At the time of my writing this October 7th, 2023, a viral reddit post to /r/midjourney of some AI art has inspired a slew of spin-offs and a huge number of views and replies.
These have really led me to question some of my exuberance and optimism that I had for AI art initially when I started making it with neural style transfer and stylegan, then moved up to fine-tuning disco diffusion. Until recently I had held out hope that, that lowering the barrier to entry for making art and self expression would be a wonderful thing, and that it would make the world a more beautiful place. This sentiment was generally shared among the smallish community of brilliant ML researchers and developers that were laying the foundations, conceptually, of the powerful generative tools we hav