Playform, the first creative AI companion for visual artists, has built a platform that responds to the actual needs of artists in the throes of the creative process. More than just a simple image generator, Playform gathers a suite of handy tools and transformations into a single site, and lets artists do everything, from training their own model securely on their work to generating images from poses and sketches via prompts, to displaying their work virtually and minting NFTs.

To continue to expand and refine its offering for artists, Playform recently launched an integration with Hugging Face, the leading open-source community for AI developers. Through this partnership, developers on Hugging Face will be able to access the hundreds of thousands of working artists Playform has gathered, and let them work with exciting new tools. Artists will get access to an ever-evolving ecosystem of generative AI-powered ways to provoke new ideas. 

“Generative AI and related techniques have been part of the artistic process for generations,” explains Playform founder and Rutgers professor Ahmed Elgammal. “There are a wide variety of ways AI can inform, shift, or upend your creative process, and Playform wants to be a Swiss Army knife for generative AI. We want to bring the tools together in a single place where artists can go to experiment, iterate, perfect, control, and promote their projects.”

Though much of the recent hype surrounding products like DALL-E or Midjourney revolves around the potential for AI to replace artists, many artists are engaging with AI to boost moments in their creative process, like developing ideas or creating sketches or prototypes, not to create finished products. Artists want to use AI—but don’t like the less than ethical origins of some company’s model training practices. Playform offers an alternative that solves both these issues, freeing artists to use AI as a new media layer and to maintain control over their work.

To satisfy these needs, Playform features dozens of AI tools ready for artists to explore, including:

- Face Mixing: Blend and shift facial features to create someone new;

- Sketch+Text-to-Image: Draw or upload a sketch and then use text to specify just how you want the final image to look, from full-on photorealism to lively line drawing;

- Pose+Text-to-Image: Upload an image of a human figure, let AI identify the pose, and use text prompts to generate a new image in that same pose;

- Text+3D-to-Image: Use an uploaded image and a text prompt to generate a new 3D image with the same depth/dimensions;

- Custom AI Model Training: Use as few of 30 of your own images from scratch to shape your own AI; 

- Direct Mint to NFT: Make a series of images using AI, then mint them as NFTs and sell on markets like OpenSea.

Over the last five years of the platform’s evolving existence, artists have used Playform in a variety of ingenious ways, enfolding AI-generated ideas in more traditional media or building complex video or other works from Playform images. They have exhibited Platform-assisted works in exhibitions, art fairs, and museums around the world.

Artist Vinni Kiniki, for example, created limited-edition prints for an exhibit at the Muse Gallery in London. Playform.io was an integral step in the creative process: “I used Playform.io as part of my investigation into a collaborative creative experience using AI,” explains Kiniki. “The prints were created using Playform.io based on 300+ sketches from my sketchbooks. I drew over selected outputs from Playform.io to finalize them into a series of prints.”

Artist Carla Gannis has used Playform.io extensively in her ongoing, ever-evolving project C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N., and in its latest iteration, wwwunderkammer, Gannis continues to explore virtual and generated worlds to unpack fraught concepts and history, in this instance, the colonial history of the Wunderkammer, the curiosity collections of proto-museums. By building different chambers, Gannis explores our experiences of being human in the age of the internet.

“Artists are using AI as part of their process and as explicit self-reflexive means of encountering how art, humanity, and technology collide and collaborate,” Elgammal reflects. “Playform hands them the keys to powerful models they can use on their own terms, in combination with physical and other digital media. It shows that generative AI is no gimmick; at its best, it’s an artform.”

About Playform
Playform (playform.io) is an AI services platform for professional artists and creatives to create, train, generate, and sell code-free AI generated art all in one place. Established in 2019, Playform was the first generative AI Art platform to enter the market. Leading the advancement is Dr. Ahmed Elgammal, founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and a professor of computer science at Rutgers University. Playform offers an integrated platform to experiment and explore with the different and best AI art generators out there. The Playform Studio is an artist accelerator program empowering emerging artists with promotional opportunities to turn their art practice into a source of income. Playform’s Art Mine is a generative AI NFT marketplace for artist-curated and collector-curated artwork created on the platform.  
 

The 500 survey participants reveal just how artificial intelligence is impacting their artistic process, from idea generation to final work.

Text-to-image models and their surprising results have raised significant questions about the future of art, questions only underlined by works like “Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial” winning fine art competitions and by class-action suits against the creators of Midjourney. 

Yet the real story of AI and art is different, more nuanced, and far more diverse and potentially wide reaching. Playform, a platform empowering image creators via specialized AI tools, surveyed hundreds of working artists using AI tools on a variety of platforms, to discover exactly how they are using AI. Much like specialty lenses or mirrors, photography, and Photoshop before it, AI can play a fascinating role in an artist’s process. And it’s rarely about simply spitting out a final product.

Of the 500 artists surveyed, most had experimented with text-to-image tools, for example, and found them intriguing. (Roughly half of those surveyed were digital artists or graphic designers, while the remaining half practiced in more traditional media like painting or photography.) More than 45% thought text-to-image was very useful, and another roughly 32% found some utility, though they didn’t always weave it into their existing workflow.

