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Artificial Intelligence

This guide is created for the UMGC community, with resources and information about Artificial Intelligence that can help students, faculty, and the greater community.

AI and Images

AI-generated images bring a whole new dimension to the fields of art, photography, advertising, design . . .

Questions arise about how to cite AI-generated images, and also about the ethical and even legal implications of AI accessing the work of visual artists online and using it, not necessarily with permission, as the basis for AI-generated art.

The University of Victoria Libraries has put together a useful guide to AI and images. The guide addresses how to cite AI-generated images in APA and other styles, as well as licensing and technical details of popular AI-art tools like DALL-E 2.

DALL-E 2

DALL-E 2 (OpenAI)

DALL-E 2 is an AI application for image generation provided by OpenAI. DALL-E 2 offers a free and a paid-for plan, and lets you create and edit images of various kinds (from photos to paintings to rendered images) using a text-based prompt.

In order to use and reference images created with the help of DALL-E 2, it is possible to publish these images and create a unique URL for them. The provided URL after publishing such an image does not link directly to the image itself, but to a landing page, that contains the visual, but also additional information on who the human creator is as well as the text prompt, that has been used to create the image.

Example: https://labs.openai.com/s/jrbn6Dl8aRTDvS4Kobny33n2 

A humming bird hovering over a flower blossom, one-line drawing

When using such an image, for example by embedding it on a website or including it in a manuscript, this prompt can be used as the alt text to meet accesssibility standards, as it ususally describes what can be seen in the image. 

If you are the human creator of such an A.I. image you might want to save a copy of the image file and maybe even preserve a snapshot of the published image by dropping it in a web-archiving service like the Wayback Machine, since there is no certainty about the long-time preservation of such images or the landing pages created for them.

Attributions

This guide was created by Julie Harding and Robert Miller, UMGC Library. 

Parts of this guide are adapted (with changes) or reused from a guide created by Bronte Chiang at the University of Calgary. The University of Calgary guide is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.