I Tried Selling AI Art For 30 Days

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*ABOUT ME*
I'm Jensen, a filmmaker and entrepreneur. I make videos on entrepreneurship and personal finance, and my honest experiences along the way. My goal is to help you create a more fulfilling life for yourself. Subscribe to be a part of the journey!

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*VIDEO SUMMARY*
In this video, I tried selling AI Art , or artwork created by artificial intelligence, by creating an AI Art business on platforms such as Fiverr and Facebook. I try out generators like Stable Diffusion, DALLE 2, Midjourney, and NightCafe. It was a wild adventure filled with surprises and drama!

*HOW TO GENERATE AI ART FOR BEGINNERS*

To get good at generating AI art, you need to first understand how prompts work. A prompt is what you tell the AI art generator to generate. Lexica is a site like Google that shows AI art and the prompts used to generate them. Super useful to find prompts you can use when generating yourself.

You can generate AI Art using NightCafe. They offer 5 free credits every day that you can claim. You can buy credits if you run out, or just wait until the next day to claim more.

Installing and running Stable Diffusion on your own computer will give you the most customization and power when generating AI art. You can generate unlimited images, utilize custom models, and features such as Initial Image (img2img).

Running a local version requires a computer with a powerful NVIDIA GPU. If you don't have an NVIDIA GPU, you can still run it with your CPU, but it will be very slow (as shown in my video).

[jensentung]

Whew! It's getting hot in the comments. New tech can be scary, and the media's fear-mongering and false narratives aren't helping. Here's my take:

As mentioned in the video, AI art isn't perfect, and I don't believe it will replace all artists. It will, however, require artists to adapt and evolve, just like they always have. I believe it will push art forward (like how photo, video and digital art did - which by the way, all co-exist with traditional art).

Art is meant to push boundaries and evolve. To accept that AI art will replace artists - would that mean that the art of artists is only an image and nothing more? If artists are that easily replaceable, were they really pushing the boundaries? As an artist myself, I believe real art has always been something more than just the visual. It involves the human storytelling and meaning behind it. That is something an AI cannot create.

[RSidd]

As a professional artist, I'm not sure whether to be excited or terrified. On one hand it scares me for my ability to get gigs and sustain myself, also in other hand nothing inspires me more to start painting than seeing other impressive work. In my mind, I'm like, "I bet I could try something similar and add my own flavor to it!"

[doktorraven]

All fun and games until AI replaces you as a youtube channel copy.

[MegaDman]

I believe that Ai art will have more negative effects on the art community than positive ones. Will AI completely replace real artists? Probably not, but I can see job opportunities for them decrease in the near future as AI becomes overall better. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if Ai art advances to the point to where it becomes so user friendly that people would rather just do it themselves than pay someone to generate art for them.

[freddyhardware]

When skill becomes scarce, that's when it becomes more valuable. The more people use AI Art and abandon practicing freestyle art on paper or canvas, the more that skill becomes valuable.

[hushedshadow]

So I guess this is it, as if artists don't struggle enough; how does a artist keep up?

[AironyAi]

Selling ai art is the next level of searching an image on google and selling it 🤷‍♂️

[oredaze]

A person spends many years to learn their craft in order to become pro and then someone comes and does the same in 5 minutes with next to no skill. Tell me how would you feel then??? Imagine people who are getting into art now... They will just give up. Or the world will be flooded with mostly AI art with all the associated problems I am too depressed to list.

[bethp.]

I generated an image using midjourney and I noticed that there were some letters in the sky of the images.
I zoomed in and even though the letters were distorted, I could clearly see that it said shutter stock. I then inspected the entire image very closely and found 3 more of them, plus a few other errors.
So, if you are selling art, please check the images very well and correct all the errors.

[nestortomaselli]

I am business minded- in the sense that I have a lot of incentives and ideas into selling my own art prints in the future. But I also respect the process it takes into creating a highly detailed work of art by hand. Maybe it would be interesting to have AI art as a side-option to sell for a really low price, but fully-hand drawn works of value with their own style will always be far more lucrative - especially now that AI art is flooding the internet. If you have both skills, you'll always be ahead of people who can only generate AI images. Those folks just become one-trick ponies when it comes to creativity. Also, you have to consider the community aspect that is against AI images (reflected on the facebook ad Jensen threw up). There are people who will outright reject and go after you and try to demolish your reputation just because you do only AI - and if there's one group you don't want to piss off online is artists. And you know, that is just alright. We need to have a balance when it comes to new technology, and yes, we do need to be concerned about a lot of jobs (and cultural value) that can potentially be lost due to it. AI image generators may be great for quantity, but what is the point when a bunch of other people will get fucked over and overall product quality of AI images is vastly inferior to pro artists who draw by hand (With most results looking either generic, or heavily distorted in terms of anatomy)? Also, there is already a lawsuit toward OpenAI in the works about ripping off coders on Github that is tied to all of this. And it's the first of many that will come given that the concept art community is also coming together due to many of their artworks being taken without consent by these AI companies benefiting from legal loopholes.

And also, I have to disagree about your point on AI 'creativity' working just like human creativity. In the end, AI can't create anything new and innovative like a human being with their own story and life experience. It takes a couple of weeks going through the Midjourney chats to realize how everything starts to look the same, then hopping onto Artstation and noticing a gigantic difference. Again, I am business-minded too, but I can't ignore the artist in me that is concerned about going to fast with this technology. If we just take advantage from it and completely neglect the community, man it is not going to be good in the long run for artists & the culture in general, and you can't expect people to just go along with the flow when their livelihoods are being threatened by the machine.

[Oncewasgolden]

Click bait much? The cover shows over $6000 made. That is quite different than $80. This video was completely useless.

[ilyjama]

Dude, artists aren't mad at ai beacause it's "stolen" or we are too old. AI Art it's mostly easy to get acceptable results. You just need the idea. What counts in art it's execution as well. That's why we don't really like AI users who consider themselves artists. Unless you're using it as a tool for a big project, it isn't art. That's just how it works

[loederwijk]

Handles hot topic beautifully objectively, provides realism which is so rare online.

[TheRealElli.V]

This is sad . Money will always win 🤷🏽‍♂️

[robwhitmore]

For future reference, if you wanted to do this again, there's an option to created a sharable link for Stable Diffusion on another PC. I generate stuff at work all the time on my work laptop through a bookmarked URL and it uses my home GPU to do all the processing.

[DalsPhotography]

WOW, I loved your content, first time it's not just a click and bite one, very well done, best from Uruguay!

[lucianvirtic]

I like how you present the facts exactly how they've worked out, or not. Your video has also the vibe of the reality, not only AI stuff :). Good content!

[ZippyBytes]

Legend has it he used AI for the script of the video too

[matthewtandy]

AI art is kinda like auto-tune to a classically trained singer, both will coexist but we all know that one takes more skill than the other

[WorldCollections]

Most realistic video on the subject I've seen thus far...minus the click bait. Well done!