The AI Unbundling(stratechery.com)
stratechery.com
The AI Unbundling
https://stratechery.com/2022/the-ai-unbundling/
206 comments
> People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose.
When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art.
I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures.
In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues.
I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.
When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art.
I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures.
In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues.
I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.
I think the sad reality is that modern art is largely trash. Perhaps because painting/drawing/sculpting with excellent technique is too much of a commodified trade already. Perhaps because it's too hard to be original. A new oil painting of a tree, no matter how well executed, won't draw people to an art gallery. So artists take refuge in social commentary: A banana taped to a wall. A naked person holding a trash barrel. Two bicycles welded together upside down. Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall.
But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.
SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.
But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.
SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.
Trash, but trash minted through an entrenched network of art curators, directors and connoisseurs - this is what makes trashy modern art scarce and valuable, not to mention the tax breaks!
What I and some insiders consider the real art - that is, applying rare well-developed talent to production of unapologetically high-quality sensual artifacts of art - is mostly commercialized by now, with best people employed by the media corporations to produce assets for high-value games and movies. I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network), and feel a tinge of sadness seeing that SD will move the equilibrium here.
The real crux of the matter is that we should provide artists with some decent UBI guarantee, and this should be a humane solution to impending poverty, for each of the professions that are going to cease being commercially viable in the near future.
What I and some insiders consider the real art - that is, applying rare well-developed talent to production of unapologetically high-quality sensual artifacts of art - is mostly commercialized by now, with best people employed by the media corporations to produce assets for high-value games and movies. I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network), and feel a tinge of sadness seeing that SD will move the equilibrium here.
The real crux of the matter is that we should provide artists with some decent UBI guarantee, and this should be a humane solution to impending poverty, for each of the professions that are going to cease being commercially viable in the near future.
> I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network)
All art is only valuable within the context of its social network. If you leave the Mona Lisa in the woods, the only real "value" it will hold is as a shelter for bugs.
I think what really bothers you here is about which social networks define the value for certain kinds of art. High technical skill art in service of mass media artifacts like videogames and films is sort of the most "democratic" of uses of art. Almost everyone can perceive its value and it asks little of the consumer in return.
Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different. It is deliberately created to provide value only to the small set of people with the context to appreciate it. It's sort of a continuation of a very long conversation that if you haven't been on the inside of, you miss out on. That leads naturally to valid claims of elitism. (The fact that it's also used as a large scale money laundering enterprise by the very rich certainly doesn't help.)
The unfortunate part is that the collateral damage this inflicts on the general idea of niche art. Anyone who has ever created can tell you that the more specific of an audience you target, the more deeply your art can move them. If you're trying to write a song that a billion people will like, it can only be about the most banal of platitudes. Now write a song about what it's like to lose one's spouse to alcoholism and turn to drinking to deal with it. Few people can relate to it, but the ones who can, well, you can pierce their soul.
The idea that you need context to understand a piece of art is totally valid and one of the most important tools an artist has at their disposal. Likewise, it's not a failing when a piece of art only aims for a small targeted audience. Don't let the snobbery and elitist trash of the contemporary art scene taint those concepts.
All art is only valuable within the context of its social network. If you leave the Mona Lisa in the woods, the only real "value" it will hold is as a shelter for bugs.
I think what really bothers you here is about which social networks define the value for certain kinds of art. High technical skill art in service of mass media artifacts like videogames and films is sort of the most "democratic" of uses of art. Almost everyone can perceive its value and it asks little of the consumer in return.
Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different. It is deliberately created to provide value only to the small set of people with the context to appreciate it. It's sort of a continuation of a very long conversation that if you haven't been on the inside of, you miss out on. That leads naturally to valid claims of elitism. (The fact that it's also used as a large scale money laundering enterprise by the very rich certainly doesn't help.)
The unfortunate part is that the collateral damage this inflicts on the general idea of niche art. Anyone who has ever created can tell you that the more specific of an audience you target, the more deeply your art can move them. If you're trying to write a song that a billion people will like, it can only be about the most banal of platitudes. Now write a song about what it's like to lose one's spouse to alcoholism and turn to drinking to deal with it. Few people can relate to it, but the ones who can, well, you can pierce their soul.
The idea that you need context to understand a piece of art is totally valid and one of the most important tools an artist has at their disposal. Likewise, it's not a failing when a piece of art only aims for a small targeted audience. Don't let the snobbery and elitist trash of the contemporary art scene taint those concepts.
> Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different.
Let's notice the elephant in the room: HN commentariat is a biased sample with an obvious overrepresentation of autistic people. I'm likely not too much ahead of the curve here, as you can see.
I hope this pretext will add to your charitable interpretation of what I have to say. As they say "autism speaks, it's time to listen". Consider this a hypothesis.
I cannot say this condition is overwhelmingly beneficial - honestly I can interpret it as a bit of a handicap, something that, among other effects, makes the child disinterested in people around him in his early formative years (yes it's most commonly "him"). Instead the child is made to focus on the world and things in it on his own terms, as a one-of-a-kind being starting from the almost pure blank slate - with the blank slate here, perhaps, being an overgrown PFC full of fresh synapses. This makes learning one's world and one's inner depth harder compared to normal individuals - which have the right set of biases and heuristics to start imitating other people early on, standing on the shoulders of giants right away, learning the behaviors that passed through many aeons from parents to children and quickly arriving to a socially-bootstrapped form of self-awareness. And for the autistic One the world (and, apparently, the self) is an alien world which is being conceptualized for the first time ever, and the society is an alien configuration of beings which feel and behave quite differently from how one would expect them to, if they were kin to the autistic. Even when one grows up to like it, it's still like being an eternal foreign student everywhere you go - yet your relationship to the world you found yourself in becomes deeply personal.
What I'm trying to say is this predicament makes one much more likely to learn the world on the world's terms, same with oneself and one's feelings - beauty sense included. Having developed in this way, the social concept of beauty you describe is a vastly alien thing to me - I can understand it, but it's like understanding physics of some abstract phenomena. Myself, I just feel beauty, as it developed inside of me as a palette of feelings resonating with certain structural patterns in the world's percepts I come across - something having to do with information-theoretic regularization in primate neocortex, as I may guess. No social reinforcement was necessary to arrive to this feeling, it has a sense of finality and self-referentiality to it - something basic and indispensable, something valuable.
Does it sound scary, cold and alien to you, or simply incoherent? That's how your idea of socially mandated value sounds to me - shallow repressiveness of one's social graph pushing supervised learning examples into your very soul, re-flashing it with the weights of the collective simulacra, of the lovecraftian entity - a disembodied communal sense of value (can't even call it "beauty" as in the limit it's completely arbitrary, a value-language defined by social custom) - to make you one of them, a part of the eusocial organism? This is 1984-level scary, reeducation camp-level, basically.
... And with these new neural networks I immediately felt some sense of commonality, as if they were from the same metaphorical planet I came from - tiny blank slates learning compressed sense of the world as it passes through them, their beauty and my beauty approximating the same information-theoretical Eidos.
Let's notice the elephant in the room: HN commentariat is a biased sample with an obvious overrepresentation of autistic people. I'm likely not too much ahead of the curve here, as you can see.
I hope this pretext will add to your charitable interpretation of what I have to say. As they say "autism speaks, it's time to listen". Consider this a hypothesis.
I cannot say this condition is overwhelmingly beneficial - honestly I can interpret it as a bit of a handicap, something that, among other effects, makes the child disinterested in people around him in his early formative years (yes it's most commonly "him"). Instead the child is made to focus on the world and things in it on his own terms, as a one-of-a-kind being starting from the almost pure blank slate - with the blank slate here, perhaps, being an overgrown PFC full of fresh synapses. This makes learning one's world and one's inner depth harder compared to normal individuals - which have the right set of biases and heuristics to start imitating other people early on, standing on the shoulders of giants right away, learning the behaviors that passed through many aeons from parents to children and quickly arriving to a socially-bootstrapped form of self-awareness. And for the autistic One the world (and, apparently, the self) is an alien world which is being conceptualized for the first time ever, and the society is an alien configuration of beings which feel and behave quite differently from how one would expect them to, if they were kin to the autistic. Even when one grows up to like it, it's still like being an eternal foreign student everywhere you go - yet your relationship to the world you found yourself in becomes deeply personal.
What I'm trying to say is this predicament makes one much more likely to learn the world on the world's terms, same with oneself and one's feelings - beauty sense included. Having developed in this way, the social concept of beauty you describe is a vastly alien thing to me - I can understand it, but it's like understanding physics of some abstract phenomena. Myself, I just feel beauty, as it developed inside of me as a palette of feelings resonating with certain structural patterns in the world's percepts I come across - something having to do with information-theoretic regularization in primate neocortex, as I may guess. No social reinforcement was necessary to arrive to this feeling, it has a sense of finality and self-referentiality to it - something basic and indispensable, something valuable.
Does it sound scary, cold and alien to you, or simply incoherent? That's how your idea of socially mandated value sounds to me - shallow repressiveness of one's social graph pushing supervised learning examples into your very soul, re-flashing it with the weights of the collective simulacra, of the lovecraftian entity - a disembodied communal sense of value (can't even call it "beauty" as in the limit it's completely arbitrary, a value-language defined by social custom) - to make you one of them, a part of the eusocial organism? This is 1984-level scary, reeducation camp-level, basically.
... And with these new neural networks I immediately felt some sense of commonality, as if they were from the same metaphorical planet I came from - tiny blank slates learning compressed sense of the world as it passes through them, their beauty and my beauty approximating the same information-theoretical Eidos.
I'm happy for you finding resonance in art produced via stable diffusion and friends.
However I must reject your claim that your experience of Autism gifts you with some sort of objective view of the world, art and aesthetics that allows you to judge all contemporary art as 'trash.'
However I must reject your claim that your experience of Autism gifts you with some sort of objective view of the world, art and aesthetics that allows you to judge all contemporary art as 'trash.'
Contemporary art always has felt to me like an “the emperor has no clothes” enterprise. It’s appreciated and valued because this marks you as not part of some out-group.
Almost all artifacts carry some amount of group membership signal. I think the more interesting question is whether an artifact carries anything in addition to that signal. And, while I agree that a lot of contemporary art leans way to heavily towards in-group signaling, I think it would be unfair to dismiss it entirely.
Literally none of the existing world matters anymore.
Period.
We're watching the Third Industrial Revolution unfold live and in front of our eyes, and it will only take a few short years to fully sweep into all aspects of society.
Yes, Picasso and Banksy will continue to have value. But that's an infinitesimal sliver of the value that is about to be unleashed upon the economy.
The real value is that startups like mine will give anyone the power to generate new Taylor Swift songs [1].
New movies, new music, new games. All tailored to the nichest and most exacting of interests.
You want the steampunk vampires of Cloud City, featuring Sean Connery and young Eddie Murphy duking it out while riding on the backs of space whales? You'll have that in just ten short years.
If you think TikTok adequately captivates the minds of the population, you have no idea what a finely tuned search for people's true interests will do.
Humans won't be good enough at satisfying other humans anymore. Not without aid.
The new world is going to blow our minds, and it's already beginning to unfold.
In about a year, I don't know why anyone would dare work for Google, Amazon, or any of the other legacy businesses. They're going to be swamped and struggle to stay afloat amid the biggest single act of the Innovator's Dilemma to ever happen in our history.
[1] This is happening. My startup does it.
Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_0JjYUe5jo --> https://vocaroo.com/1hgjjnVNqWjk
(We'll have the Obama and Taylor Swift versions up on our site soon.)
Our video stuff is under development, but I'll show you something analogous that a skilled competitor is doing in the open (though they're underselling themselves) : https://imgur.com/seBTPG8
The whole world is about to be carved up and reallocated.
