4 ms·
There are strong reasons to want to eliminate drivers from cars. I'm very optimistic about the overall impact of it on society and the environment if it actuall
by omnicognate 4y ago
There are strong reasons to want to eliminate drivers from cars. I'm very optimistic about the overall impact of it on society and the environment if it actually ends up happening.
Children's book illustrators, though, really? How do we benefit if we make it impossible for that to be a living? Is there any benefit to you or your children if they look at pictures generated from a machine learning algorithm based on past images instead of by a human artist that was paid for their creation? Is there any benefit to artists? Is there any benefit to society as a whole, or to any individuals except the owners of the algorithms generating the pictures and the publishers who save a relatively minor [1] cost?
Personally I doubt ML-illustrated children's books would catch on as anything more than a novelty simply because generating illustrations in this way seems so dystopian, impersonal and tacky, but the way people react to new technology is something I find very hard to predict.
[1] Typically between £6,500 and £8,500 per book according to https://www.peopleofpublishing.com/post/how-much-does-a-children-s-book-illustrator-cost https://www.peopleofpublishing.com/post/how-much-does-a-chil...
- ALittleLight 4y agoI know multiple people who have ideas for children's books but don't really want to actually produce one in the current system. Easy to understand why people don't follow through creating children's books - it's hard and not very lucrative. Creating a children's book is usually a money losing proposition - most books aren't published and most published books don't sell very well. Imagine taking the cost of illustrating a children's book from 10k USD (plus who knows how much time) to paying a 10 dollar per month fee to create unlimited illustrations? What would that enable? How many more children's books would get produced? How much more happiness for children and would be authors? My mother used to tell us stories about characters she had made up. With a little more time, if this technology existed, she could have illustrated her stories and shown them to us. Or, if this technology gets invented tomorrow, I could create generate the illustrations from what I remember of my mom's stories and share it with her. Why wouldn't I want this? Because professional illustrators would be devalued? Let's not forget the children who lack interesting content or concerned parents who would create it for them. These kids could benefit from a reddit or imgur of children's books and get an infinite scroll of content. If software becomes good enough the infinite scroll could be generated automatically.
- mistrial9 4y agopass the extra lucre with those clouds, Lucas