Ever wonder what a cat riding a giant toad across the ocean would look like? Or the Mona Lisa if Picasso had painted it?
Now you don’t have to imagine. In under a minute, artificial intelligence can render detailed images from short text prompts like these—or ones that are even more outlandish. It can create them in a wide range of art styles, like photorealism, CGI, crayon, or a painting in the style of Van Gogh or Monet. That means you can use it to generate pictures like these, which can be created in a matter of seconds using the AI image software Dall-E 2:
(Yes, that’s “Dall-E,” as in the painter Salvador Dali and “Wall-E,” the Pixar movie robot. If you’re now wondering what Salvador Dali would look like if he were in that movie, here you go.)
The Growth of AI Text-to-Image Art
Text-to-image technology has been in the works for years, but it’s becoming more and more accessible through tools like Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, some of the sophisticated AI art generators out there. All of them are available in some capacity for free, meaning the barrier to entry in the AI art world is low.
While you can use AI to create off-the-wall images like the ones above, it also has a wide range of applications for web design. The technology is also controversial, causing concerns about how it’s using artists’ work and the effect it could have on their livelihoods.
AI art generators are just part of the advances in AI that have led to a wide variety of tools that can help generate ideas and automate labor-intensive parts of the web design process. These tools can be helpful to cut down on tasks for human designers, as well as make web design more accessible to those who aren’t as familiar with coding or other programs.
How Does Artificial Intelligence Art Work?
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but now you can create images and designs using only a phrase or two.
AI art is created by machines that have been trained on millions of images from the internet. The machines learn to break down various elements, styles, and techniques in those pieces of art and repurpose them to compile new, never-before-seen images.
The rise of AI art programs has produced some ethical quandaries, such as whether artists should know and consent to their work being used to train the machines ahead of time, or whether AI art is going to be detrimental to artists who are creating original, non-AI work.
Last year, an AI-generated piece of artwork won a blue ribbon at the Colorado State Fair. It’s one of several instances posing questions about what AI art means for the creative process, what its proper role is, and what it means for the future of the artists and designers whose job it’s doing.
Right now, AI art and design isn’t a replacement for human designers, who still need to figure out how to use the tools to create their desired product. That happens both on the front end—engineering the right prompts to give AI tools in order to achieve the right results—and on the back end, where humans need to edit the AI output and make it make sense within the context of their website.
Just like content creation and search engine optimization, AI has the potential to dramatically shift the way things are being done.
How Can I Use AI for Art and Web Design?
Like AI chatbots, AI art and design tools provide a unique opportunity for those in the digital marketing and web design industries. AI can help with just about every step of the web design process, simplifying certain tasks and allowing humans to focus on more of the creative work.
Like AI art generators, AI design tools also use machine learning to develop algorithms for producing designs based on prompts that users give them.
Here are some examples of tools that are using AI to help the design process.
AI Web Design Builders
AI website builders are growing more and more sophisticated. Tools like Wix ADI and Jimdo Dolphin use AI to simplify the design process. They ask users about what they are looking for in a site and then create one, allowing users to edit them to make them look how they want.
AI Color Palette Tools
Aside from visuals, AI can automate the task of picking a color scheme for your website. There are several tools that will generate multiple personalized color suggestions for your brand and design, cutting down on the amount of work that goes into selecting and brainstorming them.
AI Image Editors
There are many AI tools out there already that are working to simplify the photo editing process. They can sharpen, enhance, and modify photos in a variety of ways.
AI Coding Tools
Yes, AI can help write pieces of code, although it’s not perfect and still advancing. We’ll look more into this in a future blog post, but AI has the potential to ease the process for web developers by handling some of the more menial coding tasks.
AI Chatbots
We’ve talked about AI chatbots a lot already in this series. But programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can also generate website outlines or sample placeholder text for designers to help plot out page layouts.
Want to Learn More About AI? Or Need a Website with a Human Touch?
Our (completely human) team of designers and marketers are ready to take your web presence to the next level. Reach out to the helpful team at Webspec to learn more!