I'm going to get back to work. See you on the other side.
Period.
We're watching the Third Industrial Revolution unfold live and in front of our eyes, and it will only take a few short years to fully sweep into all aspects of society.
Yes, Picasso and Banksy will continue to have value. But that's an infinitesimal sliver of the value that is about to be unleashed upon the economy.
The real value is that startups like mine will give anyone the power to generate new Taylor Swift songs [1].
New movies, new music, new games. All tailored to the nichest and most exacting of interests.
You want the steampunk vampires of Cloud City, featuring Sean Connery and young Eddie Murphy duking it out while riding on the backs of space whales? You'll have that in just ten short years.
If you think TikTok adequately captivates the minds of the population, you have no idea what a finely tuned search for people's true interests will do.
Humans won't be good enough at satisfying other humans anymore. Not without aid.
The new world is going to blow our minds, and it's already beginning to unfold.
In about a year, I don't know why anyone would dare work for Google, Amazon, or any of the other legacy businesses. They're going to be swamped and struggle to stay afloat amid the biggest single act of the Innovator's Dilemma to ever happen in our history.
[1] This is happening. My startup does it.
Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_0JjYUe5jo --> https://vocaroo.com/1hgjjnVNqWjk
(We'll have the Obama and Taylor Swift versions up on our site soon.)
Our video stuff is under development, but I'll show you something analogous that a skilled competitor is doing in the open (though they're underselling themselves) : https://imgur.com/seBTPG8
The whole world is about to be carved up and reallocated.
I'm going to get back to work. See you on the other side.
>In about a year, I don't know why anyone would dare work for Google, Amazon, or any of the other legacy businesses. They're going to be swamped and struggle to stay afloat amid the biggest single act of the Innovator's Dilemma to ever happen in our history.
Well, at least your drug dealer is apparently supplying you with the good stuff. I'll bet 10k any day that the combined value of all companies purely in the generative space will not exceed the value of a single FAANG company in 5 years. Yes, including Netflix.
Well, at least your drug dealer is apparently supplying you with the good stuff. I'll bet 10k any day that the combined value of all companies purely in the generative space will not exceed the value of a single FAANG company in 5 years. Yes, including Netflix.
What the… do you think the artist you and your clique dismiss as not making «the real art» are peddling in trash?
Wasting their efforts clamoring for recognitiom from «an entrenched network art curators, directors and connoseurs»?
That the gilded creators of «the real art» want your pity? To be construed as without agency in all of this?
You elitist buffoon, you know not of what you speak. You know what you like, but you dislike and question the motives of that which you do not know nor care to. Keep it to yourself.
That the gilded creators of «the real art» want your pity? To be construed as without agency in all of this?
You elitist buffoon, you know not of what you speak. You know what you like, but you dislike and question the motives of that which you do not know nor care to. Keep it to yourself.
You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer.
If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.
If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.
I have tried, through a very good friend who is an artist. She has exhibited at some major galleries in Europe, and I’d say she knows her stuff.
Much as I love my friend, after the exposure I’ve had to modern art I have to agree that it is almost without exception meaningless trash.
Look, let’s just be real for a moment here. Take a step back and ask yourself what’s more likely: that (A) there really is something deep and mysterious about the banana-on-the-wall or (B) most actual artistry disappeared with the invention of photography and modern artists are LARPing, sustained by taxpayer handouts and the financial fumes of the money laundering and tax evasion that high end art is used for.
Modern art is a joke, and everyone including the artists know it.
Much as I love my friend, after the exposure I’ve had to modern art I have to agree that it is almost without exception meaningless trash.
Look, let’s just be real for a moment here. Take a step back and ask yourself what’s more likely: that (A) there really is something deep and mysterious about the banana-on-the-wall or (B) most actual artistry disappeared with the invention of photography and modern artists are LARPing, sustained by taxpayer handouts and the financial fumes of the money laundering and tax evasion that high end art is used for.
Modern art is a joke, and everyone including the artists know it.
I've seen those kinds of art friends too, and it's possible that your friend has terrible taste, and has been directly or indirectly responsible for filtering out anything you might actually like. There's definitely a lot of noise to signal out there, and you definitely need people who can filter through it for you.
Oh A for sure! People are not idiots (generally). It is in fact not just us, the cool smart guys, who «see the world for what it really is» or «don’t like to waste our time with pointless sophistry». Everybody does!
I can tell you’re the kind of thoughtful serious guy who likes good, tasteful and neccesary things, and yet! You dislike bad, tasetless and unneeded things. I do too, and so does everyone else, on balance.
Ps: I feel obliged to remind you to not say the quiet part out loud. Not because the elephant in the room might trample you, but because at least one reader had to muster heroic amounts of good faith to not dismiss out of hand the substance of your post due to form. And even still, I could not abstain from this disclaimer.
I can tell you’re the kind of thoughtful serious guy who likes good, tasteful and neccesary things, and yet! You dislike bad, tasetless and unneeded things. I do too, and so does everyone else, on balance.
Ps: I feel obliged to remind you to not say the quiet part out loud. Not because the elephant in the room might trample you, but because at least one reader had to muster heroic amounts of good faith to not dismiss out of hand the substance of your post due to form. And even still, I could not abstain from this disclaimer.
You're not justifying your premise, so those two sentences are essentially free of content.
Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?
Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?
If you do not see how you are subverting the very argument that states your position, I don’t know what to tell you.
If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!
If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!
Ha! Real talk: I still have no idea what you're saying. I wish you did know what to tell me.
Art isn't about skilfully painting a tree. That's artistry. Art is more than that, it's about feeling, evoking thoughts, and yeah, commenting on society.
> It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal.
This is simply untrue, modern art is not "always" anything. And who are you to judge what is going on in the mind of an artist?
I don't know what decade you deem to be "modern" art, but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop. You are the same as generations and generations of people who have been wrong and stuck in the comfort of the status quo. I hate to refer back to Van Gough, but you are a version of the people who missed the point there. And I suppose the social commentary of Pop Art is just trash too?
AI art will hang in a gallery if it evokes a feeling, not because it's a bloody good execution of a painting of a tree. This is how ALL art has been since we moved beyond painting wealthy people. It has to capture an emotion, thought, idea, or whatever else is intangible. Being able to get that intangible feeling across to the viewer is what is special. Not the quality of the craft, that's artistry.
I truly feel sorry for you not having been moved by something more than a beautiful oil painting.
> It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal.
This is simply untrue, modern art is not "always" anything. And who are you to judge what is going on in the mind of an artist?
I don't know what decade you deem to be "modern" art, but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop. You are the same as generations and generations of people who have been wrong and stuck in the comfort of the status quo. I hate to refer back to Van Gough, but you are a version of the people who missed the point there. And I suppose the social commentary of Pop Art is just trash too?
AI art will hang in a gallery if it evokes a feeling, not because it's a bloody good execution of a painting of a tree. This is how ALL art has been since we moved beyond painting wealthy people. It has to capture an emotion, thought, idea, or whatever else is intangible. Being able to get that intangible feeling across to the viewer is what is special. Not the quality of the craft, that's artistry.
I truly feel sorry for you not having been moved by something more than a beautiful oil painting.
> but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop
What would be some examples of that? Not disagreeing, would just like to have my jaw drop
What would be some examples of that? Not disagreeing, would just like to have my jaw drop
> The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.
If the art made you think about a deeper meaning, is it better the artist put it there for you to find, or that it enabled you to freely think? I think too many people have “High school English class” syndrome. There’s no single right answer to extract from looking at art to give you that A+. It’s about self reflection, reflection on the experience and context of the art, and learning about the world around you. Everyone has a different experience and a different perspective and everyone gets something else out of it.
Can this be accomplished with SD art? Yes, but the curation of the model, or exact wording put into the model is still needed to provide some expected output that evoked the emotion. Artists may even modify an output as a starting point or inspiration, but “gallery” type art isn’t consumed for simple entertainment value like an Instagram photo feed, but as a destination experience (for sufficient expense to fund human artists too).
If the art made you think about a deeper meaning, is it better the artist put it there for you to find, or that it enabled you to freely think? I think too many people have “High school English class” syndrome. There’s no single right answer to extract from looking at art to give you that A+. It’s about self reflection, reflection on the experience and context of the art, and learning about the world around you. Everyone has a different experience and a different perspective and everyone gets something else out of it.
Can this be accomplished with SD art? Yes, but the curation of the model, or exact wording put into the model is still needed to provide some expected output that evoked the emotion. Artists may even modify an output as a starting point or inspiration, but “gallery” type art isn’t consumed for simple entertainment value like an Instagram photo feed, but as a destination experience (for sufficient expense to fund human artists too).
> Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall.
I remember this specific example because the artist was paying the workers to do a pointless job. Technically, she was breaking the law. If only for that I thought it was interesting. I am not saying I always like this kind of performance art, but sometimes it reaches you in a way that a painting could not.
I remember this specific example because the artist was paying the workers to do a pointless job. Technically, she was breaking the law. If only for that I thought it was interesting. I am not saying I always like this kind of performance art, but sometimes it reaches you in a way that a painting could not.
I don't know if SD is art or not, but it has already generated one of my favorite ever photos/paintings:
https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io/images/RSXTZVMjYhTdyTmE/
I want to hang this on my wall.
https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io/images/RSXTZVMjYhTdyTmE/
I want to hang this on my wall.
The absurdity that statement art highlights is how artistic merit is assigned more so on the artist than on any inherent quality of the art itself.
This comment is right on the money in making the distinction between illustration/stock images, and fine art, let alone installation or performance art. It's a distinction not made often enough in these conversations. These functions are performed by different people, for different reasons, and they're used in different ways.
Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it.
One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.
Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it.
One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.
> You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.
I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.
It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.
This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.
It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.
This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
> I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.
But then, if you're a great studio painter, SD doesn't threaten your livelihood in any meaningful way, whereas if you're the sort of artist that produces video game assets, you've probably already got a keen eye for spotting rendering issues, and prompt engineering and inpainting and producing concept images AIs can work with are all likely to be skills you pick up considerably better than the average person... and then it's just another tool.
But then, if you're a great studio painter, SD doesn't threaten your livelihood in any meaningful way, whereas if you're the sort of artist that produces video game assets, you've probably already got a keen eye for spotting rendering issues, and prompt engineering and inpainting and producing concept images AIs can work with are all likely to be skills you pick up considerably better than the average person... and then it's just another tool.
> One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch.
As someone intimately-amateurly involved with AI artwork over the past six months, I've come to disagree with the term "prompt engineering" as a description of the skillset. It's not just feeding it a good prompt (which is not that much of a puzzle once you get into it, and is close to being a solved problem in my book), but instead a whole iterative pipeline of human-in-the-loop hacks and touchups in order to make up for the tech's existing faults and unwieldiness. Many aspects of this pipeline, interestingly, are already familiar to digital artists.
I think the specifics of this pipeline will continue to change on a weekly basis until we reach a plateau in the technologies. But, novelty lies at the heart of all art: I don't think the pipeline will ever be replaced by one-shot, completely automated and brainless txt2img processes. Even if the difference between "beginner artist" and "expert artist" shrinks to a hair's breadth because of access to AI, it goes back to that xkcd quote, "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." We will continue to instinctually desire and respect the efforts of people who go the extra mile to create something just a little more perfect or a little more original.
As someone intimately-amateurly involved with AI artwork over the past six months, I've come to disagree with the term "prompt engineering" as a description of the skillset. It's not just feeding it a good prompt (which is not that much of a puzzle once you get into it, and is close to being a solved problem in my book), but instead a whole iterative pipeline of human-in-the-loop hacks and touchups in order to make up for the tech's existing faults and unwieldiness. Many aspects of this pipeline, interestingly, are already familiar to digital artists.
