Second Life to AI Art Backstory

This is a snapshot taken in the Second Life virtual world by me. Those who have visited my Deviant Art site will probably recognize it.

This is the splash photo that greets you when you arrive at my site. Definitely the same image, but... different.

The question of whether AI art is art has been vigorously debated online, with the vast majority coming down firmly on "No." IMHO this is based largely on the (very legitimate) fears of what AI might do to the human economy, and the human race, given that the psychopaths and sociopaths who dominate government and wealth everywhere have finally glommed onto its potential to turn us all into either corpses or work slaves.

AI art threatens no such thing, but it does threaten to drive trad artists away from having an income. It used to be that if you wanted good artwork to market a product, you needed a good artist. Not necessarily true any longer. 

(I do think that long term artists have a better chance of surviving being replaced by AI simply because eventually things created by human design will alway have a cachet of coolness that things created by AI will never have. I base this assumption on what has happened in the world of chess, where AIs surpassed human chess players a decade ago. Did this destroy interest in chess? No, it did not, chess is now doing better than ever thanks to the ease of finding good opponents via online chess. And people follow the chess games of Caruana, Carlson, Praggnanandhaa and many others, all of them human. No one cares about the games of Stockfish and other AI chess programs, because they're not human, hence not relatable. The same will occur with art: people will care about human artists, not AI art programs. This is not necessarily true for engineers, marketers, clerks and so forth.)

But the real basis of the claims of AI art not being art is that digital artists do little or nothing to create art. They just describe the artwork they want and the computer magically produces it for them. Those cases are very different, and in some cases that's exactly what happens. Though even with prompts alone it can be difficult to get what you want, especially if you're creating sexually explicit material, which admittedly horny scientists estimate is roughly 99.9999999 percent of all AI art. Because most AI art models are designed to FIGHT LIKE HELL to avoid creating explicit sexual images. They have to be cajoled, tricked, and sometimes even beaten severely to produce explicit imagery. (OK, I'm exaggerating here. You can't beat an AI art program. But an AI art program is perfectly capable of making you want to beat it severely.)

Still in the case of the Second Life-based image on this page I clearly created the blueprint for the art. I customed-designed the avatar's body. I bought skin for it, I bought custom hair for it and I bought custom hands for it as well as the clothing it is wearing, all from Second Life designers. I obtained the dance animation it is using (it was a freebie, I think, there are a lot of freebies on Second Life).

I also controlled the lighting in the sky (Second Life lets you control that in some sims, though the lighting only applies to your avatar, not other avatars on the sim.) I didn't build the striking buildings in the background, that was the sim designer's work. (And they did a great job, another great Gorean sim build.)

I also chose the camera angle and location from which I took the snapshot. I wanted to go for a romantic, epic image, and I think I got it.

Now the Civitai model that I used did some really great work based on my Second Life image, but it's very obvious that the Civitai model was based on my snapshot. You could probably get a vaguely similar image of a dancer in a chalwar on a rooftop terrace at sunrise/sunset with clouds via a text prompt, but your chances of getting  something close to this image are quite low, and the chances of getting something close to being the exact same image are almost nil.

So I created an original artwork with the help of the Second Life video game. Does that make me an artist? No. An artist is someone who can create an artwork and control how it looks down to the least detail. And I don't have that kind of control, I am at the mercy of Second Life and Civitai to a certain extent. 

But I'll tell you one thing. There are modern artists whose work consists of painting stripes of color on canvas. Or splashes of paint poured right out of the can onto a canvas on the floor. Or whose work consists of written descriptions of what they would have done, pasted on a museum wall. (I did not make any of those examples up.) And if those guys are artists, so am I. And so are you, gentle readers. So are we all. It's a very fluid term, it turns out.