You know those wonderful AI-generated photos you’ve seen all over the internet? There’s a high likelihood they’re based on Greg Rutkowski’s work.
Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist that creates beautiful fantasy landscapes using traditional painting methods. He’s created artwork for games like Sony’s Horizon Forbidden West, Ubisoft’s Anno, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering. And he’s become something of a sensation in the new realm of text-to-image AI creation.
His particular style is currently one of the most often used prompts in Stable Diffusion, a new open-source AI art generator that was released late last month. The tool, along with other popular image-generation AI models, enables anybody to produce stunning graphics from text prompts.
For example, if you write in “Wizard with sword and a shining ball of magical fire battles a terrible dragon”, the algorithm will create something that looks quite similar to works in a specific style.
These open-source apps, however, are created by stealing photos from the internet, sometimes without permission or due acknowledgement to artists. As a consequence, they are generating difficult ethical and copyright issues. Rutkowski, for one, has had enough.
Rutkowski’s name has been used as a prompt over 93,000 times, according to the website Lexica, which monitors over 10 million pictures and prompts created by Stable Diffusion. Some of the world’s greatest renowned painters, like Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, came up with 2,000 or fewer prompts. Rutkowski’s name appears hundreds of times as a prompt in the Discord of another text-to-image generator, Midjourney.
