As someone who is not an artist, I have always been fascinated by the creative process. I have a vivid imagination and often think of beautiful landscapes and scenes that I would love to be able to put on canvas. But as I lack the skills to do so, these thoughts remain just that – thoughts.

Recently, I have been exploring the world of AI art and the debate surrounding it. One argument I have seen is that humans can inherently create art out of nothing while AI needs images fed into it to work. But I believe this is a flawed conception.

As humans, we have a great memory and a subconscious that often nudges us towards ideas and images we may have seen or experienced in the past. So when an artist puts something on the canvas, it is not necessarily coming entirely from thin air. It is likely influenced or referenced from other sources, whether they be other artworks or sights and images in our everyday lives.

Check these image avatars of myself created using Dreambooth and Stable Diffusion:

In a similar way, AI art is created by feeding the system certain images to reference. It then uses these images to exaggerate and extrapolate, creating wildly different and unique images. In some cases, the AI is even trained on "noise" and then "denoised" to create new images.

While I do not condone the use of copyrighted material without proper credit or compensation for the training of AI tools, there is a vast amount of publicly available data on the internet for AI to be trained on.

For those of us who may not have the artistic skills to put our imaginations to life, AI art tools can be a powerful tool to unleash our creativity and see what our ideas would look like in real life. I have been having a blast tinkering with these tools and seeing what I can create.

In the end, I believe that AI art is not a threat to human creativity, but rather an exciting new opportunity to enhance and expand upon it. While there are valid concerns and debates to be had, I am excited to see where AI art takes us in the future.

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P.S.2 The cover image has been created by AI art tools as well!