Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

AI generated images for tarot decks?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    AI generated images for tarot decks?

    I recently saw a deck for sale which states that AI was used in the creation of the art. It's made me think about this being more of a thing in the future.

    AI is used in so many different ways in software today, but what I'm concerned about is the use of the AI art generators which have been trained by scraping art and images from the web, as that imagery can then appear in the compostions the AI generates (when a user inputs a text prompt describing what they want the image to be of).

    That art has been scraped without the consent of the artists who created it. This has been causing a lot of anger and uproar amongst artists over the past year (and IMO rightly so), with some boycotts of leading online art platforms. There have been many artists who have discovered their art being used in AI generated art. It raises all kinds of copyright issues and the legal system hasn't caught up yet with the disruption the new tech is causing.

    There are lawsuits going on with artists suing some of these AI generator companies for breach of copyright. Some of those who have been under fire are Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney.

    So I think it's something that needs to be addressed regarding the creation of tarot decks in the community. Creators should be aware that if they are using an AI art generator to create images rather than using their own artwork, the image generated could be composed of art taken from other artists without their consent. I think at the very least deck creators should be transparent about using AI so that buyer's are aware and can make up their own mind about how they feel about that. My personal feelings are that I won't buy any deck that's used AI in this way to generate the images.

    Your thoughts?
    Last edited by Lumin; 30 January 2024, 12:09 PM.

    #2
    My thougts? Oh, so many.... About AI in general. About this specifically, where do I even start??

    I saw a new deck posted on FB quite recently and someone asked the author if they used AI and the response? A loooong paragraph explaining how they put their heart into it and how they enjoy the deck and how lovely it is, completely ignoring the AI topic as it was more than clear that they did exactly that.

    I don't even like how many decks are produced now. Everyone and their mother and their dog think that they can make money creating a deck because it's so easy, isn't it? So now, we have a deck with a snowman, a deck with cats and dogs and dolphins and trash pandas, a deck with marijuana (interesting drama that I learnt about only yesterday!)... So I'm thinking what's next? I deck with household appliances? I feel sorry for Pixie who put so much thought and effort into creating something wonderful only for it to be misused like this...

    I was so looking forward for the Majors only deck that will be released by the Taroteca Studio (it's a set of 4xMajors deck) until they annonced on their IG page that due to the time deadlines, they will be using AI to finish it. I'm not gonna buy it now. Gutted...

    So to answer you question - I don't like this. I don't like this at all and it makes me not wanting to support artist any longer.
    Last edited by Alex M; 30 January 2024, 03:46 PM.
    Alex
    Instagram

    Comment


      #3
      My thoughts...

      I've been exploring AI art generation for a year. I have a bunch of poetry which I would like to publish on Amazon self-publishing, but I wanted the poems all to have accompanying art plates. I can do the art myself by hand or via digital collages and Photoshop-style programs (now all old hat). But it would have taken me more years than I have left as I have a couple of hundred poems. I thought AI art might be a good solution. At first, I marvelled at the creations, but then I realised how very derivative it is. Also, it wasn't giving me quite what I wanted. The nature, look and feel of the art wasn't depicting the mood or augmenting the poems in an accurate or subtle way. Ultimately, I decided it wasn't me, so I have abandoned AI art as the primary canvas. I will use it as another tool only, but it won't be my first stop. I mostly used Deep Dream, but I did try many other AI programs and had mixed results. Some of the results were laughable, and I did have some great fun using it; some of the art was not only missing soul, but they were almost absurd comical imitations of what was asked. The closest I could describe, it was like when Benny Hill was doing skits depicting the American Wild West. It's hilarious, garish, and almost drag queen-like mimicry. Great fun but not useful for my purposes. This year, I enrolled in a digital art course (Procreate style). We'll see where that takes me.

      As far as AI decks, there are so many out there that are utilizing it now. I am seeing it everywhere, and not in a wholesale fashion. It's now augmenting other older digital processes like 3D Graphic modelling. 3D graphics have been used in Tarot Decks since the '00s; some have been very popular. A few recent decks I have seen might have started as hand-drawn but are heavily AI-assisted and manipulated. I'm not saying there was not a lot of creative work put into the process, but I feel that AI is going to be in nearly all commercial art processes to some degree.

      If you don't like AI at all in the artistic process of making Tarot decks and only want to buy decks that are totally the artist's work ... then I suggest you place a red flag in your timeline in 2022. That is when 'Tarot of the Everlasting Day' was released and seems to be the AI milestone for Tarot deck creation, (Marcus used Midjourney). Then only consider buying Tarot decks made before 2022, as you won't be able to tell the difference the further we go.

      Comment


        #4
        Jason C Thanks for your thoughts. Whilst some AI generated images don't seem that good, there are others out there that are near indestinguisable from 'artist' generated art.It's been the keen eye of some artists that have noticed that they are indeed AI. If you are looking through quickly you might not even realise. If that's where the capability is now, imagine where it will be in say 6 or 12 months and more. (I think we are only at the tip of the iceberg with AI in general).

        Personally don't have a problem if someone wants to use some kind of AI powered software to enhance their own image (like using a tool that cuts down the time to do something or enhances the image, without using other artist's work in the process), it's when it's come from artists without consent that bothers me. And yeah, it's creeping into all aspects of creativity such as 3D modelling, rigging, design etc.

        Comment


          #5
          Alex M Thanks for your thoughts Alex, I feel generally the same. I don't mind decks that are quirky or use non-traditional type imagery like animals or something else - as long as there is a sense of thought having gone into the meanings and art etc. I think you can feel when it doesn't and it's just be made as a quick money making exercise. Not that I'm judging someone for that - I don't know their circumstances. It's just that for me the deck needs to have depth and soul so to speak.

