Painting, by numbers

AI-generated art has takers, but there are problems galore

- ANIRUDH MADHAVAN

Spencer Alden sued Nirvana in 2021. Alden was a baby when the band used a photo of him drifting in a pool, naked, as the cover of its 1991 album Nevermind.

The album blew up, made grunge mainstream and took Kurt Cobain to global superstardom.

Alden had recreated the picture for landmark anniversaries of the album, but later felt that Nirvana had indulged in “child abuse”. His case was thrown out.

Not that Nirvana ever had a fear of authority, but this minor legal hassle could have been avoided had DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion been around. Cobain could have used these AI tools to create the album cover for Nevermind. He would have just needed the words “baby”, “drifting” and “pool”. But, given his distaste for anything inauthentic, he would probably have hated the technology.

Not everyone thinks like him, especially not in 2022. These free-to-use tools—which use artificial intelligence to generate art based on a few keywords—are having their moment in the sun. The question is: Will they burn conventional artists?

There have been artists who have used artificial intelligence to shape their vision, to add and subtract from it, to modify and polish it. But now, especially in 2022, there has been an explosion of AI generators that have made artists out of anyone with enough bandwidth and vocabulary. Midjourney, for instance, has more than two million active users.