AIGC's works mixed into CAFA's graduation exhibition, true and false

Source: Qubit

Author: Hengyu

AI pushing artists to the brink?

CAFA graduates who are serious about art do not seem to be afraid.

At this year's CAFA Graduation Exhibition, some fresh graduates with a keen sense of smell did not wait for AI to grab their jobs, so they acted first and called AI as an assistant to participate in the production process of their graduation works this year.

And the number of such works is even greater than in the previous two years, mainly focusing on AI painting; the AI tools used are also updated, such as Stable Diffusion - in the graduation exhibitions of previous years, there were very few works that involved GAN in the design/ production process.

Interestingly, compared to the scattered voices of "Isn't it lazy to use AI for art graduation projects?", more people came here because of the AIGC works at the graduation exhibition, and they checked in specially.

One of the most discussed AIGC-related graduation works is "Prompt Store-lmagine Store".

"Prompt Shop" is positioned as a design tool, which integrates design-related vocabulary to help designers express design language accurately.

According to the first-hand experience, "Inscription Store" is somewhat similar to the designer's version of Midjourney.

You only need to input the subject you want to generate, and then choose blindly in the categories of style, perspective, material, light, emotion, etc., to generate a picture.

For example, if you feed Ma Yilong and other prompt words, the following will be generated:

The pictures generated on-site can be printed, and the black and white version is still included—it is observed that more than 150 exhibitors will stop and interact in front of the "Inscription Store" in a day.

△ Source author Jin Bao

In the conversation with the author Jin Bao, he expounded his design philosophy. The graduation work itself is to build a transaction service model that is the embodiment of the designer's imagination.

Relying on the background of the current AI technology development, text () has become the carrier of design imagination. As a designer, how to accurately describe design requirements has become an urgent problem for designers to solve.

In the future, the boundary of design may not be the level of technology, but the boundary of imagination.

AI painting into "master material"

Coincidentally, many other pictures generated by AI can be captured at the graduate graduation exhibition and undergraduate graduation exhibition.

For example, the graduation project "1001 Pages" by Ma Zhi, a graduate student of the School of Arts and Technology, built a huge tent-like cone from 1001 images generated by Stable Diffusion.

According to him, SD is used because its usage is more flexible, and a style can be oriented by feeding a few pictures.

Specifically, Ma Zhi used only one sentence from the beginning to the end: From the first graffiti to the 1001st page, smear human hands on the canvas woven by AI, and dance brilliant legends together.

Using this sentence, generate 20 new pictures each time, do graffiti as you like on the basis of the new pictures, then feed them to SD for stylized training, and then repeat the process.

It took 2 months and finally generated 1001 pieces.

△ Comparison chart before and after graffiti

Using AI to participate in graduation works, will it be rejected by the tutor?

"In fact, it's okay, we are relatively open." Ma Zhixiang answered this doubt, "When I complete the work, I think more about 'art should not be taken away by technology'."

He said that "it is good" not to be passive due to the AIGC wave, but also to dig deeper into the media attributes of SD and Midjourney.

With the same approach but equally satisfactory results, AI paintings are the main body of the graduation design. There is also "AI·I" by Li Chaoqun, an undergraduate of the Department of System Design. 1,000 pieces of AI-created graduation design occupy most of the area on the wall.

The author defines the AI workflow (i.e. AI·I) it built as a "divergent thinking platform that helps people establish multimodality".

Careful observation reveals that Li Chaoqun's novels mainly involve two scenes, one about organizations and the other about individuals.

According to him, he has collected a lot of art museums and open source databases of works information, including names, pictures, design descriptions, etc., and finally marked several aspects according to the needs of the design.

When performing data clustering, GPT-2 is called behind the scenes; when generating pictures, the API of Stabble Diffusion is called.

Dotted by AIGC

Most of the above-mentioned graduation works can be classified as CAFA graduates who explore the upper limit of AI in the art field based on their own ideas.

As for other works on site, the works born by AIGC are only a very small part of the whole design.

For example, the graduation work "Garden of Forking Paths" by undergraduates majoring in visual communication, "structuring the color elements in memories", finally presented a pink booth.

There are two pink picture albums on the booth, and one page attracts attention-it is an apple with growing blood vessels generated by AI-the author said that this is a corner of her inner memory garden.

Another booth with AI participation is related.

(Because the AI-related introduction in the introduction is not conspicuous, Qubit passed by several times before and after, and almost didn't notice that "Southern Orange and Northern Trifoliate" has AIGC elements).

There are many pictures on the wall, the surface is mainly orange, and the pictures are generated by AI; when the surface is uncovered, the bottom is the same theme (that is, the same sentence), pictures taken by humans.

In order to facilitate understanding, use one of the pictures to give a specific example:

The author Wang Yuejia took a photo of a big orange sleeping, and named this photograph "a piece of curly orange peel".

Then use this name as an input to get "a piece of curly orange peel" that AI understands, and then overlay the picture generated by AI on the photo of the kitten sleeping.

In this way, visitors can directly perceive the difference in the understanding of the same sentence from the human perspective and the AI perspective.

△"A Curly Orange Peel"

△"A Bright Red Orange"

It can be intuitively felt that regardless of the proportion, there are works participated by AIGC at the CAFA graduation exhibition. The author's own creation and AI's generation ability are intertwined, and it is difficult to distinguish the subject and the object, but in general, the artistic component is higher than the technology.

That is to say, graduates and AI have completed a relatively physical "human-computer collaboration". Whether it is GPT or Stable Diffusion, they are all regarded as tools, processes and even materials for completing works.

But it is different from the focus of the professional artificial intelligence field.

The field of design pays more attention to the framework of the system, the exploration and breakthrough of artistic boundaries, and the emphasis on accuracy is less than that of computer science.

Including some graduates themselves expressed: "If the graduation design works involving AI are to be truly implemented, people with majors such as AI are needed to do it."

One More Thing

Here is an additional very interesting graduation work called "Opaz 2023".

There are suits hanging on the work booth, which contain damaged negatives taken over by the Opalz Image Restoration Office, and high-resolution printed photos after restoration.

△Picture source author Sun Pujian Xiaohongshu

The introduction to the work reads:

30 years ago, there was a photo restoration company Opalz, even if the photo negative was damaged or moldy, it could restore the negative according to the only information on the negative and the verbal description of the photo.

Oparz, who has such a "traversal" level of technology, has never disclosed the technology to the public, and it is still an unsolved mystery.

But！！

In the bottom right corner of the background board of the booth, there is a line of words smaller than "the final right of interpretation belongs to the merchant" in the advertisement——

Opaz doesn't actually exist, and neither does the person in the photo.

Bingo～

"Pseudo-archival form" and "a non-existent company" are the author's sugar coating on the outside of this work.

If you didn’t notice this line of fine print carefully, friends who watched the exhibition would probably think of it later and be amazed at the advanced technology of Opaz Company 30 years ago (dog head).