Playform discovered that most artists use AI in the middle of their creative process, not the end, akin to the way painters might use a sketched drawing to explore or plan a work. More than 65% of respondents used text-to-image to explore new ideas or create assets they eventually incorporated into their final work. Thus, for most creatives, AI tools form part of an iteration process, with only around a fifth of artists using AI to create a final work. If they reveal this part of their practice at all--and approximately 36% say they don’t--they may post it to social media (~37%).

“AI tools are becoming a new kind of sketchbook, a testing ground for ideas that might otherwise languish or prove hard or time consuming to execute,” explains Ahmed Elgammal, the computer scientist and artist who began working with generative AI long before its current boom. “They can confirm or challenge an artist’s approach, or provide new insights and inputs that they would otherwise never have.”

The overwhelming majority saw AI-generated art as “art” full stop, and while some had questions about their identity and originality as a artist, they also saw AI processes having a positive impact on their work overall, one they felt would be dramatic (~45%) or at least noticeable (~37%). 

“Artists know that AI cannot replace them but that it can inspire them to produce more and more innovative or satisfying work, based on their ideas, aesthetics, and practices,” says Elgammal. “AI can be our creative companion, and is most powerful when it supports unique and evocative human ideas and visions.” Full survey results here (www.playform.io/editorial/survey).

Artists have long used technology--from photography to Photoshop--to push their ideas into new territory. Playform (playform.io) offers the latest opportunity for artists and creators to explore the edge of technological possibility and express their humanity. It harnesses AI’s power and turns it into the perfect co-creating companion. 

Playform gives artists a variety of ways to experiment with generative AI. Using groundbreaking technology, Playform can take a simple sketch and transform it into a full-fledged image with color, texture, and stunning detail. It allows a designer to create a series of prototypes of a piece of clothing, say, then layer in other textures, colors, and images for a truly innovative result. The platform functions like an interactive mirror, reflecting back novel iterations that help creatives evolve their ideas. 

“We think of Playform as accompanying and reflecting artists as they generate and perfect their ideas,” says Ahmed Elgammal, founder of Playform. “Playform can be integrated into the creative process because we built it in collaboration with artists.” This month, the platform will be coming out of beta with a slew of new features, including sketch-to-image.

Generative AI, when algorithms create new images, texts, or sounds based on training from massive data sets, enriches human creativity, without replacing it. Playform was built on ongoing artist input, to ensure it served visual creatives in a way they could easily incorporate into their practice. “Playform is not a tool. It’s a creative soulmate to enhance artistic expression,” says Elgammal. 

Behind Playform’s innovative new features like sketch-to-image lies a powerful AI engine trained on centuries of artworks, representing a range of styles, cultures, and techniques. Crafted with an eye for art history and style, this data set allows the AI to identify, mimic, and completely transform a range of images and inputs. From a barebones sketch, for example, Playform can generate a novel landscape, portrait, or other type of image in a specific user defined style or historical style, taking its cues from Monet, Turner, Roerich, or one of many other artists or movements.

“Our goal is to find out ways for generative AI to fit the creative process of artists and other creative professionals. We work closely with artists to understand what they want to do and how AI can help that. We look for questions like ‘Is it possible to do X?’ and try to make it possible,” Elgammal reflects. “To discover what artists truly want, we have developed an artist residency program where we worked with artists, for one month each on specific projects based on their concepts and adapting the AI technology to achieve what they want to do. We then used the experience to make this particular creative process part of Playform.” 

Elgammal and the Playform team worked with artist and instigator Devin Gharakhanian, who created abstract images from old photographs of Charlie Chaplin and who helped inspire Playform’s style morph feature. The portraits were displayed at SCOPE Art Fair in conjunction with Art Basel Miami, causing a buzz at the high-profile event and making history as the first human-AI generated artwork displayed there.

Qinza Najm, a Playform artist in residence, worked with Playform to create a process inspired by her own artworks that explored abstract images based on the human body. The series that emerged from the collaboration with Playform was chosen for an exhibit about art and science at the National Museum of China in Beijing in November 2019, with 1 million visitors to the exhibition during its one-month run.

Along with groundbreaking works based on artists’ existing approaches, Playform has empowered conceptual explorations of what it means to be a mediated human and how we collide and merge with our digitally generated selves. NYU professor and artist Carla Gannis used Playform to create a series of works based on childhood memories for an avatar named C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N. She then monitored people’s responses to the works versus her own “human” works. In another experiment, Gannis used Playform to create visuals she incorporated into a larger VR-based project, which will be exhibited at Telematic in San Francisco in March 2020. Italian artist Domenico Barra developed a project called Affiliation, which explored storytelling via Instagram stories using works made with Playform. 

Playform’s images can also be used as a foundation for works in other media. Artist Anne Spalter generated images using Playform, then executed them in pastels on canvas, drawing on AI’s peculiar ability to surface and blend unexpected elements. Spalter recently exhibited her Playform-based art at the Spring Break Art Fairs in LA and New York City. 

From time-tested methods to bleeding edge technology, Playform is designed to nurture and provoke creative impulses. Then artists take the next steps to make art. “We always listen to artists and creative professionals to build AI that can be part of their daily process,” notes Elgammal. “With them as our guides, we want to spark new ways of seeing.”