I received a pleasant note from a reader the other day complimenting the artwork for my column on Ray Bradbury’s Letters. She wanted to know if it would be okay to download it for her personal use. The answer is yes. Occasionally for these columns I use the cover of whatever is book of mine is new or on sale at the moment. But I have forayed into public domain art for both website and newsletter use many times in the past.
With the advent of text-to-art AI engines, however, there is no reason to hunt through the free boards, or spend time in the archives of clipart sites. You simply offer up a prompt to the AI engine and it spits out three or four options for you to choose. If you don’t like what you see, modify the prompt and try again.
It has been interesting to watch this field develop over the last year or so, and sometimes it reminds me (in a two-dimensional way) of Star Trek’s holodeck. You simply order up something and wait for the computer to create it for you.
There are three big engines and a host of minor ones out there available for use. The big one is in Adobe Creative Cloud’s suite of offerings, Adobe Firefly. This program not only will create new images from you, from photorealistic to a variety of graphical styles, it will allow you to modify existing ones, removing people or things in a photo, for instance and “fill in the blanks” with realistic detail. It is remarkably easy to use, especially for an Adobe product. Is there an extra person in your image? Simply rub them out and Firefly makes it look like no one was ever there, automatically.
Available in Microsoft accounts for free (at least for now), is Microsoft Designer. Microsoft has poured billions into OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E generative graphics engine. Microsoft Designer, in the preview stage, allows users to access DALL-E just as Bing lets them use an older version of ChatGPT.
I like Microsoft Designer and can usually find just what I’m looking for in the first set of offerings it generates for any given prompt. Of course, my needs are simple. I’m usually just looking to add something to these posts.
A third engine of note is Unstable Diffusion. This one is free, too. But to really use it, many people download it to home computers. It is known for being “uncensored,” and will happily generate photorealistic nudes. The dark side of the technology is thus on full display. Just like any other tool or technology, it can be used for good or bad purposes.
As for using the images here, I informed the reader to feel free and grab them. US courts have ruled that AI-generated images are not copyrightable. This may change in the future, but that ruling along with the recent Hollywood strike will likely result in real images being mostly used in the publishing and media worlds for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, European ad agencies are happily creating virtual models and using them as online influencers. The photorealistic technology of generative AI is good enough to create images that can pass for living humans, who then pitch real products to their followers.
For the next few weekdays, Lost Quadrant, fifth in the Star League Assassins series is free. Since the sixth one in the series is out and the seventh is on preorder, this is a great opportunity to catch up on the series.
(Image courtesy Microsoft Designer.)
Hi Jaxon!
Thank you for allowing the use of your images. Please thank my fellow reader for graciously asking you if we could.
And especially, I want to thank you also for providing us with companies with Creative AI Images for free, like the Microsoft one. It will be fun to try it out. Paying for a link for only personal use was too much for me, especially with so little lucid time and energy lack.
Thank you, Jaxon! I’ll let you know how it goes, that is, when and if I remember to download the links(memory loss is one of the side effects of the strong meds I take, and drowsiness, fuzziness).😏