AI
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A strange and powerful collaborator awaits you. Offer it a few words and it will create an original scene, based on your description.
These are images generated by artificial intelligence, a emerging technology now in the hands of anyone with a smart phone.
The results can be astonishing: sharp, beautiful, fantastic and sometimes strangely realistic. But they can also be muddy and grotesque: distorted faces, gibberish road signs and distorted architecture.
How it works? Keep scrolling to learn step by step how the process unfolds.
Try your own AI-generated images
Select a prompt from the options below, or
a photo
Van Gogh
stained glass
a magazine cover
Like many cutting-edge technologies, AI-generated artworks raise a host of thorny legal, ethical, and moral issues. The raw data used to train the models is pulled directly from the internet, requiring image generators to replicate many of the biases found online. This means they can reinforce faulty assumptions about race, class, age, and gender.
The datasets used for training also often include copyrighted images. This outrages some artists and photographers whose work is ingested into the computer without their permission or compensation.
[AI selfies — and their critics — are taking the internet by storm]
In the meantime, the risk of creating and amplifying misinformation is enormous. That’s why it’s important to understand how the technology actually works, whether it’s creating a Van Gogh the artist never painted, or a scene from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol that never did. has ever appeared in a photographer’s viewfinder.
Faster than society can anticipate and solve these problems, artificial intelligence technologies are racing ahead.