          Comment


            #6
            Lumin Yeah I agree, that was my last point that we won't be able to tell the difference soon. However, when I was inserting lines of text from my poetry in 'text to image', AI came up with came up with some well produced, but strange stuff. It worked better being directed like a child, or marching soldiers around a parade ground, than left to interpret my psycho-spiritual-scifi esque poetry. I found it had the tendency to go off on weird hell scape like tangents, seemingly doing whatever it liked. So for me although the artistic quality was there the content of the art was too much of a compromise. So I put it aside for the moment.

            I did spend time trying to create a few Tarot cards too. I posted those experiments in this forum sometime ago last year. But to get it to do exactly what you want took a lot of effort and I never quite achieved it. Lots of fun, almost computer game like, when wrestling with it, but the results weren't really what I was after.

            Comment


              #7
              This is going to be a problem across the board and also why Hollywood writers went on strike recently. Musicians too will also be affected as well as people producing affordable art for home buyers. All these will be affected. As well those in non-creative industries where information collation is a thing such as medical diagnosis and law. This time mechanisation is coming for white collar work.

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by Squareye View Post
                This is going to be a problem across the board and also why Hollywood writers went on strike recently. Musicians too will also be affected as well as people producing affordable art for home buyers. All these will be affected. As well those in non-creative industries where information collation is a thing such as medical diagnosis and law. This time mechanisation is coming for white collar work.
                Yes, I think AI will have an enormous impact in the world, for both good and bad.

                Comment


                  #9
                  While I agree that using living artists and illustrators work to train ai is wrong I do feel that we should not throw the baby out with the bath water.

                  What about dead artists. There are many decks that directly use the work of dead artist:

                  The William Blake Tarot

                  The Klimt Tarot

                  The Golden Tarot

                  The Enigma Tarot

                  We do not find anything wrong with This. So should our ai also be allowed to learn from these Artists? Many artists first learn by copying/imitating then absorbing the results into creating their own style. Perhaps our ai can do the same.

                  A lot depends on how you use the ai. The best results are obtained by adding additional trained modules, called lora, to the base model. If you have enough vram you can train these yourself. You can also find them on sites like civitai. No one makes you use those based on living artists.

                  Ai should not be seen as something that just churns out a finished product. It is something to interact with. Something to incorporate into your creative process. Kasperov said of chess ai; An ai can beat a strong player but a strong player working with a ai will beat an ai working on its own.


                  What I think I am saying is Don't reject all ai because it is sometimes misused. We will not put it back in the bottle. The best thing is to find ways of using it ethically and creatively.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    I agree pteb. I wasn't implying we should totally reject AI. And I think it's fine to use art of artists that have passed (within copyright laws). I would have no problem purchasing a deck using such art, if the deck appealed to me. It's using artwork from living artists without their consent that's the issue I'm raising. There are potentially many ways to use AI that doesn't do this, but at the moment the bulk of it does seem to. And yes, I agree, it's also about how we can use the tools, how we interact with them. I believe AI is firmly here to stay, so yeah we have to find ways to use it ethically. But as with any technology humans create, ethics and safety tend to be at the bottom of the list It takes time for regulations and agreed practices which implement those to come into being.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      pteb Lots of good points there. I love Klimt Tarot, btw.

                      2023 was kind of like the year AI broke through I feel. But it's been around and improving for decades. I suspect the fear surrounding it might be the anxious sense of the unknown, the stranger in town. But we will learn to live with our new entity like we did the car, the plane, the fibreglass surfboard, and the internet. It's like a deck of Tarot cards; they can't read themselves; they need a reader and a question. Actually, I did that last year! A couple of times, I fed a Tarot question with background narrative into the text-to-image feature on Deep Dream. Then I evolved it to convergence, about ten images. The sequence of images told a subtle story. It was an interesting exploration. It still required interpretation and application, and there were my own projections too, but it answered the question, like an oracle card perhaps. I did a real-world one of these for a Tarot friend querent as an experiment. She found it eerily on point and useful. To step back a moment and look at what we were doing here with an AI art generator, using it for divination. It is not too dissimilar to automatic writing, bibliomancy, etc, looking for signs, symbols and meaning. Anyway, I went off tangently. Good chat!

                      Squareye, Good point about the information collation. The intelligence world is certainly using it in the production and dissemination of answers for the government, etc. I am sure there is an AI race going on between nations too. To paraphrase an old Peter Sellers movie, 'Is our AI better than their AI'?! Ha!

                      Comment


                        #12
                        I bought a recent-ish ai deck made by two well known tarot people and I ended up selling it on because I found the ‘art’ was creepy and soulless and I didn’t get anything psychically from the images.
                        After hearing about the battle that Baba Studios had with someone who was blatantly feeding their art into a machine to rearrange it and make money off it I really hope that the law is adjusted quickly before this becomes ‘the norm’.
                        I understand that the world of art and indeed everything is evolving but what bothers me is how far it can go, unchecked.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Just watching to see how all this does pan out.

                          I have never experimented with AI, it just seems like cheating somehow, and am not sure how an AI programme would differ massively from using Phtoshop to edit my artwork, and I certainly did use that in the end to create a more finished and polished deck out of my indie deck. The copyright challenges seem formidable enough though, when already all some copycats have to do is modify things a little, to avoid charges of plagiarism..

                          ​​​​​


                          Comment

                          Working...
                          X