Musings on Creativity in the Age of AI

As an artist and a programmer, I have watched with interest as AI text-to-image tools have become more and more powerful and accessable. While continually impressed and always hopeful, I admittedly also have some complicated feelings about new tools like DALLE-2, Midjourney, and Disco Diffusion. Having used a few services now to create concept pieces for some of my projects, it was exhilarating to see a fictional world that previously only existed in my head come to life! The image results are uncannily on point, coming up with moods, color palettes, and textures that usually reflect the prompts quite well, even if often there are characteristic AI rendering oddities. At first I was even a little disturbed by the strength of the results; the images were far beyond my own attempts at drawing out my own world.