I think the specifics of this pipeline will continue to change on a weekly basis until we reach a plateau in the technologies. But, novelty lies at the heart of all art: I don't think the pipeline will ever be replaced by one-shot, completely automated and brainless txt2img processes. Even if the difference between "beginner artist" and "expert artist" shrinks to a hair's breadth because of access to AI, it goes back to that xkcd quote, "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." We will continue to instinctually desire and respect the efforts of people who go the extra mile to create something just a little more perfect or a little more original.
Art in the sense of gallery art is a social phenomenon. Nobody cares about the paint splashes with a meaningful interpretation on the placard from some high school student in Nebraska, but the same thing at a hip NYC gallery from the right NYU student with the right mentors could be a big break.
This isn't a cheap shot on art (the same can be said for many things people enjoy, including much of fiction). It's to say that I think that this will replace "art as a low margin service" but not "the art world."
This isn't a cheap shot on art (the same can be said for many things people enjoy, including much of fiction). It's to say that I think that this will replace "art as a low margin service" but not "the art world."
> In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things.
Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies.
Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies.
Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages.
AI won't be any different.
The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler.
Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art.
That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.
Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies.
Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies.
Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages.
AI won't be any different.
The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler.
Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art.
That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.
This reminds me of the early days of the synthesizer. Oh, no. Music is over. First it was novel and interesting, then it was poorly done and cliche and then the artists did what they do, they turned it into something new and fresh and then it was awesome. Same story, new tech. I'm just keeping my eye out for the Stevie Wonder of SD.
> The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions.
How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating?
Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there.
It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor?
Just throwing some random questions out there.
Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions.
How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating?
Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there.
It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor?
Just throwing some random questions out there.
> How does the person making this know it's actually good art?
How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...
> Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
> As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
> What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...
> Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
> As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
> What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
> How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...
I wouldn't know, but I'm not sure what that point illustrates?
I'm fairly sure Van Gogh had a pretty good idea how his art was different/stood out from what existed, and could articulate why he did it a certain why (i.e. why it was good, to him at least). I'm far less certain about some random person with no art background typing a prompt being capable of the same analysis/understanding (that's also why 99% of AI art so far is transparently derivative).
To be clear — my point isn't that AI-art is bad or whatever. It's that it could displace/change the nature of what making art is about, and that incidentally it might require new skills or more extreme versions of existing skills, making the fear of the disappearance of "artists" overblown (and as a corollary making the idea that anyone can become capable of creating meaningful art exaggerated as well).
> It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
Right, but "expression" isn't something trivial, that's the point. If the prompt is "Harbor scene", there's a billion ways to realize that. Someone would presumably have to have the vocabulary/knowledge to navigate that space and produce something worthwhile in the end.
There's probably something to be said about the amount of control the artist gets on the output as well. The more we try to reintroduce post-hoc adjustments to e.g. an AI-generated image, the more we make "new art" look like "old art" (i.e. requires significant specific technical knowledge, albeit with different tools that paint and brushes).
Maybe it hits a balance, maybe it just goes back to the same situation as before.
> And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
Yup, that's another important point. AI just becomes the new normal. But it will take skills to stand out given that new tool set. AI generated "art" will be seen the same way we see children doodles.
> If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Eh, disagree. If people had no knowledge of what poetry existed in the past or no understanding of it (think average college freshman essay), it certainly wouldn't follow that AI-generated crappy nursery rhymes would become Shakespeare-level poetry.
> Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
That's why I made the point about curation.
If there's no "objective" quality to art, it's entirely narrative-based, whether on a past canon, or some sort of manifesto/principles something should stick to (think of modern art movements).
The job becomes completely different — it's not about the technical details of the work itself, but about how it's inserted in a larger cultural phenomenon ascribing certain values to art itself or certain principles in particular.
> If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
To the person creating it, maybe, but then we're definitely talking about something different than ("high") art the way it's been talked about in academic discourse for the past ~2500 y. There has so be at least a common perception about the value of a piece of art for it to be considered as such.
I wouldn't know, but I'm not sure what that point illustrates?
I'm fairly sure Van Gogh had a pretty good idea how his art was different/stood out from what existed, and could articulate why he did it a certain why (i.e. why it was good, to him at least). I'm far less certain about some random person with no art background typing a prompt being capable of the same analysis/understanding (that's also why 99% of AI art so far is transparently derivative).
To be clear — my point isn't that AI-art is bad or whatever. It's that it could displace/change the nature of what making art is about, and that incidentally it might require new skills or more extreme versions of existing skills, making the fear of the disappearance of "artists" overblown (and as a corollary making the idea that anyone can become capable of creating meaningful art exaggerated as well).
> It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
Right, but "expression" isn't something trivial, that's the point. If the prompt is "Harbor scene", there's a billion ways to realize that. Someone would presumably have to have the vocabulary/knowledge to navigate that space and produce something worthwhile in the end.
There's probably something to be said about the amount of control the artist gets on the output as well. The more we try to reintroduce post-hoc adjustments to e.g. an AI-generated image, the more we make "new art" look like "old art" (i.e. requires significant specific technical knowledge, albeit with different tools that paint and brushes).
Maybe it hits a balance, maybe it just goes back to the same situation as before.
> And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
Yup, that's another important point. AI just becomes the new normal. But it will take skills to stand out given that new tool set. AI generated "art" will be seen the same way we see children doodles.
> If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Eh, disagree. If people had no knowledge of what poetry existed in the past or no understanding of it (think average college freshman essay), it certainly wouldn't follow that AI-generated crappy nursery rhymes would become Shakespeare-level poetry.
> Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
That's why I made the point about curation.
If there's no "objective" quality to art, it's entirely narrative-based, whether on a past canon, or some sort of manifesto/principles something should stick to (think of modern art movements).
The job becomes completely different — it's not about the technical details of the work itself, but about how it's inserted in a larger cultural phenomenon ascribing certain values to art itself or certain principles in particular.
> If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
To the person creating it, maybe, but then we're definitely talking about something different than ("high") art the way it's been talked about in academic discourse for the past ~2500 y. There has so be at least a common perception about the value of a piece of art for it to be considered as such.
Worth noting that this is also currently on the HN front page: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin...
Huh, was not expecting Fur Affinity to be a poster child for such a ban.
The surprise is not because it’s furry — the art scene is such a large fraction of the furry economy that the introduction of AI art is approximately equivalent to introducing modern farming to, IDK, the 1850s or something — but rather because of that site’s lack of reputation with regards to technology.
Although, perhaps that explains why the quotation is “That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.” rather than the billions in the training sets.
The surprise is not because it’s furry — the art scene is such a large fraction of the furry economy that the introduction of AI art is approximately equivalent to introducing modern farming to, IDK, the 1850s or something — but rather because of that site’s lack of reputation with regards to technology.
Although, perhaps that explains why the quotation is “That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.” rather than the billions in the training sets.
This was actually predictable, if one was listening to the buzz around the different communities when the "this waifu/pony/fursona/etc. does not exist" generators were first introduced. Every community seemed to love the spectacle, except for the furry community, who were noticeably more on edge about it.
I still don't really know what to attribute the attitude to, but it seems to be a pattern.
I still don't really know what to attribute the attitude to, but it seems to be a pattern.
As I said, the surprise is that particular website, not that specific fandom. The fandom is unsurprising for the reason I gave.
The pony and anime communities also revolve around an economy of mostly static 2d art, for what it's worth.
Interesting one, thanks. By the nature of it that art community excludes huge areas of art (concept art, performance art, land art, …). Basically anything that is not a 2d image (sometimes animated) on a screen. To me it matches exactly what I meant with the first type of art, although I admit it is a crude categorisation.
If they charged a small amount per submission probably the would stop users submitting 40 images per second.
If they charged a small amount per submission probably the would stop users submitting 40 images per second.
> art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger)
I'd say the opposite. Seeing how shit SD was at generating placeholder products for a demo, and how it fails at stuff like proportions, depth, etc. the only good applications I've seen so far is abstract/concept art where you suspend disbelief because of the setting.
I think abstract art is lower hanging fruit. "High art" will be impacted as long as someone spins it into a story, it mostly reduces into social circles and selling bullshit to eachother anyway.
I'd say the opposite. Seeing how shit SD was at generating placeholder products for a demo, and how it fails at stuff like proportions, depth, etc. the only good applications I've seen so far is abstract/concept art where you suspend disbelief because of the setting.
I think abstract art is lower hanging fruit. "High art" will be impacted as long as someone spins it into a story, it mostly reduces into social circles and selling bullshit to eachother anyway.
>I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art.
A note here, the term "modern art" is usually used to define a period of art produced sometime between 1860-1960. When discussing artwork created today (or since about 1950), most would define that as "contemporary art".
A note here, the term "modern art" is usually used to define a period of art produced sometime between 1860-1960. When discussing artwork created today (or since about 1950), most would define that as "contemporary art".
> I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues.
Do you happen to have a link? This sounds amazing. I wish more artists and mainstream would come forward to help immigrants. The way the states treat the immigrants is inhumane. We should open our borders, not build more walls.
Do you happen to have a link? This sounds amazing. I wish more artists and mainstream would come forward to help immigrants. The way the states treat the immigrants is inhumane. We should open our borders, not build more walls.
Is a good question how much AI will take the jobs of artists.
To do a practical exercise, I just enter to The Atlantic website, which in my memory has some level of quality on custom illustrations and photos/collages to represent a concept of the stories. The Atlantic now is paying designers/illustrators and stock image websites to create this images. After the research, I believe that using AI will be useful in many cases and will reduce costs for sure. What do you think?
------
AI + Human "AI querier"
AI is able to do this just from a text query and maybe a human tuning the query
* https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypt...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delon...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speec...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreake...
-------
AI + Human "AI querier" + Human designer/artist for visual adjustments (merge/remove stuff/retouch)
* https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/care...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
--------
Not sure
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-de...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
To do a practical exercise, I just enter to The Atlantic website, which in my memory has some level of quality on custom illustrations and photos/collages to represent a concept of the stories. The Atlantic now is paying designers/illustrators and stock image websites to create this images. After the research, I believe that using AI will be useful in many cases and will reduce costs for sure. What do you think?
------
AI + Human "AI querier"
AI is able to do this just from a text query and maybe a human tuning the query
* https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypt...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delon...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speec...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreake...
-------
AI + Human "AI querier" + Human designer/artist for visual adjustments (merge/remove stuff/retouch)
* https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/care...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
--------
Not sure
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-de...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
>It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me.
Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet?
I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.
Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet?
I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.
Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.
Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration?
Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.
I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN get distorted because you have people sharing their views on art here, even though they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do. Maybe you'd be fine with reading a comic book where everyone has seven melting fingers, but people who take comic books seriously as an artistic medium would not.
Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.
I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN get distorted because you have people sharing their views on art here, even though they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do. Maybe you'd be fine with reading a comic book where everyone has seven melting fingers, but people who take comic books seriously as an artistic medium would not.
> Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.
This seems to be purely an issue of the size of the network. Parti (https://parti.research.google/) demonstrates that as the number of parameters increases, with no change to the underlying architecture, a lot of these problems simply go away. Basically just throw more compute and memory at the problem and everything gets fixed.
This seems to be purely an issue of the size of the network. Parti (https://parti.research.google/) demonstrates that as the number of parameters increases, with no change to the underlying architecture, a lot of these problems simply go away. Basically just throw more compute and memory at the problem and everything gets fixed.
People who buy art do not buy it because of the technical execution. You may need to execute a piece in some way to get a desired effect, but the technique is the mean not the goal.
