Old folks like me, who spent decades developing their fine art skills feel that AI art is not hand created, and thus is cheating or not real art.
I totally understand this mindset but we're not selling to other artists; the only thing that counts is if the random shopper likes what you're offering and I don't think the majority really care how it was created. You can look around Zazzle and it doesn't matter if you're looking at a main category landing page, the bestsellers page, a top seller's store, random search results ... like 90% of things I look at don't offer in the description how they were created. It's just "this design features a cute blue elephant with pink flowers ...". Etc etc etc. If the buyers cared about the origin of the art none of this type stuff would be selling like it does.
I personally would like Zazzle to exclude the use of AI generated art — or at the very least allow customers and designers the option of excluding AI generated art from their search results.
To that end, why not also exclude the use of purchased/licensed stock art as that wasn't hand created by the Designer either? It's absolutely rampant and you often see the exact same stock image being used by many multiple designers with just simple color tweaks or changes to orientation if even that much. I saw one store with over 300 Collections featuring wildly different graphics so you know they didn't create all the art themselves, with many elements recognizable as popular stock art. But this didn't stop them from becoming successful on Zazzle so again, buyers obviously don't care that they didn't hand create all the art involved.
Not knocking these type designers, just trying to make the point - why is AI being singled out for not being unique hand created art when all this other stock stuff that pre-dates the rise of AI isn't either? If designers didn't have the natural talent to draw/paint their own stuff they turned to purchasing/licensing ready-made art , or using public domain images. But that was fine and perfectly acceptable for years - and still is - so why is AI work not? Whether AI or stock or public domain, it creates the same unnatural competition for natural hand-created artists that's been flooding the market since forever. .
On another note, creating something with AI isn't as easy & magical as some think. You can get really amazing results very easily with random prompts, but trying to create something specific to what you see in your head is actually really difficult. So those of us not natural-born artists are still severely handicapped, we can't just type in what we want and magically get it, whereas those with natural art skill can draw/paint exactly what they see in their head.
To provide example, I just tried for a very basic star shape graphic. After repeated tries with various prompts, this is the most basic I could get it to generate.
So point #1, not really what I had in mind so if I was relying on AI I'd be out of luck.
But I can take that star in to Photoshop and do an unlimited number of things with it. Here's just a basic change.
Point #2, if I were to use this little star as an accent element in a design - maybe a handful of them in different colors I edited in PS - decorating an invitation design - would that be required to be tagged as "generativecontent" because it incorporates something that started out as an AI generated graphic? What if I create an entire scene using AI but spend hours painstakingly editing it? Should that be tagged as "generativecontent" and excluded from Zazzle?
And then - the use of Photoshop by itself, even when not working with an image that was originally generated by AI ... There are sooooo many things one can do in PS, from basic color enhancements to extremely advanced manipulations to creating something from scratch using a combination of the default tools & presets, and it's all reliant on the program's technology, not one's own natural talent as a natural artist. So this should all be considered AI too as it's all achieved by a computer program. Where do we draw the line? Why is it OK to use one computer program but not another?
This has been a thorn in my side ever since Z said we should use the "generativecontent" tag. Because to me, pretty much everything out there these days could be considered "generativecontent". Did you increase the saturation level on a photo? Hmm, that's not natural, you did it with a computer program ... Did you install a font in PS, type some text out, add a gradient/pattern style and upload to Zazzle as an element in a design? Not natural hand-created so that's "generativecontent".
What about something like this?
This is an actual photo I took. But I obviously heavily edited/stylized it in Photoshop. Should that require a special tag indicating it's not a natural photo? Should it be excluded from Zazzle because it's not hand-created art?
This is a really complicated topic and there are no simple answers. Most designs incorporate some degree of "generative content" but can be well thought out including the product type and overall design they were used in. And then there are designs that are 100% unedited AI generated and slapped on every product Zazzle offers in hopes of making some dream overnight millions with minimal effort or care.
To me, things are rarely black & white enough to warrant a cookie-cookie approach.
Just for curiosity's sake, I entered "Make me a totally unique picture that no one has ever seen before, something no one has ever thought of before, totally new and unique" as a prompt in an AI text-to-image generator and it spit me out this image:
Really far out, no idea what the AI algorithm was going on here.
But now let's pretend this was some vision I saw in my head, maybe a dream (nightmare?) that I want to put it to canvas. So I tried to describe this image and entered that as prompt.
"A giant eye with a green iris and long lashes, the eyelids are actually lips and there is moss growing on the lips. There is a reflection of a house in the pupil. The giant eye is floating in the ocean and there is a man at the end of a path to the beach looking at it."
And it gave me this:
So yeah, not at all like the vision of what my not-artistically-talented self was trying to create.
AI creations are really unpredictable. There is no natural talent for composing prompts. Getting better results that more closely reflect what you envisioned requires time, study, research on how to write & format prompts. From the above example, i clearly haven't put the time in to learn how to be better at prompting. Point is - it's a learned skill one has to work at, minus the benefit of any natural propensity for it. Just like learning Photoshop or Inkscape or Zazzle etc etc. It's something you have to take the time to learn about and get better at with practice as your experience grows. And even then, there is no guarantee, no magic button to press, that will create just what you wanted.
I would suggest we don't call for any eyes floating in the ocean. LOL
Eliminating the misty hollyhock plant in the background, it produced a near replica of my original painting except for the fact that its damselfly had just a small black blob on the wing.
Interesting how my utterly brief prompt caused the result to also be brief. I'm not sure this would always hold true, however.
