Fine Art America adds AI created Description and Keywords

Just a quick post in case you weren’t aware of this. Fine Art America has released a new feature that automatically creates a description and keywords for images that are uploaded without them. An image that already has those pieces of metadata pre-filled are not impacted, but if you upload an image without any metadata, or with just the title completed, their AI system will create the missing ones. I understood that they used a title (if present) to help create the rest, but after my quick test, I’m not sure that is the case.

Here is the result of one test upload I did. The image was a reprocessed version of the Mountaineer statue composited in front of a sunset behind Woodburn Hall at West Virginia University.

The title I used for the upload was “Mountaineer Statue in front of Woodburn Hall at WVU” and I had nothing in the description (caption in Lightroom) and keyword fields. The AI system creates the new fields immediately on upload so you are presented with this:

The first thing to say is that it doesn’t seem to have used the title information at all. There is no indication of where it is or what specifically it is. It has instead looked just at the image and done an OK job of describing it, guessing that it is a college campus and it is sunset and there is a statue there. If you were a buyer, would you use those words to look for this image – I doubt it personally. You could carry on and add some specific information about where it is, but if you are going to have to do that for each image, especially if you upload several similar images in a series, you might as well have keyworded in Lightroom to start with and sync the information across multiple files.

My own keywords and descriptions for this image are:

So will I be using this – no. I can see that some people could find it useful – it might be good for an abstract painting or image where it is really quite difficult to describe what the image really illustrates. The biggest downside for what I might call competent artists is that many more images and paintings that used to have few keywords and poor descriptions will now be more easily found by search engines. Good for the owner of the site who now hosts fewer images that are never seen. More competition for the artists!

Incidentally, I noticed that FAA is now getting almost 10,000 new images a day uploaded to their site! You can see them here for a specific day. Quite a lot are AI generated images, but it just goes to reinforce that you are the only one that can make your images been seen. No-one can go to that site and browse around and find your work. So, get some good keywords and descriptions and try to make them visible and ranked by Google!