This is not to take away from the achievements of AI. It's that creating pictures adhering to a prompt with some degree of creativity is very little of what art is. Maybe it will replace some part of commissioned illustrations where the artist's name does not matter (e.g. some avatar pic?).
We still value, financially, some material goods for much more than they cost to produce. Or for much more than their almost identical mass-produced counterparts.
This is not to take away from the achievements of AI. It's that creating pictures adhering to a prompt with some degree of creativity is very little of what art is. Maybe it will replace some part of commissioned illustrations where the artist's name does not matter (e.g. some avatar pic?).
We still value, financially, some material goods for much more than they cost to produce. Or for much more than their almost identical mass-produced counterparts.
> It's that creating pictures adhering to a prompt with some degree of creativity is very little of what art is.
I mean, it's the majority of commercial art - you get a prompt from the client, you maybe flesh it out in a few different directions with sketches, then you refine a final piece. And AI is incredibly good at this process - instant results, infinite patience, and it's free. A very hard combination to meet.
Calendars, book covers, video game assets, green screen backgrounds....
Even in a case like video game animations, where the AI can't build every frame, it can still give you a good reference photo. From there you just need a cheap artist to fill out the frames - a huge cost savings, and a big blow to the artistic community.
Where do you get started as an artist, without any of those? Obviously, Fine Arts isn't nearly as effected, but how do you get your start when you can't build a name from your cool book covers, or get famous off Magic: The Gathering card illustrations?
I mean, it's the majority of commercial art - you get a prompt from the client, you maybe flesh it out in a few different directions with sketches, then you refine a final piece. And AI is incredibly good at this process - instant results, infinite patience, and it's free. A very hard combination to meet.
Calendars, book covers, video game assets, green screen backgrounds....
Even in a case like video game animations, where the AI can't build every frame, it can still give you a good reference photo. From there you just need a cheap artist to fill out the frames - a huge cost savings, and a big blow to the artistic community.
Where do you get started as an artist, without any of those? Obviously, Fine Arts isn't nearly as effected, but how do you get your start when you can't build a name from your cool book covers, or get famous off Magic: The Gathering card illustrations?
Well, we’ll see how it performs, if it’s ever made public.
The 20B images don’t look that much more impressive than what SD is already doing (aside from the ability to render text), and in some cases they look worse. It’s hard to tell because the resolution is so small, but even in the 20B “astronaut riding a horse through a pond” image, it looks like his hands are still nonsensical.
The 20B images don’t look that much more impressive than what SD is already doing (aside from the ability to render text), and in some cases they look worse. It’s hard to tell because the resolution is so small, but even in the 20B “astronaut riding a horse through a pond” image, it looks like his hands are still nonsensical.
This nitpick about hands sounds desperate. Here we are, with a tech so powerful that it overshadows the default hype it's surrounded by (no small feat, most technologies fail to live up to the hype as you know) ... and the critics merely move the goalpost a tiny bit further, even if the tech scales so well as to make their new goalpost irrelevant in a year.
It's not a nitpick. It might be a nitpick if hands were the only thing it couldn't do. But it struggles with a lot more than just hands.
>the tech scales so well as to make their new goalpost irrelevant in a year.
This just brings me back to my original question. Self-driving cars have been "a year away" for many years now, and now companies are starting to hint that human assistance may be required for the foreseeable future [1]. So, why the confidence that art will be an easy problem to solve with just more scaling, when that approach hasn't eliminated the need for humans in any other domain?
[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/truly-autonomous-cars-may...
>the tech scales so well as to make their new goalpost irrelevant in a year.
This just brings me back to my original question. Self-driving cars have been "a year away" for many years now, and now companies are starting to hint that human assistance may be required for the foreseeable future [1]. So, why the confidence that art will be an easy problem to solve with just more scaling, when that approach hasn't eliminated the need for humans in any other domain?
[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/truly-autonomous-cars-may...
I have a suspicion that generative art is going to hit a data wall, also. All of these models are constrained in what patterns they can learn because image captions are not very precise. They can rehash common motifs associated with keywords, but they’re not good at following specific instructions. (“The chair is at the corner of the rug, turned 15 degrees to the left, with the leg nearest the camera aligned with the edge of the fireplace.”) For them to meaningfully improve in this regard, I have to imagine someone will need to locate a trove of a few billion images with exceptionally high quality captions, and well distributed throughout the space of possible image types, subjects, themes, and styles.
I think that details like angle and position will be resolved by using basic sketches as a starting point (we can already make images that sort of conform to layouts as well as prompts), and subdividing the image into assets it then has to stitch together in subsequent steps, and then adjusting lighting/contrast/style as a set of filters in post processing. The wall is lowered quite a bit when you don't insist on doing everything from a single magic prompt
(This will be great from the point of view of art creation; not so great from the point of view of supposedly rendering humans obsolete)
(This will be great from the point of view of art creation; not so great from the point of view of supposedly rendering humans obsolete)
That makes sense. I don’t think that will render humans obsolete; I think it will just increase their productivity and ultimately raise the standard of quality expected. It means artists can explore and iterate on ideas faster than if they had to lay down preliminary artifacts manually. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for authorship: someone still needs to decide what to communicate visually and how to communicate it.
Sure, but eventually we’re going to hit on environmental and cost-effective power limits of training, and it’s not worth the cost to train the model.
AFAIUI, that’s part of the point that Gebru was trying to make before she was fired.
AFAIUI, that’s part of the point that Gebru was trying to make before she was fired.
For now I can run my stable diffusion on a vintage laptop from a decade ago, on CPU (!), and it doesn't even utilize most of my RAM. And training this model was still cheap compared to, say, a google senior engineer yearly salary. The limits of scaling are further than laymen may want to believe.
With an order of magnitude more parameters it won't just do hands, it will do quite a bit more.
With an order of magnitude more parameters it won't just do hands, it will do quite a bit more.
This makes me wonder what the costs of training an actual human artist are. Are AIs less efficient?
You don't have to retrain an AI to spin up another instance - just download a 4gb weight file via a magnet link floating around the internet and run some python code in terminal on your old PC. This kills the comparison.
And training a real living breathing person in a rich OECD country is going to be costly - no offense meant, I'm actually not from OECD.
And training a real living breathing person in a rich OECD country is going to be costly - no offense meant, I'm actually not from OECD.
You can create a lot more copies of the AI.
But then again, when it comes to commercial needs, a human doesn't need "retraining" every time you ask them to draw something they weren't familiar with when they went through art school...
But then again, when it comes to commercial needs, a human doesn't need "retraining" every time you ask them to draw something they weren't familiar with when they went through art school...
Gebru doesn't have anything good to say about AI, it's only downsides. She's biased being an activist and all.
Her position doesn’t invalidate her arguments. How good is a product that can’t stand up to criticism?
Edit: to tie it back to the original criticism: what’s the maximum training cost we’re willing to accept for the model? How can we guarantee return greater than the increased training cost?
Edit: to tie it back to the original criticism: what’s the maximum training cost we’re willing to accept for the model? How can we guarantee return greater than the increased training cost?
Doesn't "the AI" train on art produced by people? "Just expand the dataset, just increase the parameters" seems like it should hit a wall fairly quickly... and still not be very good, because deep learning systems have no insight.
Every instagram, facebook, and tiktok photo with associated text data is a potential pair for training.
In the smartphone age, the case for data hunger looks pretty weak.
In the smartphone age, the case for data hunger looks pretty weak.
But not as weak as the case that the route to production grade commercial art is reached via biasing the training dataset more towards sloppy social media images...
There is no problem here, for any moderately "in" person it's obvious you can bias the model towards aesthetics by concentrating the highly liked images in the dataset. And if it isn't enough, just ask your audience to sometimes rate the aesthetics of the image and use this as a signal for dataset curation.
Artistic styles are often just thin semantic filters over the base 3d geometry that can be learned from photos, and learning these shouldn't require many examples.
Artistic styles are often just thin semantic filters over the base 3d geometry that can be learned from photos, and learning these shouldn't require many examples.
> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.
Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1].
Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant.
Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant.
The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration.
The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant.
> Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.
I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on <$2,000 laptop. That's not 2 years. Do you think hands are going to be a long term roadblock?
As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...
Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1].
Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant.
Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant.
The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration.
The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant.
> Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.
I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on <$2,000 laptop. That's not 2 years. Do you think hands are going to be a long term roadblock?
As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...
But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB.
Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.
Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.
Go ahead and get me a photo off Google images of an alpaca in a suit playing chess in vibrant digital painting style.
Without meaning to sounding rude about it... I'll wait.
Without meaning to sounding rude about it... I'll wait.
I'd be curious to see if you could get that from the AI as well.
I tried generating that exact prompt a few times at theartbutton.ai and all the results were nonsensical.
For example: https://theartbutton.ai/image/OW1HZLfhjg6DFvJtk4vQZzUYqI7pGG...
I tried generating that exact prompt a few times at theartbutton.ai and all the results were nonsensical.
For example: https://theartbutton.ai/image/OW1HZLfhjg6DFvJtk4vQZzUYqI7pGG...
Here are my best attempts: https://imgur.com/a/obZH7X5
Not a very wide range of what I could do with the idea in terms of composition, but just some variations of finishing touches/intermediate steps. I achieved this with some human-in-the-loop iteration and inpainting, but it was no more than 15-30 minutes toying around with it, and I'm no artist.
If you have a semi-decent graphics card and would like to experiment with a bunch of extra settings and tools than are readily available online, this is a good repo for that: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
Not a very wide range of what I could do with the idea in terms of composition, but just some variations of finishing touches/intermediate steps. I achieved this with some human-in-the-loop iteration and inpainting, but it was no more than 15-30 minutes toying around with it, and I'm no artist.
If you have a semi-decent graphics card and would like to experiment with a bunch of extra settings and tools than are readily available online, this is a good repo for that: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
And you are free to search through the whole catalog of google results until you find an owl that looks exactly like you want. Though this is going to get harder as you want something more specific than a simple owl.
But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"
But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"
Changing the prompt until it generates what I want is not that different from changing my search terms until the result I want is closer to the top.
Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.
Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.
> they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do.
I would extend this lack of nuance and understanding to the deep learning implementation side also. A lot of people seem to have some very foundational misconceptions about what deep learning is and what it does. In the case of generative art: these models are “simply” sampling from the frozen statistical structure they have learned from web images and their captions. They don’t understand the relationship between objects in space, they have no ideas or feelings to express, and they communicate nothing. That’s why the even the best output of these models tends to have a perceptible hollowness: you can detect the lack of a coherent authorial intent in it.
I would extend this lack of nuance and understanding to the deep learning implementation side also. A lot of people seem to have some very foundational misconceptions about what deep learning is and what it does. In the case of generative art: these models are “simply” sampling from the frozen statistical structure they have learned from web images and their captions. They don’t understand the relationship between objects in space, they have no ideas or feelings to express, and they communicate nothing. That’s why the even the best output of these models tends to have a perceptible hollowness: you can detect the lack of a coherent authorial intent in it.
I recently went to stable diffusion for some art for a D&D campaign guide, to make the thing more immersive. While the pictures are impressive, there are a lot of things about the generated art that just don't make sense: In one picture, a tower had a staircase down 1/3rd of the way from the door to the ground, just stopping at that point. Most had issues like this. Several other pictures I wanted were impossible to generate.
The field of "art that needs human communication skills" seems to be a lot broader than just scientific illustration.
The field of "art that needs human communication skills" seems to be a lot broader than just scientific illustration.
A significant chunk of what you're describing can be solved by a combination of better prompt engineering and repeated inpainting.
SD obviously doesn't understand language in the same way we do, so it can be tricky to describe things in a way that will match your expectations. Once you start to understand the tricks here, it gets easier and easier.
