The most incredible breakthroughs in Multimedia of my teaching career is the the emerging use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create stunning artwork. A growing number of publicly accessible AI engines are taking input from users and applying everything known about art to generate all sorts of images. With most of them, you write what you want to create in plain English and in a matter of seconds you can have several interpretations of your description to choose from - no software to install, no special skills required and best of all - Free! (At least, to try out). The results can be fine-tuned with additional parameters and you can even provide a reference image to base the experiment on and yes, this is all very experimental. My personal favorite is called MidJourney for several reasons:
- Strict rules banning Adult-themed material
- Easy-access interface as a Discord messaging "bot"
- Free to try out but it IS very addictive
- Public access to everyone's output - even the prompts used. Learn by example!
- Experimental features that are already very useful
- Supply your own reference images to add some focus to the results
Some cons...
- Some users can be seen pushing the PG-13 limits
- Need a Discord account to use
- No exclusive ownership of your free creations - everything is public
- Swimming in the "creation stream" is chaotic, especially at first
- your own jobs get mixed in with everyone else on that Newbie server
- you find yourself scrolling up and down in the stream looking for your stuff
- motivates serious users to pay for a special account
Olivio Sarikas - in a crown of Midjourney enthusiast, he's got the best guides and explanations. Not limited to MidJourney, either - there is an AI program called Stable Diffusion that you can install on your own computer!