What's new copycat?

Al image-makers can generate pictures in moments. Some creatives fear for commercial art's future but others are sceptical of the hype

- Laurie Clarke

When the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the finetuned photorealism compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021's Dall-E and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Mid journey. Type in any prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings eating watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later.

The internet revelled in the meme-making opportunities, with a Twitter account documenting "weird Dall-E generations" racking up more than a million followers. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world's first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of "generative AI". The image-generation capabilities have spread to video, with the release of Google's Imagen Video and Meta's Make-A-Video.

But Al's new artistic prowess wasn't received so ecstatically by some creatives. "The main concern for me is what this does to the future of not just my industry, but creative human industries in general," said Palmer.

By ingesting large datasets to analyse patterns and build predictive models, Al has long proved itself superior to humans at some tasks. It's this number-crunching nous that led an AI to trounce the world Go champion back in 2016. But until recently, producing original output, especially creative work, was considered a distinctly human pursuit.