Inpainting will let you fix a lot of the rest. Staircase stops? Select the area where it stopped, get the AI to generate more. People are already doing this to create very complex artwork where there are issues with faces, hands, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img... is a great example of how you can quickly iterate over a scene.
One of the other things people struggle with is consistent characters and settings, but people have found ways to improve this with Midjourney - https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V3...
There's more of a learning curve to these tools than most people think, but it's also still miles and miles away from the learning curve required to actually be proficient at the technical aspects of making art.
SD obviously doesn't understand language in the same way we do, so it can be tricky to describe things in a way that will match your expectations. Once you start to understand the tricks here, it gets easier and easier.
Inpainting will let you fix a lot of the rest. Staircase stops? Select the area where it stopped, get the AI to generate more. People are already doing this to create very complex artwork where there are issues with faces, hands, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img... is a great example of how you can quickly iterate over a scene.
One of the other things people struggle with is consistent characters and settings, but people have found ways to improve this with Midjourney - https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V3...
There's more of a learning curve to these tools than most people think, but it's also still miles and miles away from the learning curve required to actually be proficient at the technical aspects of making art.
> machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet?
It's not clear if machine language translation may have:
- Increased "demand" for translation by reducing the price of "basic" translation. - Increased overall globalization -- I use machine translation to communicate with contract manufacturers in China, whereas without it I might avoid using contract manufacturers in China. - Due to increased globalization, increased demand for occasional "advanced" translation via professional translators or bilingual.
So perhaps it does greatly decrease or eliminate the large slice of the pie which reflects translation jobs that would exist at the low end while simultaneously greatly increasing the overall size of the pie.
It's not clear if machine language translation may have:
- Increased "demand" for translation by reducing the price of "basic" translation. - Increased overall globalization -- I use machine translation to communicate with contract manufacturers in China, whereas without it I might avoid using contract manufacturers in China. - Due to increased globalization, increased demand for occasional "advanced" translation via professional translators or bilingual.
So perhaps it does greatly decrease or eliminate the large slice of the pie which reflects translation jobs that would exist at the low end while simultaneously greatly increasing the overall size of the pie.
I think it’s highly likely that machine translation will still put human translators out of work. We’re probably very close to the point where machine translation is about as good as an average human translator.
My guess is that something like 90% of translation - e.g product manuals, websites etc are now machine translated. Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.
> Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.
Yes and with luck, at least one language you know how to read will make sense and not be off-the-wall bonkers or simply incomprehensible.
Yes and with luck, at least one language you know how to read will make sense and not be off-the-wall bonkers or simply incomprehensible.
Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate struggles with.
Of course, there are still some jobs for high-quality/high-importance translation like legal work, simultaneous translation etc, but these are quite niche.
Of course, there are still some jobs for high-quality/high-importance translation like legal work, simultaneous translation etc, but these are quite niche.
Just another chapter of the whole automation shtick.
> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.
Any time now.
> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.
Any time now.
There would be way, way more translators in a highly globalized society like today if it wasn’t for machine translation. Also translation is an exact science for the most part, art isn’t.
I am becoming more and more convinced that many techy folks near the AI scene saw that SD et alia can create an image that convincingly (and perhaps even indistinguishably) looks like a very nice digital painting, and based on that data point alone are calling artists obsolete.
I've played around with Dall-E a bit and based on trying to create weird ideas like an army of toddlers in plate armor riding corgis into a medieval battle or a bear riding a bicycle pulling a semi truck, I'm fully convinced that it's over-blown.
It can recreate data close to what it has already seen, just like all neural network techniques. It does poorly outside that domain.
It can recreate data close to what it has already seen, just like all neural network techniques. It does poorly outside that domain.
>Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before.
I'll believe it when I see it. How many self sufficient, independent digital artists are actually making a living doing something other than webcomics or furryporn? SD is amazing technology for sure, but this notion that it's going to incredibly disruptive is the latest in a long line of AI hype. It ignores the simple fact that there is already more art produced and uploaded onto the internet, every hour, than can meaningfully be consumed. Independent artists already had to compete with millions of art uploaded very minute, what is a few million more?
I'll believe it when I see it. How many self sufficient, independent digital artists are actually making a living doing something other than webcomics or furryporn? SD is amazing technology for sure, but this notion that it's going to incredibly disruptive is the latest in a long line of AI hype. It ignores the simple fact that there is already more art produced and uploaded onto the internet, every hour, than can meaningfully be consumed. Independent artists already had to compete with millions of art uploaded very minute, what is a few million more?
> I'll believe it when I see it.
I'll second that.
Hell. Even ATMs haven't automated bank tellers yet. Nor has Kindle replaced physical books.
I'll second that.
Hell. Even ATMs haven't automated bank tellers yet. Nor has Kindle replaced physical books.
You quite studiously compared every ostensible disruption to the preceding state of the art to (quite convincingly IMO) reveal the material consequeces to be… less than world shattering, shall we say. Your example of Amazon and walmart does the converse.
And yet, with «stable diffusion» it is just so. Disruption is declared wholesale, without even passing mention of the preceding state of the art of computer generated art.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you not see the own goal here?
And yet, with «stable diffusion» it is just so. Disruption is declared wholesale, without even passing mention of the preceding state of the art of computer generated art.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you not see the own goal here?
I don't see it. Can you expand a little more by what you mean here?
Gp calls out certain declarations of disruption to be hot air, then argues the point.
Gp then proceeds to declare «Stable Diffusion» to be Capital D disruptive, bemoans the unfortunate destiny of the world’s now disrupted artists but, curiously, does in fact not argue the point.
Gp then proceeds to declare «Stable Diffusion» to be Capital D disruptive, bemoans the unfortunate destiny of the world’s now disrupted artists but, curiously, does in fact not argue the point.
> Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.
>Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Sorry, I’m still not seeing the distinction you’re making between these cases. You say that with Uber, it makes no difference because there are still drivers going from “point A to B” (a pickup to a destination), but it was a huge difference with Walmart because small shops “saw the writing on the wall”.
But … in both cases you have the same service still being provided (rides and retailing) and the unprofitability of smaller providers (small shops vs taxicab companies).
If there is a difference between the two, could you highlight it clearly and in plain language?
>Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Sorry, I’m still not seeing the distinction you’re making between these cases. You say that with Uber, it makes no difference because there are still drivers going from “point A to B” (a pickup to a destination), but it was a huge difference with Walmart because small shops “saw the writing on the wall”.
But … in both cases you have the same service still being provided (rides and retailing) and the unprofitability of smaller providers (small shops vs taxicab companies).
If there is a difference between the two, could you highlight it clearly and in plain language?
Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for.
Professional illustrators will always have work, but their work may be in a different shape than current one, relying on AI as an additional tool to generate images for their clients. In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way. This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.
As for art more broadly, it is much greater than visual art. It will be interesting to see the new ways people find to express themselves with these new tools.
Professional illustrators will always have work, but their work may be in a different shape than current one, relying on AI as an additional tool to generate images for their clients. In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way. This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.
As for art more broadly, it is much greater than visual art. It will be interesting to see the new ways people find to express themselves with these new tools.
We're in month one of these tools, so I think your predictions are incredibly short sighted.
> Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for.
And the new workflows will be as well.
> Professional illustrators will always have work
They're in work because the job takes 10,000 hours to learn and individual pieces take 2-10 hours to create. Not anymore. The dam got busted.
> In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way.
You tell the illustrator, "I don't like the arm". They come back the next day with something new.
You tell FancyIllustrator.AI or whatever the same and you can draw a squiggly and have ten new concepts to refine from. Game over.
> This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.
This is month one. Everything is about to be disrupted. Even the big tech companies.
This is the biggest singular moment of Innovator's Dilemma in human history.
> Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for.
And the new workflows will be as well.
> Professional illustrators will always have work
They're in work because the job takes 10,000 hours to learn and individual pieces take 2-10 hours to create. Not anymore. The dam got busted.
> In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way.
You tell the illustrator, "I don't like the arm". They come back the next day with something new.
You tell FancyIllustrator.AI or whatever the same and you can draw a squiggly and have ten new concepts to refine from. Game over.
> This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.
This is month one. Everything is about to be disrupted. Even the big tech companies.
This is the biggest singular moment of Innovator's Dilemma in human history.
Ok captain cocksure, this being month one:
What was practitioners in the field of computer generated art able to do in month minus one, how has this changed subtstantively, and do they offer any experience, criticism or understanding of the practice that might still apply? If not, which and why?
I’m as bedazzled by the blinkenlichten of prompts and generated images as the next guy, but I must confess I don’t have the foggiest what those guys were (and probably still are) doing before Dall-E. If the needle really is bending against the post I would take their word for it.
What was practitioners in the field of computer generated art able to do in month minus one, how has this changed subtstantively, and do they offer any experience, criticism or understanding of the practice that might still apply? If not, which and why?
I’m as bedazzled by the blinkenlichten of prompts and generated images as the next guy, but I must confess I don’t have the foggiest what those guys were (and probably still are) doing before Dall-E. If the needle really is bending against the post I would take their word for it.
> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies.
I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a kind of amalgam view of the entire collection at once.
The only significant advantage compared to Google Image Search is that AI-generated art is getting around copyright, allowing you to publish it legally under your own name. This makes it very similar to Uber, which got around taxi regulations that were impeding market access.
Essentially, if we ignore copyright, there are relatively few illustration problem you could have where DALL-E/SD/... would help more than searching for an existing image. Branding is an obvious one, where the need for unique-ness is not only legal, but also practical. The other is that DALL-E/SD/etc can also sometimes produce combinations of unrelated images, thought that is offset by just how bad their results are in other places where there is plenty of existing art to choose from (especially anything involving images of humans).
I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a kind of amalgam view of the entire collection at once.
The only significant advantage compared to Google Image Search is that AI-generated art is getting around copyright, allowing you to publish it legally under your own name. This makes it very similar to Uber, which got around taxi regulations that were impeding market access.
Essentially, if we ignore copyright, there are relatively few illustration problem you could have where DALL-E/SD/... would help more than searching for an existing image. Branding is an obvious one, where the need for unique-ness is not only legal, but also practical. The other is that DALL-E/SD/etc can also sometimes produce combinations of unrelated images, thought that is offset by just how bad their results are in other places where there is plenty of existing art to choose from (especially anything involving images of humans).
>there are relatively few illustration problem you could have where DALL-E/SD/... would help more than searching for an existing image
This is probably true if you want a single image, but if you want many images that look consistent with each other then google images will be little help. Stable diffusion with textual inversion can just about do it though. I would imagine in a few years it will be able to do that better than it can currently generate a single image.
This is probably true if you want a single image, but if you want many images that look consistent with each other then google images will be little help. Stable diffusion with textual inversion can just about do it though. I would imagine in a few years it will be able to do that better than it can currently generate a single image.
My startup can make you sing as Taylor Swift.
Not like Taylor Swift. As Taylor Swift.
We'll have our new product out very very shortly.
We're at end times.
Not like Taylor Swift. As Taylor Swift.
We'll have our new product out very very shortly.
We're at end times.
Is this sarcasm, or do you think this is somehow impressive?
Not sarcasm. I'm working in this space and you can check my bio.
If you're not excited by these rapidly improving results, then I don't know what to tell you. I think you can extrapolate what lies just ahead if you think about it.
I've been a tech pessimist for the last two decades of my life, and I can strangely now state that this is the most important and exciting time of my entire life and career. Everything we know is about to change.
I can't believe that this is the timeline we're in and that it's actively unfolding now. It's like a dream. It's hard to grasp and come to terms with.
Just think for a second about what these models are doing. This is going to happen to every product category.
Think too about Carmack's recent claims.
