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I think it's worth pointing out that DALL-E 2 mimics the style of famous artists. The artists had to come up with the original style in the first place! There

I think it's worth pointing out that DALL-E 2 mimics the style of famous artists. The artists had to come up with the original style in the first place! There are highly competent artists that can create highly convincing copies (fabrications? forgeries?) of famous paintings. Are these paintings worth anything? No, because people find value in the specific contribution to the field of art that the particular painting represents. I think we should look at DALL-E 2 like a highly competent artist that can produce convincing forgeries and even mimic the style of famous artists, but cannot replace the artists themselves.

smaudet 5y ago
I don't know that the metaphor works out in your favor here... if you were to catch an art theif you might send them to prison. If you have automated the process of producing art theives, that seems like a problem you have caused. You HAVE replaced the talented artists, because you didn't need to consult the original artists. How does this benefit society? Even in the case the artist themselves uses the generator, is the artist better off for no longer needing to create art? It's not like there is an economic advantage, and so there isn't as much incentive to create even original art anymore, someone can just immediately mimic it. People mimicked art in past, but at least for the artist there was the value of honing their own skill, and remixing or enhancing it, maybe tools like this have the potential to destroy creativity itself.
gwern 5y ago
> I think we should look at DALL-E 2 like a highly competent artist that can produce convincing forgeries and even mimic the style of famous artists, but cannot replace the artists themselves. We don't know that. DALL-E must encode its knowledge about art styles somewhere in a way which permits applying them to almost arbitrary contents, similar to style transfer. So, what do you get when you 'just interpolate' between artists in the high-dimensional space defined by a multi-billion parameter model? It is vanishingly unlikely that that point in the style latent space will correspond to the output of any artist who has ever lived. What if you manipulate the encoding to push it far away from the latent points of a large set of real artists? And so on. We don't know what that looks like or if the new styles would not be considered 'original' by critics unaware of the machine origin.

smaudet 5y ago

I don't know that the metaphor works out in your favor here... if you were to catch an art theif you might send them to prison. If you have automated the process of producing art theives, that seems like a problem you have caused. You HAVE replaced the talented artists, because you didn't need to consult the original artists. How does this benefit society? Even in the case the artist themselves uses the generator, is the artist better off for no longer needing to create art? It's not like there is an economic advantage, and so there isn't as much incentive to create even original art anymore, someone can just immediately mimic it. People mimicked art in past, but at least for the artist there was the value of honing their own skill, and remixing or enhancing it, maybe tools like this have the potential to destroy creativity itself.

gwern 5y ago

> I think we should look at DALL-E 2 like a highly competent artist that can produce convincing forgeries and even mimic the style of famous artists, but cannot replace the artists themselves. We don't know that. DALL-E must encode its knowledge about art styles somewhere in a way which permits applying them to almost arbitrary contents, similar to style transfer. So, what do you get when you 'just interpolate' between artists in the high-dimensional space defined by a multi-billion parameter model? It is vanishingly unlikely that that point in the style latent space will correspond to the output of any artist who has ever lived. What if you manipulate the encoding to push it far away from the latent points of a large set of real artists? And so on. We don't know what that looks like or if the new styles would not be considered 'original' by critics unaware of the machine origin.