Art is challenging to make. It can take years of practice and experience to express an image as you see it in your head. But a new revolution in artificial intelligence lets you tell a computer what you are thinking, and it will create an image for you. No joking - you can even specify if you want a photo or a painting in specific styles.

It's called AI-generated Art, a new trend turning the art world upside down. These creations are very controversial, even resulting in death threats to creators. What is all the fuss about?

What is AI Art?

You may have seen news articles and social media posts mention the name DALL-E, a combination of the Pixar movie character WALL-E and surrealist artist Salvador Dali. DALL-E can create an image based on a description: a photo of an astronaut riding a unicorn in space, a painting of a pig riding a motorcycle, and a raccoon playing tennis.

DALL-E was one of the first, but today there are dozens more, and the number keeps growing. Many are scams, yet a few are legitimate and fun to use. To use one of these sites, type in a detailed description of what you want to see. For example:

'view, sunset, mountain, stream, golden grass, big clouds, photo, wide angle'

You can go very detailed - working out how to describe images in detail to these AIs has become a bit of an online trend.

One thing to note: the below sites do not require you to log in, but some will limit how many images you can create before needing a free account. Specific AI art sites also limit your overall number of images and will offer to sell extra credits for more image generation.

• Stable Diffusion: this is an open-source art AI, and many different sites offer the service.
• Midjourney: one of the most popular AI art generators; you need to use the Discord chat service to access this bot.
• Craiyon: You can make as you want, but you need an account to access high-resolution versions.
• Deep AI: One of the original art AIs, this bot likes to be artistic.
• Night Cafe: Though you only get limited credits, Night Cafe has several AI art generators that produce awe-inspiring images.

The controversy of AI Art

One problem with these sites is that they can quickly create art, and the images are often good enough for people's wants. Hiring a human artist will get better results, but it is also a lot more expensive. Many people can't afford an artist, so these AIs open up the doors for many more people to create the image they have in their heads.

But art AIs are also taking work from artists. It's a very controversial topic and has even led to very aggressive behaviour. When someone trained an AI to generate art as a homage to the recently-deceased art legend Kim Jung Gi, he received death threats. Many people feel an AI shouldn't be able to copy a specific artist's style, and some AI services have to stop people from uploading copyrighted images.

These AIs don't create art out of anything. They study millions of images, including the work of artists and their unique styles. If you tell one of the AIs to create a picture in the style of Van Gogh, you can get some stunning results. But is it stealing? Many artists think so, and there are already court cases brewing over the debacle.

Yet several sites now accept and sell AI-generated images, and some, like Shutterstock, promise to enforce and respect artists' copyright. It's going to be interesting to see how this story develops.

In the meantime, you can finally create paintings of GoPro scenes from the French Revolution. AI lets you express your creative ideas and come up with new ones as well. It wasn't long ago that these bots generated strange and poor-quality art. But that is changing very fast. For better or worse, art created by artificial intelligence has arrived with a bang. Love it or hate it, you can't help but be amazed at what these machines can do with a couple of your ideas…

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