Ask HN: Would you buy an AI-generated picture book (for kids) or a comic?
7 comments
No. I would sit at my computer and make my own pictures in the same vein. Get a chuckle out of them and then delete them. Like I've been for months now.
But if I didn't have the capability to make these kind of images myself at home on my GPU with my brain with my own words that generate prompts... I don't think I would feel short-changed knowing that an art book contains images that someone put time and effort into thinking of the words to generate the images that hopefully they also brought into other photo editing software to clean up a bit and put a little personal flair onto.
I would feel short changed if the person just had absolutely zero creativity and used some sort of prompt collection website and then just generated a bunch of pictures over the course of a couple days and then just casually went through all of the pictures selected a couple of them and then just sent them off to Google photos to turn into a picture book or something.
Edit: now, would I do any of this given that I have the ability to do this at home on my computer offline? Hell no. Even if I made the best children's picture book or adult picture book or whatever pictures I would have to be seriously convinced by multiple people that I should sell whatever pictures that I've made because otherwise I think that art should just be free for people to enjoy and I'm not even talking about legal complications involved because I don't give a shit about those.
Edit: and to your aside: I think there's more of a possibility of touch up artists using actual photos or pictures as the original base along with in and out painting to modify the picture either by using straight up AI or expanding the canvas and crudely drawing what they want changed and then feeding that in for loopback to be in painted and then outpainted. there's more possibility there.
But if I didn't have the capability to make these kind of images myself at home on my GPU with my brain with my own words that generate prompts... I don't think I would feel short-changed knowing that an art book contains images that someone put time and effort into thinking of the words to generate the images that hopefully they also brought into other photo editing software to clean up a bit and put a little personal flair onto.
I would feel short changed if the person just had absolutely zero creativity and used some sort of prompt collection website and then just generated a bunch of pictures over the course of a couple days and then just casually went through all of the pictures selected a couple of them and then just sent them off to Google photos to turn into a picture book or something.
Edit: now, would I do any of this given that I have the ability to do this at home on my computer offline? Hell no. Even if I made the best children's picture book or adult picture book or whatever pictures I would have to be seriously convinced by multiple people that I should sell whatever pictures that I've made because otherwise I think that art should just be free for people to enjoy and I'm not even talking about legal complications involved because I don't give a shit about those.
Edit: and to your aside: I think there's more of a possibility of touch up artists using actual photos or pictures as the original base along with in and out painting to modify the picture either by using straight up AI or expanding the canvas and crudely drawing what they want changed and then feeding that in for loopback to be in painted and then outpainted. there's more possibility there.
It depends.
Is this a lovingly crafted book where the pictures are expertly prompted and currated to the point you can hardly tell an AI was involved?
Or is this another GPT-3 generated book shat out on the market with zero quality control where the AI is not used to push creative boundaries but rather to mass-produce endless noise designed to overwhelm any sort of curation and degrade the quality of the internet just that much further?
If you haven't figured it out by now my personal qualm with AI art isn't with a person's livelihood or copyright issues or whatever. It's with everything else that happens when easy AI comes into the mix
Is this a lovingly crafted book where the pictures are expertly prompted and currated to the point you can hardly tell an AI was involved?
Or is this another GPT-3 generated book shat out on the market with zero quality control where the AI is not used to push creative boundaries but rather to mass-produce endless noise designed to overwhelm any sort of curation and degrade the quality of the internet just that much further?
If you haven't figured it out by now my personal qualm with AI art isn't with a person's livelihood or copyright issues or whatever. It's with everything else that happens when easy AI comes into the mix
Are you asking more about the ethics of commercializing AI creatives derived from real world labor, or about the safety of exposing children to potentially lightly vetted AI creatives?
I have no issue with a children's book written and illustrated by AI that has been properly edited and vetted. On the other hand, I do have some reservations about AI mimicking human generated content.
I have no issue with a children's book written and illustrated by AI that has been properly edited and vetted. On the other hand, I do have some reservations about AI mimicking human generated content.
This is only my opinion but my opinion is asked for:
I would consider buying if the book stated what model they were trained with and then whether that model sources its training data ethically via opt-in or public-domain.
Same as I wouldn't want to buy illustrated children's books made by a large corporation stepping over small illustrators, I don't want to buy from illustrators stepping over a large mass of others either.
I would consider buying if the book stated what model they were trained with and then whether that model sources its training data ethically via opt-in or public-domain.
Same as I wouldn't want to buy illustrated children's books made by a large corporation stepping over small illustrators, I don't want to buy from illustrators stepping over a large mass of others either.
If a loaf of bread wrote a warning that it was made with robot labor, I'd opt for the homemade bread at the same price. I think we're slightly biased to expect better quality from humans. Is it racism to expect that the human race is superior?
How would one know if the AI is sufficient? Maybe there is a place for a real human validation and curation service.
Aside Note: I've already seen for hire posts of human artists offering to touch up AI generated work.
Aside Note: I've already seen for hire posts of human artists offering to touch up AI generated work.
I will. In fact, I'm making an online course using AI to generate the voiceover.
I can see a future soon where AI picture books will be flooded on Amazon (using print-on-demand). Or writers create comics with AI-generated images.
Would you buy such books if they cleary state the images were AI-generated? Would you feel shortchanged if the book omits the fact the images were AI-generated? Or would you avoid AI-generated picture books or comics?
(Aside: I wonder if a new role emerges: the AI touch-up artist who takes an AI image as the base and embellish. A bit like the 'photobashing' technique widely used by artists.)