I have been a working artist, photographer and designer for 20 years — long before AI was ever on the table. However, I've always tried to stay at the forefront of trends and technology throughout my career, and for this reason, I choose to embrace AI as a tool that can help make my life as an artist easier.
I believe in being transparent about how my artwork is created. I create four different kinds of artworks:
Some of my goods sold here are created using what I consider to be responsible usage of AI. What do I mean by that?
When using AI — which I still only use fairly rarely — I only use Adobe's Firefly technology when generating AI images. Adobe Firefly uses Adobe's existing pool of stock art sold through the Adobe Stock website to train its AI dataset, AND Adobe also pays its stock artists for the reference images used by Firefly. Firefly also uses public domain content to train its AI, as well.
This is not a free-use service; I pay to use Adobe Firefly and in turn, Adobe pays its stock artists for their work used in its image generating software.
Meaning, Adobe's AI image generating software is the only generator currently on the market that is using copyright-free images to train it's AI on, therefor not impeding upon any artist's intellectual property.
I know this to be true not because I blindly believe whatever I read, but also because I've been an Adobe Stock contributor for over four years, and Adobe has paid me two years in a row for my stock photos they've used to train its Firefly AI. I have the receipts, as they say!
In a backwards way, I see myself using Firefly as a way to make sure I keep making money from Adobe Stock.
If you want to learn more about Adobe Firefly and how its technology is generating images, please read more here: https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html
When I use AI in my artworks, please understand the image is a mix of AI pieces and digital painting by hand in Photoshop — and never, ever only what the software spits out after writing a prompt. I'm using Firefly as a tool, and not the main attraction.
I also sometimes make use of Adobe Photoshop's "Generative Fill" option, which is basically Firefly embedded into Photoshop itself; this is very helpful for fine, small tweaks to an existing piece of art (for example, if I wanted to change the direction of a shadow quickly, it's a lot easier to tell the AI to change the shadow direction than it is to spend 30 minutes hand-drawing the shadow in Photoshop).
If you have any sort of ethical issues with this practice, you are under no obligation to buy my goods, please go forth and find another artist to support! There's enough artists in this world — and enough art lovers — for all of us to get and give the love we deserve!
