4 ms·

While I agree with what you say, I think there's also subsets of modeling which can be cheaper with a computer which doesn't need wages, an agent, travel, or ro

While I agree with what you say, I think there's also subsets of modeling which can be cheaper with a computer which doesn't need wages, an agent, travel, or royalties. Also remember that models are human talent and human talent tends to come with costs which must be geographically local: makeup, photographer, scene, etc. Humans can only work so many hours a day, they can develop drug or eating habits, they can age. They can say indecorous things which will cause an outrage mob to want to boycott brands associated with them. All of these are costs or liabilities. Granted, there may be a new generation of agents that specialize in AI models and royalties may still exist (with shrinking margins), but if nothing more, AI is likely to opt downward pressure on wages/jobs/contracts some of the non-minimum-wage models. Once it's bootstrapped, it will either become more appealing (for the reasons I mentioned above) or turn out to be complex and not worth the cost/risk. Only time and experimentation will tell.

Talanes 6y ago
I don't think the boycott mob is a unique problem to the human. Could just as easily end up with an anti-AI boycott mob. Neither bet is fully safe on that front.
- lazide 6y ago
  The difference is, the bot can be made to only say what you want it to. That is a LOT harder to do with a human. If you're a big outfit looking to control risks, it might be very tempting.
- thephyber 6y ago
  I don't see the average consumer caring whether the model for their perfume commercial is flesh and blood or CGI. They already don't care what the quality of life is like for the test animals for those same cosmetics. Plus, it's easy enough to create fake personal social media profiles to pretend like the persona has a real history.
- thu2111 6y ago
  The issue is for companies that just want to sell clothes, without also being forced into a wide variety of shallow, poorly thought out political stances that could blow up in the companies face. Note just how much of this article is the 'model' talking about what is basically politics. They're half model, half politician. This is 100% liability to most of their employers, who ultimately just need a good looking mannequin to wear some clothes or pose seductively for advertising. A GAN generated face textured onto a convincing 3D model means you can just keep clicking or adjusting until you got a truly beautiful model, without needing to pay extra for it, and you know your exposure is capped in entirely predictable ways. This model won't unexpectedly cause trouble for you, or demand you take a particular stance you may not agree with in order to employ them.
kbenson 6y ago
> Human talent ... can say indecorous things which will cause an outrage mob to want to boycott brands associated with them. I'm not envisioning a future in which some company creates a full persona for their AI models, and we get a full Tay[1] moment out of it, and then we've come full circle. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  There are also the companies producing or providing the AI. Any entity capable of producing a convincing AI fashion substitute can do much more besides, some possibly not wearing well with public opinion. I'm reminded of the (aweful) film Simone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)), and a Ben Bova novel (possibly Starcrossed) in which CGI gradually replaces human actors.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    To clarify, in my original post, not was supposed to be now, as in "I'm now envisioning" Lots of typos for me today... :/
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Right, I realised that. Am also agreeing with you and extending the notion. AI is by no-means outrage-proof.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        Sure, your comment didn't look like it was trying to disagree as much as add more info, whether you realized I had a typo or not. I had just happened to read a comment I had mangled atrociously earlier because I did it on my phone and then I saw this comment, and the urge to correct myself here was overwhelming. :)
        6y ago
joe_the_user 6y ago
Also remember that models are human talent and human talent tends to come with costs which must be geographically local: makeup, photographer, scene, etc. This sounds vaguely similar to initial discussions I remember with self-diving cars. It begins with "I look forward to the day we don't have fallible humans at the wheel" and end with the realization the AIs are going to be more fallible and in different, strange ways. I mean, hypothetically, suppose you had a system that could constantly monitor world fashion trends, world clothing markets, the routes of hip and average people and so-forth. In the case you might create a system that produced a variety of still and moving images that satisfied all the constraints that today's fashion industry satisfies just with a few written or spoken suggestions from executives. Then you'd eliminated no just models but a large chunk of the industry. But let's look at what "AI" is now (and what it seems likely to be for a while without any "revolutionary" changes). What you have now is a way to extrapolate typical objects out of a stream of similar objects. Just GPT-3 does a great job create texts that sound vaguely right, you can create a vaguely plausible looking set of still and moving images of one or another "typical" model. Moreover, these extrapolations require constant training by professional much more highly paid than actual models now (as the GP notes). Further, without being in the fashion industry, I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to a useful set of images than "looking about right". I suspect you could generate a model-image that would "work" with a kind of clothing (since both clothing and image can be trained). But generating a model-image that suits a given demographic, that expresses "what's becoming hip right now" and so-forth would be extremely hard. It may not be impossible but it would require lots of high paid labor by AI engineers, defeating the entire purpose once the novelty wears off. And all this is to say that these "replace human activity" approaches wind-up with the problem of doing an "90%" of the activity right and then foundering on corner cases - like self-driving cars that are easy-yet-impossible AI tasks.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > And all this is to say that these "replace human activity" approaches wind-up with the problem of doing an "90%" of the activity right and then foundering on corner cases - like self-driving cars that are easy-yet-impossible AI tasks. I think this is the crux of the issue.
- 6y ago