If you're not excited by these rapidly improving results, then I don't know what to tell you. I think you can extrapolate what lies just ahead if you think about it.
I've been a tech pessimist for the last two decades of my life, and I can strangely now state that this is the most important and exciting time of my entire life and career. Everything we know is about to change.
I can't believe that this is the timeline we're in and that it's actively unfolding now. It's like a dream. It's hard to grasp and come to terms with.
Just think for a second about what these models are doing. This is going to happen to every product category.
Think too about Carmack's recent claims.
I can only wish you luck and say that personally, I'll believe it when I'll see it (that is, when I first end up enjoying a piece of art - book, game, movie, song etc. - where AI generation played a major part in its creation).
You guys hiring? I don’t see anything regarding careers on the storyteller.io site.
Yes!! Email me, [email protected], or join the Discord.
ML and Rust +++
ML and Rust +++
If it's as good as your Donald Trump voice conversion demo on your site, I'd have to pass. That sounds like someone with a cold trying to do a poor impression of Trump. The voice doesn't even have a New York accent!
Why would I want that?
Even if I like Taylor Swift, what would be the point?
Even if I like Taylor Swift, what would be the point?
Today you're a Taylor Swift fan and you want more of her music faster than she can deliver. Maybe you make it yourself and share with friends, and it goes viral. She might even get on stage and sing it.
Tomorrow, you want more Taylor Swift and you tell the computer to give it to you. It delivers with no human intervention whatsoever. You love it, but want it a bit more country - so be it. Piano and acoustic. Got it. A duet between her and Bruno Mars. Just for you.
Michael Jackson and Elvis? Nothing is without possibility.
Brand new singers. Instruments and styles we could never conceive of - all about to happen.
A never-ending stream of novel music that tailors itself to you.
Already being dreamed up.
I'm building this, have parts of it already working, and I'm sure others are as well.
Every inch of your day to day life is about to change in a way that will make developments brought on by smartphones and the Internet pale in comparison.
Tomorrow, you want more Taylor Swift and you tell the computer to give it to you. It delivers with no human intervention whatsoever. You love it, but want it a bit more country - so be it. Piano and acoustic. Got it. A duet between her and Bruno Mars. Just for you.
Michael Jackson and Elvis? Nothing is without possibility.
Brand new singers. Instruments and styles we could never conceive of - all about to happen.
A never-ending stream of novel music that tailors itself to you.
Already being dreamed up.
I'm building this, have parts of it already working, and I'm sure others are as well.
Every inch of your day to day life is about to change in a way that will make developments brought on by smartphones and the Internet pale in comparison.
Is every inch of my day to day life about to be spent consuming an endless stream of media?
I think what you’re working on is genuinely intriguing. How will it work commercially once you gain popularity, do you pay Taylor Swift a royalty for using her voice likeness?
You don't get it.
> A never-ending stream of novel music that tailors itself to you.
That's worthless. A firehose of novelty is almost immediately no longer novel.
Why would anyone want this?
It's the same problem already with streaming services and their own series. They're all already joyless and immediately forgettable. They have less and less value.
Your breathlessly described "amazing transformation" sounds incredibly boring and pointless.
> A never-ending stream of novel music that tailors itself to you.
That's worthless. A firehose of novelty is almost immediately no longer novel.
Why would anyone want this?
It's the same problem already with streaming services and their own series. They're all already joyless and immediately forgettable. They have less and less value.
Your breathlessly described "amazing transformation" sounds incredibly boring and pointless.
> You don't get it.
It's easy to say that as someone on the outside without skin in the game, not working on this, not in the know.
> That's worthless. A firehose of novelty is almost immediately no longer novel.
And yet here you are on HN. I'll bet you have a Twitter and phone and consume social media, too. That's all just a poor man's version of what we'll be building.
> Why would anyone want this?
I have literally wanted this exact thing all of my life.
There have only been a handful of films I've walked out of and felt truly satisfied. I've seen thousands of movies shot by mere hundreds of directors at best. That's billions of dollars of institutional capital put behind a few lucky white men for what amounts to as a "meh" at best. Now we can empower anyone to have their own take at it. To build and express anything. To sift and sort through emotional/concept space and deliver truly new things.
We get one short life to experience the universe. Let's climb the gradient to the stars and experience the limits.
> It's the same problem already with streaming services and their own series. They're all already joyless and immediately forgettable. They have less and less value.
Spaghetti thrown at walls by blank check writing firms trying to capture eyeballs. This isn't at all what I'm talking about. This technology will bankrupt that type of behavior.
Everyone will have access to these tools and be able to build whatever their heart desires. Whatever they want to put out into the world for the rest of us to experience.
> Your breathlessly described "amazing transformation" sounds incredibly boring and pointless.
I don't get you, but that's fine. We'll be building away regardless.
I don't think humans are the end point of our tiny quadrant of the universe. We're a transitional blip. This is just part of the changing of the guard. And the transformation will yield beautifully captivating results. I'm here to contribute and experience.
It's easy to say that as someone on the outside without skin in the game, not working on this, not in the know.
> That's worthless. A firehose of novelty is almost immediately no longer novel.
And yet here you are on HN. I'll bet you have a Twitter and phone and consume social media, too. That's all just a poor man's version of what we'll be building.
> Why would anyone want this?
I have literally wanted this exact thing all of my life.
There have only been a handful of films I've walked out of and felt truly satisfied. I've seen thousands of movies shot by mere hundreds of directors at best. That's billions of dollars of institutional capital put behind a few lucky white men for what amounts to as a "meh" at best. Now we can empower anyone to have their own take at it. To build and express anything. To sift and sort through emotional/concept space and deliver truly new things.
We get one short life to experience the universe. Let's climb the gradient to the stars and experience the limits.
> It's the same problem already with streaming services and their own series. They're all already joyless and immediately forgettable. They have less and less value.
Spaghetti thrown at walls by blank check writing firms trying to capture eyeballs. This isn't at all what I'm talking about. This technology will bankrupt that type of behavior.
Everyone will have access to these tools and be able to build whatever their heart desires. Whatever they want to put out into the world for the rest of us to experience.
> Your breathlessly described "amazing transformation" sounds incredibly boring and pointless.
I don't get you, but that's fine. We'll be building away regardless.
I don't think humans are the end point of our tiny quadrant of the universe. We're a transitional blip. This is just part of the changing of the guard. And the transformation will yield beautifully captivating results. I'm here to contribute and experience.
Yo, don't listen that guy. Music synthesis is my dream as well, and I look forward to seeing it come to life.
> And yet here you are on HN. I'll bet you have a Twitter and phone and consume social media, too. That's all just a poor man's version of what we'll be building.
A better version of a net negative is still negative.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it really sounds like more of what we've already proven isn't good.
> It's easy to say that as someone on the outside without skin in the game, not working on this, not in the know.
But you sound like you're in a cult.
A better version of a net negative is still negative.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it really sounds like more of what we've already proven isn't good.
> It's easy to say that as someone on the outside without skin in the game, not working on this, not in the know.
But you sound like you're in a cult.
He is someone under the deluded impression that if he pitches his startup david koresh style in a hackernews thread, something will happen.
I have new for this boyo - the moment you try to sell a service that emulates the catalog of {insert famous musician name here}, you are going to get sued to oblivion.
Very true. It will be a while before the high-end art market is at risk - if ever. Quality human-made art will likely rise in value with the influx of AI art, due to perceived scarcity. The major disruption in the short term will likely be in the stock photo/art market.
OP characterizes the disruption as "unbundling idea creation from substantiation". In the modern art world, this actually happened a long time ago! Warhol made famous the ancient notion that popular artisans could have their work produced by an army of assistants, rather than making it themselves, which allowed artists to focus on concept (and marketing).
Digital technology has already accelerated this process a lot, allowing artists to communicate prototypes efficiently and supervise implementations of their work on the other side of the world. What's new is how AI makes this dirt cheap and accessible, not just folks who can earn the admiration of assistants. People are focused on the plight of the artist-creator, but I also wonder what will happen to the legions of substantiators already out there in the world.
Digital technology has already accelerated this process a lot, allowing artists to communicate prototypes efficiently and supervise implementations of their work on the other side of the world. What's new is how AI makes this dirt cheap and accessible, not just folks who can earn the admiration of assistants. People are focused on the plight of the artist-creator, but I also wonder what will happen to the legions of substantiators already out there in the world.
> People will insist that SD art isn't real art.
For 99.999% of art that is commercially relevant no one cares if it's "real" or not.
The problem here isn't necessarily that these tools change the story for "real" art, it's that they change the story for _commercially relevant_ art which has always tended towards uninspired and formulaic.
There are a lot of artists that have hobbies in art they consider meaningful while making a living with commercial art that can be software-displaced.
For 99.999% of art that is commercially relevant no one cares if it's "real" or not.
The problem here isn't necessarily that these tools change the story for "real" art, it's that they change the story for _commercially relevant_ art which has always tended towards uninspired and formulaic.
There are a lot of artists that have hobbies in art they consider meaningful while making a living with commercial art that can be software-displaced.
Why does this simply threaten artists? At what point is code a type of creative expression? When are the IDEA for a novel technology and the chops to implement equally viable applications of AI?
Artists are losing today, but why are they in any way more vulnerable? They just seem to be next on the chopping block.
Artists are losing today, but why are they in any way more vulnerable? They just seem to be next on the chopping block.
Oh, when you are required to use implants to do your job... and you don't want to, because you think your body is sacred and those implants must be returned at the end of your job... well then you are disrupted.
"There will be backlash"
"There will be backlash"
People will be incapable of distinguishing AI art from the “real” thing. Or people will just start claiming AI generated art as their own human made creations. The lines will become indistinguishable.
It is disruptive but only to one type of art - flat. So yes, since we are in front of screens most of the time flat will disrupt some. But art is more than that.
For a while, there's been a few ML based tools that have been given flat images and generated 3D renders:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7j4f6U7FJ4
I think that machine learning models will quickly hit some walls that feel unintuitive due to a lack of training data, but I also wouldn't want to bet on which ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7j4f6U7FJ4
I think that machine learning models will quickly hit some walls that feel unintuitive due to a lack of training data, but I also wouldn't want to bet on which ones.
> This is good for society but bad for many individual artists.
If something affects a large group of individuals, it will eventually have an impact on society as well.
If something affects a large group of individuals, it will eventually have an impact on society as well.
I am not sure I see the unbundling here. AI generated art may be a threat to generic stock photography and small jobs for custom blog art, but artists higher up on the food chain now have a new tool for them to use. They can quickly generate a bunch of concepts to tryout ideas, and polish those into a higher quality piece of art than if left to their own devices.
If it’s a 10x force multiplier, then one person could do the work of 10. There are two possible outcomes:
1) the lower rate per piece enabled by higher productivity unlocks a much larger market for commissioned work. No one has to lose their job, people make up the price difference in volume.
2) there is not a much larger market waiting for cheaper art. The existing pool of artists is too big, and some of them need to find new work.
My guess is lowering the price does grow the market some, but not enough to avoid displacing at least some of the artists. Whether that’s 10% or 99% depends on how good these tools ultimately end up being.
1) the lower rate per piece enabled by higher productivity unlocks a much larger market for commissioned work. No one has to lose their job, people make up the price difference in volume.
2) there is not a much larger market waiting for cheaper art. The existing pool of artists is too big, and some of them need to find new work.
My guess is lowering the price does grow the market some, but not enough to avoid displacing at least some of the artists. Whether that’s 10% or 99% depends on how good these tools ultimately end up being.
AI is not a "force multiplier" in any literal or semi-literal way. Having an mediocre version of an image isn't something that gives an artist much of a leg up on producing a good version.
