Lori Grace is a founding BFF and a professional portrait photographer who also enjoys chasing extreme weather and extraordinary skies. Lori's work has appeared in major publications and television outlets including Cosmopolitan and Backpacker Magazine, and her passionate dedication of pursuing extreme weather allows her to consistently capture vivid and evocative imagery unique to her craft. Lori is also a dedicated NFT artist whose work can be found on Foundation and OpenSea. As a Hispanic transwoman, Lori dedicates much of her time to elevating artists and onboarding women, LGBTQIA+ and other marginalized groups into the NFT space.
Erica Reiling is the NYC-based artist behind CryptoVenus, a NFT collection of 10,000 hand-painted art pieces honoring sacred feminine energy and inspired by Botticelli’s iconic Venus portrayal. She has been featured in publications such as HighSnobiety’s Artazine and HypeMoon, among others, and sits on QCouncil, the founding council of Qualia, a Web3 art collective and incubation ecosystem. Erica’s work revolves around themes of mindfulness, mental health and humanity’s collective divinity.
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Potentially losing jobs to machines is a scary thought. I think people all over the world, in every industry have had those moments in the recent decades of 'Oh no, is this robot going to take my job?' And I think most artists never really thought that would be something that they would have to worry about. So it is sort of concerning.
Basically back in 2015 they were able to write code where the computer learning could look at a picture and see, 'OK, this is two men playing volleyball on the beach,' and they could make that caption through AI learning. Then about a year later, technologists were like, 'OK, what if we could do this backwards and say I'm going to type in this caption and how can we make computers create what's in the caption?'
And that technology started out remedial, sort of basic and funny-looking. But within a couple of years it has advanced so far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined, to the point where it's creating these brilliant pieces of art. But they're not necessarily coming from a human brain.
Part of the problem is that [with AI-generated art] the computer is absorbing images from across the Internet. So if there are certain artists who are very prolific with a certain kind of work, some of these AI generators go to try to create those scenes within the AI generator, but it's really just variations of [the artists'] work being recreated by the machine. So it's not [the artist's] hand creating it, but it's their work and it's not attributed to them. It gets tricky about how an artist's work can be stolen.
I actually think that conventional artists are typically the ones who are most averse to AI. That's why it's such a news topic and grabs people's attention because we have yet another tool — well, some would describe it as a tool and others would describe it as something that is dragging the art space down by just throwing in more randomness.
From a conventional artist's standpoint, the challenge for adaptability — first acceptance, and acceptance implies that adaptability — that's the hardest part when it comes to being an artist. We finally find our mojo, so to speak, and then we have to constantly adapt to the changing tides.
Myself, as a traditional landscape photographer, all of the images that I capture, the lightning that you see raining down from the sky from above — those are very dangerous shots. Initially, I was averse to photographers who use extensive compositing where they can just replace the sky with the moon or with a a perfect Milky Way Galaxy. And of course, in the photography space, there are already huge disagreements among photographers who can't stand compositing. They don't want to call it art, but I see it all as art in my in my book. The NFT space actually allowed me to soften my understanding and my own acceptance.
So the next natural step would be to understand that, whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay. And I think that's the most important thing to to embrace. The more that people embrace the possibility that we can use AI as a tool, I think that the faster we're going to see acceptance.
Royalties brought me into the space, and I don't want the lack of royalties to make me leave the space.
I love what Betty said on November 12th. She said, "If this week has taught us anything across all fronts from creator royalties to self-custodianship of assets, is that we cannot continue to place all our trust in external organizations."
Every single day there are people who are designing platforms to honor creator royalty fees in perpetuity. So I'm looking forward to that. I already see it happening. For those creators who want to know, with Manifold, you can create your own smart contract. Manifold is doubling down on creator fees and creator royalties. And that's something I can get behind. I think what they're doing is building from scratch with the intent of showing that creators should have full control. That was the whole purpose of of designing Manifold so that people could design their own smart contracts with royalties built in and give the power to the people — finally, the power to the creator.
Read More: Why Zero Royalties Stand To Hurt Diverse Creators The Most
For more insights, listen to the full conversation with Lori and Erica here
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