Talanes 6y ago

I don't think the boycott mob is a unique problem to the human. Could just as easily end up with an anti-AI boycott mob. Neither bet is fully safe on that front.

lazide 6y ago
The difference is, the bot can be made to only say what you want it to. That is a LOT harder to do with a human. If you're a big outfit looking to control risks, it might be very tempting.
thephyber 6y ago
I don't see the average consumer caring whether the model for their perfume commercial is flesh and blood or CGI. They already don't care what the quality of life is like for the test animals for those same cosmetics. Plus, it's easy enough to create fake personal social media profiles to pretend like the persona has a real history.
thu2111 6y ago
The issue is for companies that just want to sell clothes, without also being forced into a wide variety of shallow, poorly thought out political stances that could blow up in the companies face. Note just how much of this article is the 'model' talking about what is basically politics. They're half model, half politician. This is 100% liability to most of their employers, who ultimately just need a good looking mannequin to wear some clothes or pose seductively for advertising. A GAN generated face textured onto a convincing 3D model means you can just keep clicking or adjusting until you got a truly beautiful model, without needing to pay extra for it, and you know your exposure is capped in entirely predictable ways. This model won't unexpectedly cause trouble for you, or demand you take a particular stance you may not agree with in order to employ them.

kbenson 6y ago

> Human talent ... can say indecorous things which will cause an outrage mob to want to boycott brands associated with them. I'm not envisioning a future in which some company creates a full persona for their AI models, and we get a full Tay[1] moment out of it, and then we've come full circle. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

dredmorbius 6y ago
There are also the companies producing or providing the AI. Any entity capable of producing a convincing AI fashion substitute can do much more besides, some possibly not wearing well with public opinion. I'm reminded of the (aweful) film Simone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)), and a Ben Bova novel (possibly Starcrossed) in which CGI gradually replaces human actors.
- kbenson 6y ago
  To clarify, in my original post, not was supposed to be now, as in "I'm now envisioning" Lots of typos for me today... :/
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Right, I realised that. Am also agreeing with you and extending the notion. AI is by no-means outrage-proof.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Sure, your comment didn't look like it was trying to disagree as much as add more info, whether you realized I had a typo or not. I had just happened to read a comment I had mangled atrociously earlier because I did it on my phone and then I saw this comment, and the urge to correct myself here was overwhelming. :)
      - 6y ago

joe_the_user 6y ago

Also remember that models are human talent and human talent tends to come with costs which must be geographically local: makeup, photographer, scene, etc. This sounds vaguely similar to initial discussions I remember with self-diving cars. It begins with "I look forward to the day we don't have fallible humans at the wheel" and end with the realization the AIs are going to be more fallible and in different, strange ways. I mean, hypothetically, suppose you had a system that could constantly monitor world fashion trends, world clothing markets, the routes of hip and average people and so-forth. In the case you might create a system that produced a variety of still and moving images that satisfied all the constraints that today's fashion industry satisfies just with a few written or spoken suggestions from executives. Then you'd eliminated no just models but a large chunk of the industry. But let's look at what "AI" is now (and what it seems likely to be for a while without any "revolutionary" changes). What you have now is a way to extrapolate typical objects out of a stream of similar objects. Just GPT-3 does a great job create texts that sound vaguely right, you can create a vaguely plausible looking set of still and moving images of one or another "typical" model. Moreover, these extrapolations require constant training by professional much more highly paid than actual models now (as the GP notes). Further, without being in the fashion industry, I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to a useful set of images than "looking about right". I suspect you could generate a model-image that would "work" with a kind of clothing (since both clothing and image can be trained). But generating a model-image that suits a given demographic, that expresses "what's becoming hip right now" and so-forth would be extremely hard. It may not be impossible but it would require lots of high paid labor by AI engineers, defeating the entire purpose once the novelty wears off. And all this is to say that these "replace human activity" approaches wind-up with the problem of doing an "90%" of the activity right and then foundering on corner cases - like self-driving cars that are easy-yet-impossible AI tasks.

thephyber 6y ago
> And all this is to say that these "replace human activity" approaches wind-up with the problem of doing an "90%" of the activity right and then foundering on corner cases - like self-driving cars that are easy-yet-impossible AI tasks. I think this is the crux of the issue.
6y ago