If you want something a diffusion model can produce, you can get it for nearly free. If you want something significantly better, you have to pay an artist significant money for it.
If you want something a diffusion model can produce, you can get it for nearly free. If you want something significantly better, you have to pay an artist significant money for it.
Except it is actually if you've been following the workflows which have popped up since stable diffusion's release. These models are not limited to just making a image which vaguely matches some description. They can also inpaint specific portions of an image, turn a vague sketch into a finished looking image, and blend together different images in convincing ways. A workflow for creating a high quality looking piece goes something like this:
1) Quick, low quality sketch
2) Generate detailed scene based on that sketch
3) Fix obvious errors by re-generating specific parts of the image
1) Quick, low quality sketch
2) Generate detailed scene based on that sketch
3) Fix obvious errors by re-generating specific parts of the image
I haven't heard of anything like this but I haven't following closely.
I also have questions, what is the "Generate detailed scene based on that sketch" process? Can an algorithm do this? Can a person easily do this? I'd be more impressed than with the raw pictures. Similarly with your #3.
I also have questions, what is the "Generate detailed scene based on that sketch" process? Can an algorithm do this? Can a person easily do this? I'd be more impressed than with the raw pictures. Similarly with your #3.
The Image2Image part of StableDiffusion lets you do that. For example https://old.reddit.com/r/restofthefuckingowl/comments/x4w3mn...
I think it is a force multiplier for people who need art to create their work, but not necessarily for visual artists themselves. Images for blogs, book illustrations, game assets, storyboards for film - that sort of thing.
I think the demand represented by this meme [1] is one such example of a market waiting for cheaper art.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u8j3lf/i_n...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u8j3lf/i_n...
I don't think AI generated art is even a threat to stock photography, but rather clip art... which isn't too disruptive in my view.
I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore thumb.
Just like the clip art ascetic quickly becomes recognizable and somewhat nauseating, so too is AI generated art already starting to feel that way.
As far as aiding experts I don't imagine synthetic art will be nearly as game changing as the Adobe suite. I do a fair bit of writing and find GPT-3 to be completely unnecessary for "quickly generating a bunch of concepts". I assume that visual arts, like writers, already have a bunch of ideas in their head for what to do. That's never the bottle neck. Writers block happens but it's not because you can't think of a general concept, it's because implementing that specific concept into text is what's hard.
I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore thumb.
Just like the clip art ascetic quickly becomes recognizable and somewhat nauseating, so too is AI generated art already starting to feel that way.
As far as aiding experts I don't imagine synthetic art will be nearly as game changing as the Adobe suite. I do a fair bit of writing and find GPT-3 to be completely unnecessary for "quickly generating a bunch of concepts". I assume that visual arts, like writers, already have a bunch of ideas in their head for what to do. That's never the bottle neck. Writers block happens but it's not because you can't think of a general concept, it's because implementing that specific concept into text is what's hard.
I’m curious why do you think that AI generation will plateau at its current quality level?
Same reason that self driving cars have plateaued. The things that are really important for that last mile are also really hard and we're not really sure how to get there.
The output between all the major AI image synthesis tools, while impressive, is quite clearly very high dimensional interpolation, and it shares the same limitations in that space as it does the 2d space. We've already thrown insane amounts of data and compute resources at the problem and it's made the things that were done well in the past even better but doesn't move us towards solving the hard parts.
The output between all the major AI image synthesis tools, while impressive, is quite clearly very high dimensional interpolation, and it shares the same limitations in that space as it does the 2d space. We've already thrown insane amounts of data and compute resources at the problem and it's made the things that were done well in the past even better but doesn't move us towards solving the hard parts.
Same reason that self driving cars have plateaued.
But they haven't plateaued. I can go take a trip in a self-driving Cruise in San Francisco right now. I couldn't do that last year.
There's certainly a lot of room for them to improve, but the self-driving car industry is making progress.
But they haven't plateaued. I can go take a trip in a self-driving Cruise in San Francisco right now. I couldn't do that last year.
There's certainly a lot of room for them to improve, but the self-driving car industry is making progress.
It's making slow progress, much slower than expected 10 years ago, when in 2012 I was personally "promised" by a person with a start up in the field that I will be able to buy a L5 car in 5 years. That person is the equivalent of those promising me I will be able to generate a whole movie by a prompt by the end of this decade.
Not happening.
Not happening.
Self driving cars and generating AI are two completely different problem sets.
Particularly as one deals with the world of atoms, where the cost of a mistake is much higher.
There are already models that work to “aesthetically” rate images, and the results are quite promising.
To think we won’t see leaps in quality over the coming months/years is narrow sighted.
Particularly as one deals with the world of atoms, where the cost of a mistake is much higher.
There are already models that work to “aesthetically” rate images, and the results are quite promising.
To think we won’t see leaps in quality over the coming months/years is narrow sighted.
Coinbase stock keeps going up despite it being widely acknowledged that crypto is fundamentally a scam, so anything is possible.
Though it's more likely in a the coming months/years people's ability ignore reality will just become stronger and we'll all believe that a person waving their 4 wiggly fingers and staring at you with strange fish eyes is hyper realism at it's finest.
We've entered the "emperor's new clothes" reality at this point, so nothing would surprise me.
Though it's more likely in a the coming months/years people's ability ignore reality will just become stronger and we'll all believe that a person waving their 4 wiggly fingers and staring at you with strange fish eyes is hyper realism at it's finest.
We've entered the "emperor's new clothes" reality at this point, so nothing would surprise me.
I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.
But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learning that 10%, plus the new entrants wouldn't be burdened by having to unlearn a lot of things that were now better done in a different way.
Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.
Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.
It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression.
Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.
Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.
I've read a little bit about prompt engineering. The author said the stuff he needed to learn to be good at using stable diffusion, is about art history - knowing many art styles and their parts.
So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles.
Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it.
But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.
So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles.
Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it.
But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.
I think this will be many things.
A force multiplier, allowing existing professionals to generate more art.
The creation of a new profession. Digital artists are already doing a very different job with very different tools. These tools will be another step and there will be demand for human and generated art in different applications.
The empowerment of non artists. Same as how digital art democratized art. This will let people without hours of skill generate images of their liking with relatively minimal effort. Anyone can generate scenarios or images, even if they aren't perfect.
These aren't exclusive and will probably all happen at the same time. It will also 100 percent devalue artists work since it's now easier to meet people's needs. This won't make them obsolete, but it'll reduce demand and put people out of business.
A force multiplier, allowing existing professionals to generate more art.
The creation of a new profession. Digital artists are already doing a very different job with very different tools. These tools will be another step and there will be demand for human and generated art in different applications.
The empowerment of non artists. Same as how digital art democratized art. This will let people without hours of skill generate images of their liking with relatively minimal effort. Anyone can generate scenarios or images, even if they aren't perfect.
These aren't exclusive and will probably all happen at the same time. It will also 100 percent devalue artists work since it's now easier to meet people's needs. This won't make them obsolete, but it'll reduce demand and put people out of business.
Devalue, yes. Put people out of work? That's less obvious to me. Imagine:
- Instead of video advertising with a handful of regional variations, hundreds or thousands of variants tweaked for specific preferences, target profiles, as part of A/B testing, etc. Changes to accent, emphasis, copy, maybe even which parts of the product being advertised are focused on.
- Increasing variation in open world game locations and interactions, with AI able to insert much more meaningful distinction between instances of a template (as compared with recent Assassins Creed games, where identical towns and forts are copy-pasted dozens of times all over the map).
- Much greater accessibility of visual art as an accent for other kinds of creators— illustrations to accompany poetry, blog posts, fanfic, etc.
- Increasing ability for AI to do first-cut assembly of video content, particularly review-type YouTubers (think: SkillUp, Critical Drinker) where the video is kind of secondary and the majority of the audience may even be listening to it as a podcast anyway. The AI being able to understand from the script what is under discussion and select matching clips would likely match or approach what
This is far from a sure thing— sometimes people really are the buggy-whip manufacturers in a situation and technology completely displaces them. But other times (as with software development), the market and use-cases have expanded considerably faster than the efficiency gains made by better tooling.
- Instead of video advertising with a handful of regional variations, hundreds or thousands of variants tweaked for specific preferences, target profiles, as part of A/B testing, etc. Changes to accent, emphasis, copy, maybe even which parts of the product being advertised are focused on.
- Increasing variation in open world game locations and interactions, with AI able to insert much more meaningful distinction between instances of a template (as compared with recent Assassins Creed games, where identical towns and forts are copy-pasted dozens of times all over the map).
- Much greater accessibility of visual art as an accent for other kinds of creators— illustrations to accompany poetry, blog posts, fanfic, etc.
- Increasing ability for AI to do first-cut assembly of video content, particularly review-type YouTubers (think: SkillUp, Critical Drinker) where the video is kind of secondary and the majority of the audience may even be listening to it as a podcast anyway. The AI being able to understand from the script what is under discussion and select matching clips would likely match or approach what
This is far from a sure thing— sometimes people really are the buggy-whip manufacturers in a situation and technology completely displaces them. But other times (as with software development), the market and use-cases have expanded considerably faster than the efficiency gains made by better tooling.
How do you think artists “higher up the food chain” got there?
Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up.
If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.
Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up.
If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.
Do you have some evidence of this being how we are currently getting quality artists? Talking with one digital artist, my impression was that stock art plus the ever-declining ad CPM rate eliminated most of the lower-level work years ago.
There are still plenty of entry and lower/mid level graphic artists working at creative agencies, ad agencies, etc. it’s possible some may be replaced but their skills would still likely be needed if AI is doing most of the work for edits, adjustments, exporting out of .PSD, etc
I don’t see why AI generation would be restricted to stock art. There are plenty of very impressive results already that will displace artists further down the chain.
I think of it more like, If an artist can support themselves doing commissions of low quality art so they can support their high quality art, that’s better than if they had to drive Uber.
https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463...
I think of it more like, If an artist can support themselves doing commissions of low quality art so they can support their high quality art, that’s better than if they had to drive Uber.
https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463...
The tweet you shared looks like low-effort stock art with a "deep" idea that I have already seen thousands of renditions of. It looks quite similar to a PowerPoint of 36 images picked from stock sites with (slightly fancier) fade transitions between them, and a background soundtrack.
Reminds me of COBOL programmer demand. There seems to be plenty of well paid work to do here, but what is left unsaid is no one is hiring junior COBALT programmers and training them up. The work is all of people with 30 years of experience so even if new developers want to enter the field there's nothing for them to do so they'll just end up exiting it for something else. So it seems like the field will have to die with the old programmers, no matter how much you pay them they'll eventually be gone if you don't create new ones.
I am by all means not a big client of artists but I commission custom character art all the time and what makes me commission (especially smaller) artists is their signature style. I have never seen an artist grow from doing boring stock art, quite the opposite in fact.
oh no, all those blue collar arts jobs are going to be lost! They'll have to retrain as classical guitarists.
Having recently watched the Warhol Diaries on Netflix, I can't help but think of the examples of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and think that calls for the death of the artist are premature. The funny thing is that I don't find Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat's work particularly compelling, and from the a technical perspective, I don't think either of them were blazing new paths, but what they (and Andy Warhol) offered was something Stable Diffusion simply cannot offer, that is, something new.
You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring
You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring
It seems it is possible to achieve that, but it may look different.
Since we still have to give text prompts to generate images, and these prompts need qualifiers (x subject “oil painting”) it seems possible that a prompt giver could generate images in a specific way to achieve their own unique style.
Difficult now since the tools are new and don’t have a ton of features, but down the road if the tools are built out more and prompts get more nuanced I could see “prompt givers” as “artists with their own unique style”
Since we still have to give text prompts to generate images, and these prompts need qualifiers (x subject “oil painting”) it seems possible that a prompt giver could generate images in a specific way to achieve their own unique style.
