I realise there’s a lot of ongoing debate regarding generative AI tools, especially those that have putatively been trained on copyright material without permission from the creators. It’s generally impossible to know what work has been used as source data for the likes of Dall-E, ChatGPT, and MidJourney etc, unless you work in their back office, presumably. However, I do know that some of my copyright material, books, potentially website content, photos, and perhaps even some of my music, will have been used to train various AIs over the last few years.
I think there needs to be some kind of permission system in place and a royalty/payback system to compensate artists and creators for the use of the output as training data. I suspect that horse has bolted, as it were, and neither of those things will come to pass. Meanwhile, I feel that given that a lot of my content is likely to have been used to train AIs, I’m almost justified in clawing something back from those AIs.
In this case, I have used a couple of tools to generate an image as artwork for my latest song, My Light, My Sky, the origins of which and the development thereof I mentioned here recently.
First, I asked ChatGPT to come up with a prompt for an image AI to help me generate some Hipgnosis-type artwork for my song. My initial prompt to ChatGPT told it to “act as an expert in album artwork” and to “give me a prompt to use with a generative AI for creating images”. I added the lyrics from my song as part of the initial prompt and this is what ChatGPT came back with:
Generate an album cover in the style of Hipgnosis that captures the essence of a journey, the intertwining elements of water, dreams, and loss. Incorporate surreal and symbolic imagery such as raindrops turning into streams, rivers flowing to the sea, and scenes of introspection. Use a color palette that conveys both the beauty and melancholy of the lyrics. Ensure that the cover evokes a sense of mystery, emotion, and the passage of time. Consider including elements like shattered dreams, reflections, and a connection to the sea as central motifs.
I then used that prompt in Img2Go’s AI Creator Studio to get it to produce an appropriate image to which I could add the song title and my name. It looks rather evocative and Hipgnosis-like although that tree that looks like a Cedar of Lebanon or a chink of broccoli is reminiscent of Yes album artist Roger Dean.
I ran the AI a second time and got a similarly evocative image, but without the tree. I imagined this one as the back of the record sleeve for my putative 7-inch. I added the lyrics to the graphic:
A couple more iterations with some minor tweaks to the prompt that ChatGPT had given me generated some amusing images with silhouetted figures. In one, a woman is seen standing up to her waist in water and carrying an umbrella. This is quite a nice idea for an album cover…very Hipgnosis, very Magritte. The ludicrous notion of being soaked up to the waist but protecting one’s upper half from the rain with an umbrella! The album might have been entitled “Staying Dry” or “Underwater” or something…
Another version of the same prompt, simply adding the word umbrella to the end generated this:
