s much like a human would, but just in a much faster way and in a much broader scale due it being a program gives it massive advantages over humans.
A reddit user named u/PhyrexianSpaghetti has created an infographic explaining beautifully how diffusion models really work. Here’s the original post.
If the A.I. image generator were to sample image data from the images then the image generation models would have been hundreds of terabytes long. Instead just 4-5gb models of stable diffusion already makes it clear that the A.I. image generators don’t merge or collage images, rather create new and unique and completely artworks by synthesizing their programmed visual data.
Who are Promptstars?
Promptstars are people that generate images by feeding a word prompt into a text-to-image A.I. art generator. This term was first coined by Debargha Bhattacharjee.
Although Prompstars and Synthographers sound similar, those two words don’t represent the same thing. Synthography has different aspects like Image to Image, inpainting, outpainting, blending etc which are different from the standard text to image model prevalent in most A.I. art generation models. We can say “All Promptstars are Synthographers but all Synthographers are not Promptstars.”
Why ‘Synthography’ is Necessary?
‘Synthography’ is like ‘Photography’ which was much frowned upon when it first arrived. Traditional artists felt threatened by photography as they feared it would feast upon the artists that used to draw and paint portraits. Now the same reactions can be seen in the case of A.I. generated images. From the perspective of many artists, using A.I. art generators might seem like a lazy shortcut and an attempt to replace traditional and digital artists whereas it’s rather a completely new way of generating art. This can also create new types of art pieces in conjunction with traditional art methods.
Therefore, a new word was necessary to define this completely new art form.
Backlash against Synthography
Recently there has been a lot of hate and backlash against A.I. generated arts in online forum and art related websites. Stock photography site Getty Images has banned A.I. Generated content on its platform. In several social media posts and reddit threads traditional artists are venting their frustrations and anger over A.I. generated arts. It is understandable. If photographers claimed their photos as paintings, painters would definitely be upset. Similarly if synthographers claim their A.I. generated images to be same as traditional art forms, artists would definitely be angry.
But most of the backlash and anger comes from poor understanding of the technology as most people are under the impression that the A.I. ‘steals’ the images from traditional artists’ works and mixes and merges them into a new piece whereas the A.I. uses the art pieces as inspirations and uses the knowledge learnt from them to create new pieces just like any human would do.
How AI Image Generators Work
A.I. image generators don’t sample from images and merge them into newer images. They don’t mix and match either. They are ‘Trained’ based on how noise is introduced into the images and how that noise can be removed step by step. With this method and also taking inspirations from images based on keywords used with them, these image generators create different images.
Here is an outstanding video that explains the process in the simplest and most detailed way possible.
How To Make Synthography Ethical
The A.I. art generators are already released out open into the world. There is no sheathing the sword now. Stability AI has released Stable Diffusion 2.0 that contains no contemporary artists but their models upto 1.5 is already out there, made copies of, modified and what not. So, everyone can copy the style of any artist they want to. People can even feed the A.I. images from any artist outside of the dataset, and copy their style. That’s how powerful this is.
Only we synthographers can make this beast ethical. So, there are some rules we all can follow.
Don’t use the Artists’ name in the prompt who are unwilling for their work to be used in training the A.I. There are hundreds of artists whose copyright has expired and their names could be easily used.
Don’t pass off A.I. generated art as traditionally created. Be Transparent and honest about your image generation and modification procedures.
Be respectful of all other artists even if they are against A.I. image generators. They are terrified of losing their job due to mostly not understanding this technology. Being kind and empathetic doesn’t cost anything but can take you a long way.
The last one is more on the safety part compared to ethical. Don’t use name of copyrighted materials, characters, company, person etc on the prompt and sell that piece. The legal aspects of A.I. generated images are kind of blurry at present and we don’t know when selling those pieces might land you in the target of an enormous lawsuit.
Currently Stability AI is working on Stable Diffusion 3.0 where they have given every artist the option to either opt out or opt in for their images to be included in the dataset for training the A.I. That’s another big step forward towards ethical development of the A.I. image generators.
Artists Embracing A.I.
Synthography is not a replacement of traditional art. Rather it is a new way of creating and working with art. Another new tool in the arsenal of an artist and a very powerful one at that. When Photoshop first came out, many people reacted similar way thinking that it would steal their jobs. Then they realised that it would rather make the works easier and help them put more of their focus on creating more art instead of spending time in doing things in the hard way that could easily be done now with the help of Photoshop.
Similarly, many artists are embracing A.I. to create completely new ways of working. Some are using this for inspiration for their art work, some are generating digital assets for their work, some are feeding their hand crafted works into the models and generating outstanding results from there. The possibility is really limitless.
My take on this
Synthography is currently developing at a rapid speed. It’s just been few months since Stable Diffusion was released and already there is an ecosystem built around that. There are versatile web interfaces like Automatic1111 & InvokeAI that has made Stable diffusion accessible to all. It has given people a massive scope to develop this technology at an unimaginable level. People are creating custom models, training the A.I. on their images, creating apps for various purposes and many more. Midjourney was generating crappy disoriented images just a few months back with its v2. Look at it now. From a fun to play game it has turned into an immensely powerful tool that can create images undistinguishable from real photos, turn your drawings into realistic 3D looking models, merge 2 images into something completely new and there is much more to come.
If you are proud as a synthographer, flaunt these T-shirts proudly to show your support. You can get yours’ here :
https://www.redbubble.com/people/Pixensation-AI/shop?asc=u&ref=account-nav-dropdown
Openai already created a stir by their Dall-e model. Now they have released A.I. text model ChatGpt and A.I. Text to 3D Model Point-E.
From this point on this technology is going to develop at an unimaginable speed. It is nothing like humanity ever experienced before. Soon, it’s gonna replace a lot of jobs, create a lot of newer opportunities and like any other technological breakthrough it is not possible to go against the tide and take a stance against it all. All we can do is to take part in its development and learn this completely new tool as much as we can. Here’s a synthesized banana by Bishoy Zak. Happy synthographing.