Difficult now since the tools are new and don’t have a ton of features, but down the road if the tools are built out more and prompts get more nuanced I could see “prompt givers” as “artists with their own unique style”
I think his breakdown of the value chain is a bit redundant, and can more effectively be factored into: Creation, Distribution, and Consumption. With this framing, it is apparent that distribution has almost always been the target of major optimizations until AI came along:
- Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally.
- Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand.
- Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced.
That's not to say that we've ignored creation. We've built hundreds of tools to make producing content easier: word processors, Photoshop, and even TikTok to name a few. It's just that AI has recently taken a huge leap in this area. For that reason, I don't think "unbundling" is the right metaphor here.
- Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally.
- Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand.
- Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced.
That's not to say that we've ignored creation. We've built hundreds of tools to make producing content easier: word processors, Photoshop, and even TikTok to name a few. It's just that AI has recently taken a huge leap in this area. For that reason, I don't think "unbundling" is the right metaphor here.
I think "Creation" was the wrong word for the first step. "Ideation" gets across the idea better: that first stage is just "thinking of the thing"; "Substantiation" is then actually executing on it ("creating it")
Otherwise- really good points, well-written
Otherwise- really good points, well-written
Hottake on skimming the article: people don't yet fully get where this is going (fast).
In the unbundling story, the premise is I gather that what is disruptive atm is that what's left as the god-in-the-gaps human role, is now democratized in the the technological acceleration in the the creation-substantiation phase at the head of the snake.
What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem.
Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some.
What I am saying is, before we are ready, the aspects which remain human-domain in the cybernetic collaboration between humans and AI in what well call "content generation," namely, the agency and the intention—the "idea" which today is, the prompt; the editorial and curatorial functions; the insight and lightbulb and all...
...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well.
What inspires "art" or whatever else?
The filtering of media streams (aka cultural discourse, the zeitgeist) and the identification of symmetries, analogies, serendipity, humor... whatever that is, it like the "substantiation" phase is going to be ceded to the super-human in a few years.
I speculated recently to a friend that the way the fine-art market reacts to this is going to be interesting. We're going to have Wintermute on tap. I wondered if gallerists will represent AIs, or, spin them up long enough for them to emit some stream of work then be ceremoniously destroyed.
Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways.
Anyway. The writing is on the wall.
And it's not in OUR handwriting.
In the unbundling story, the premise is I gather that what is disruptive atm is that what's left as the god-in-the-gaps human role, is now democratized in the the technological acceleration in the the creation-substantiation phase at the head of the snake.
What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem.
Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some.
What I am saying is, before we are ready, the aspects which remain human-domain in the cybernetic collaboration between humans and AI in what well call "content generation," namely, the agency and the intention—the "idea" which today is, the prompt; the editorial and curatorial functions; the insight and lightbulb and all...
...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well.
What inspires "art" or whatever else?
The filtering of media streams (aka cultural discourse, the zeitgeist) and the identification of symmetries, analogies, serendipity, humor... whatever that is, it like the "substantiation" phase is going to be ceded to the super-human in a few years.
I speculated recently to a friend that the way the fine-art market reacts to this is going to be interesting. We're going to have Wintermute on tap. I wondered if gallerists will represent AIs, or, spin them up long enough for them to emit some stream of work then be ceremoniously destroyed.
Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways.
Anyway. The writing is on the wall.
And it's not in OUR handwriting.
> I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher...
You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around.
In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off.
In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed.
If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.
You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around.
In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off.
In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed.
If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.
These recent developments make wonder whether in 30 years we aren't streaming movies anymore, and instead entire personalized movies will be generated for us on demand, based on a few keywords and our past history of rating movies, browser activity, search terms, or whatever else the machines will know about us.
Looking a little further, we will be generated on demand when AI deems it necessary; based on what the machines know about us. With the specific keywords/features it deemed best.
The combination of recommended media (TikTok) and generated media (SD) makes me believe this future is inevitable.
Content will be created specifically for you.
Content will be created specifically for you.
I don't understand the point the post is trying to make. Maybe it's generated? HN sure likes to upvote stuff with AI in the title.
The article's point is: AI production and consumption is becoming so widespread that the tools and usage can't be controlled by a few entities
I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists.
The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist.
I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience).
Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.
The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist.
I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience).
Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.
I think if you dig into the latest research you would find that AI is much closer to what you’re imagining than you think.
One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.
One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.
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Can Dall-E be extended to generate 3d models?
https://www.kaedim3d.com/ is working on 2D -> 3D.
Welcome to the world where every blog has a vaguely painterly smear of a header image that falls to pieces when you actually look at it. Kinda tacky, really.
Yeah, I really hope people stop just letting AI generate images with no human direction beyond the text prompt. It looks terrible 99% of the time, and Midjourney especially is so same-y.
There are good uses for human guided AI, but I fear most people are down for accepting whatever the algorithm happens to crap out at you
There are good uses for human guided AI, but I fear most people are down for accepting whatever the algorithm happens to crap out at you
Anything this guy writes gets gobbled up and worshipped mindlessly to no end. The opening here was so crass i didn't bother reading the rest (yet) until i find a better time to do so and have put my strong feelings aside.
The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line.
Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.
The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line.
Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.
They aren't publishers. Me posting a link to the NYTimes on facebook is not the same as writing a NYTimes article. That fact that NYTimes articles get more boost from the algorithm than a sketchy right wing site does not make facebook a publisher
If your Intellectual Property is used in any commercial setting without reimbursement, that's theft.
Just because you post a link somewhere, it does not automatically waive the commercial interests of the platform you're posting to.
In another strain of the argument, you posting to Facebook and Facebook later choosing to rank and distribute that content to their liking with you having ZERO control over that is the equivalent of using individuals as proxies to steal and propagate content.
You can't just start a website with stolen content plastered all over, say its coming "From the users" and deny any culpability.
Just because you post a link somewhere, it does not automatically waive the commercial interests of the platform you're posting to.
In another strain of the argument, you posting to Facebook and Facebook later choosing to rank and distribute that content to their liking with you having ZERO control over that is the equivalent of using individuals as proxies to steal and propagate content.
You can't just start a website with stolen content plastered all over, say its coming "From the users" and deny any culpability.
I am very, very excited about Stable Diffusion and similar technologies. I do see a ton of pushback from human artists who seem fairly venomous in their attacks. But I tend to believe that this will pass once we have a new normal and they will use these AI assisted techniques to enhance their abilities.
In the short term, It will certainly enhance artist’s abilities, Because artists still have that creative aspect that AI does not
But what happens when AI becomes more creative than humans? There will really be no need for a human artist at that point.
But what happens when AI becomes more creative than humans? There will really be no need for a human artist at that point.
A lot of the discussion around AI now is about the transition of AI from tool to tool-user. Very few are considering how close we might be to the tool-user to tool-maker transition and how much more world changing that will be. We are at the cusp. https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...
> This image, like the first two in this Article, was created by AI (Midjourney, specifically). It is, like those two images, not quite right: I wanted “A door that is slightly open with light flooding through the crack”, but I ended up with a door with a crack of light down the middle and a literal flood of water;
I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.
I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.
Good article, although "unbundling" is an odd choice of word. Before AI, the execution step was necessary, but not necessarily attached to the "coming up with an idea" step. Conceptual artists have for years (centuries?) produced ideas that were executed by others.
AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are being removed as gatekeepers.
A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?
If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to.
If we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?
AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are being removed as gatekeepers.
A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?
If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to.
If we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?
> If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to.
If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format.
In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.
If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format.
In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.
What could contain information is a book of all 512x512 images that a human being would perceive as being "an image". Ie, the vast majority of possible 512x512 images look like random noise to humans. Excluding those massively shrinks the size of the book.
So that does mean image model AI like dall-e/SD are effectively compression over this space of images that they can generate (which is at least attempting to emulate the space of 'meaningful images' to a human), since given a seed, they'll deterministically produce the same image, and that seed is much smaller than the information needed to describe every pixel in the image.
So that does mean image model AI like dall-e/SD are effectively compression over this space of images that they can generate (which is at least attempting to emulate the space of 'meaningful images' to a human), since given a seed, they'll deterministically produce the same image, and that seed is much smaller than the information needed to describe every pixel in the image.
Ah yes, conceptually, SD is a filter that removes noise (~ things that look like noise to us) from the space of all possible pixel combinations. It's interesting that it's also how it works in practice.
does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?
A perfectly linear model with linearly-independent matrix columns could generate any possible value, but would be exactly equivalent to a single vector-matrix multiplication, unable to do any interesting multi-step reasoning.
At least as it works now, on a given system, you can generate an identical image given the exact same prompt and the same random seed. That is assuming you are using the exact same software version and model version and the exact same graphics card.
Plus, I can't imagine it ever becoming faster to generate a 512x512 image using AI than transmitting the full image over a network.
Plus, I can't imagine it ever becoming faster to generate a 512x512 image using AI than transmitting the full image over a network.
Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team?
The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all
The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all
It's pretty rare that patent law makes a big difference in slowing down a field of software innovation. The main examples I can think of are eFax suing fax machine software companies, and Blackboard suing education companies.
In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".
In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".
It is heavily unlikely that there is exactly one route to intelligence: to take a card from biology, look at octopuses versus humans. Since only relatively specific architectures can be patented, I expect that one would have no issue circumventing any patent that could claimed.
This wasn't true of software, so I don't know that we should expect it to be true of AI.
But that's because the laws on software developed prior to tech becoming as powerful as they are now.
The problem with patenting AI is that you have to describe how something works in order to patent it. The issue presently is that you can describe relatively obvious things (e.g. one click checkout) and patent those.
AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to.
My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.
AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to.
My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.
The patent would apply to the model's architecture rather than the trained values so the black box nature of deep learning doesn't matter too much.
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anti-trust law would prevent the most egregious forms of this
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Network effects apply to almost every industry, not just social media apps. FMCG companies are a great example. The reason Nestle, Unilever, P&G have so many brands is because they have a phenomenal distribution network. Even a crappy product is guaranteed to make millions of dollars in revenue.
The irony should be mentioned. many comments here point to human artists becoming obsolete, but it is a common refrain on this forum that people with art degrees already struggle to make a living. So which is it?
I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.
I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.
Isn't there going to be the great bundling with AI? Contrary to the trend in the past of unbunding?
He can't see the forrest for the trees:
"I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet [...]"
Most of those ideas will look shallow in the future and be generated by an AI, executed by an AI etc. aka the great bundling.
He can't see the forrest for the trees:
"I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet [...]"
Most of those ideas will look shallow in the future and be generated by an AI, executed by an AI etc. aka the great bundling.
What about the negative side of this? All these generators will be used for evil. Looks like we need a way to figure out if an image or video is real or not and we need it desperately. Not sure if we are working on that at all. The implications of not having that are huge.
These models won’t appear in a vacuum. Models will compete with other models designed to improve and report on other models.
people forget that art is something unique to the artist.
you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings.
reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art.
but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style.
and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities.
it's the same reason, we tend to overlook countless paintings of trees done by street artists unless the style is so unique and evokes our emotions by beauty or novelty.
for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and say AI art won't push artists out of jobs
you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings.
reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art.
but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style.
and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities.
it's the same reason, we tend to overlook countless paintings of trees done by street artists unless the style is so unique and evokes our emotions by beauty or novelty.
for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and say AI art won't push artists out of jobs
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With stable diffusion out and making it trivial to generate fake images, Blockchain and NFT are going to be more indispensable in proving authenticity
Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant.
Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.
Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists.
There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.