It’s the weekend, I’m trying to close down a bunch of tabs, and one tab I hadn’t realised I had open, was this piece by Andy Masley about AI-generated images he’s been creating with Midjourney. Before it disappears into the either, I figured it was worth jotting a few thoughts down.
Here’s the quote(s) that stuck with me:
Obviously it’s a philosophical question whether I “made” these, or whether they count as art. If you prefer, we can say I “found” these images in MidJourney’s vector space. I’m excited that I found them in the same way I’d be excited about finding a neat rock. I don’t think much of my own creativity went into this, and I know it’s different from creating art myself. Curating AI art feels kind of like curating a Pinterest board. I think that can be a neat way to spend time to develop and show off your own taste even if you’re not putting any creative effort into the images themselves.
When I have time, I’ll go back through these and add the prompts I used for each as alt-text. If you’d like the prompts for any of these in the meantime please let me know!
There are 152 images here. According to the MIT Tech Review, this means that altogether I used about 185 Wh of electricity to make these. That’s about the same energy you use running a normal kitchen microwave for 12 minutes, or playing a gaming console like a PS5 for about an hour. The average American household uses this much electricity every 8 minutes.
Some of these look quite nice! Here’s one:
As the quote suggests, the post has loads of them, and had I seen them as something on say… the Deviant Art website, I’d generally feel pretty positive towards them. It’s a different story if you think about how the training data was originally sourced for Midjourney to be able to generate them though.
Even when I see the energy costs, the 185Wh feel like a lot in isolation. When put into context to other things I do though, it seems strange to have an emotional response about the energy footprint of the generation of images, compared to someone playing a video game for an hour.
Anyway, this feels as good as any to come back to something a colleague of mine, Michelle Thorne said earlier this week, during a chat over lunch. There’s AI the tool, and there’s AI the project. It’s helpful to be clear about which one you’re talking about when you talk about AI.
AI the tool, and AI the project
Let’s look at the two separately. It might feel a bit arbitrary to split them out like this, but I think in some ways it’s helpful.
AI the tool
You can think of AI the tool as the neat little product or service that allowed someone who hasn’t spent years learning illustration to be able to come up with the images that they did – i.e. “finding” these images in MidJourney’s vector space.
From the perspective of the person typing in the prompts and seeing images come up, this seems pretty magical and handy!
AI the project
You can think of AI the project as something else. An astonishing amount of money was raised from investors, and to deliver a return, a chunk of it was spent on scraping millions of images, from the open internet, regardless of consent or intellectual property laws, and then another chunk of money was spent on very energy hungry servers to create models capable of generating these image.
I don’t know enough about how Midjourney images were created but in the creation of many models, there is a significant amount of manual labelling, usually down by people in precarious conditions (see this report, Ghost Workers in the AI Machine for more).
From one point of view, this might represent a creation of value, where the user gets something they enjoy for the cost of the credits to generate images, and along the way, loads of new wealth has accrued to investors and the founders of Midjourney.
From another point of view, loads of people, like the artists, the human labellers, have been exploited, and left in ever more precarious positions, largely to concentrate power in the hands of people doing the exploitation.
You might see AI the project as this transfer of various forms of wealth to a small group of people funding projects like Midjourney, and the indifference to the conditions to the people whose time and art are inputs.
To be honest, it’s not a million miles away from the indifference to the chain of labour associated with using a nice smartphone, or laptop or cloud service and the corresponding concentration of wealth there too.
For me at least, it feels like a magnified, more intense, more accelerated version of the same dynamic in many ways.
What do I do with this ‘AI the tool vs AI the project’ idea?
There are good number of people I know and respect who would likely have a positive emotional response to the image above, which then would change very negative once they heard it was generated by MidJourney.
I think a huge part of this is down to that fact that even if AI the tool is helpful and effective for certain tasks, AI the project feels so far from their values that it totally overrides any other feelings.
The fact there are almost no alternative projects that present a more compassionate, considerate set of values that generate alternative versions of AI the tool doesn’t help. If all the instances of AI the tool are from companies who are very visibly aligning themselves with AI the project, then it’s hard to see how you can have one without getting the other whether you like it or not.
But I’m getting off topic – while there are many cases where the capabilities of AI services are massively overstated, there are also quite a few where they can solve real problems, in ways that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to do otherwise.
Ultimately, I think it’s useful to be able to talk about AI the tool, separately from AI the project when I weigh it up against other tools for solving specific problems. This is because in many contexts, starting a conversation about the injustices of AI the project with people are not ready or able to engage with it won’t get you all that far.
I am aware of AI the project even as I use AI the tool, but I’m also aware that it’s not that different from the project that makes working in the tech industry possible. Even if things like open source, open data, and running on refurbished devices make it feel more aligned with the values I have personally.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about AI the project – far from it. I think it’s more a case of knowing when someone is ready to talk about it, and being clear about which one are discussing when we do.