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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

• cercatrova 4y ago
  Title should be more like, artists concerned about Stable Diffusion AI model that makes images look human-made.
  • antiterra 4y ago
    It also apparently copies the artist’s logo. In a way, the “it just does what humans do but faster” argument is starting to follow the “a number can’t be illegal” trajectory.
    • cercatrova 4y ago
      Either way I support AI art and AI in other fields. Just because artists are mad it's gonna take their jobs does not seem like a legitimate reason to halt human progress. It's just inevitable the way things are going.
      • Bjorkbat 4y ago
        Just because some trend feels inevitable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t oppose it. We shouldn’t be beholden to the march of technology like it’s some force of nature that we are powerless to resist.
        • t_mann 4y ago
          Can you give examples of when technology was successfully rolled back for social reasons (not because it was found to have dramatic side effects, like asbestos eg) and that didn't coincide with a massive drop in HDI (like the fall of the Roman empire)?
          • yanderekko 4y ago
            Anti-WMD proliferation comes to mind, but perhaps that's a special case.
            • t_mann 4y ago
              I wouldn't call that a successful roll-back unfortunately, they've been somewhat contained at best, but they're still being produced and more powerful than ever. Those discussions aside, what I meant by social reasons was people wanting to see some tech go away because it's automating jobs.
      • CSSer 4y ago
        What progress? We’re bruteforcing solutions without any way to learn from then. ML eliminates serendipity. I’m not strictly anti-ML. Horses for courses and all that, but I’ve got to admit I get weird, “The humans stopped learned and the computers started,” sci-fi vibes sometimes.
        • yanderekko 4y ago
          >ML eliminates serendipity. This is a statement that is pretty quickly disproven if you actually pay attention to the generated art. Lately I've been seeing TikTok videos where people are using DALL-E to create "new aesthetics" - "vampwave", "neon apocalypse", etc.
      • superchroma 4y ago
        Whilst automation in textiles, agriculture, etc. brought measurable benefits to society, this will have few as it stands. I can think of a dozen things that are worth automating before this. This leaves me suspecting that projects like DALL-E are gunning for Shutterstock's $500 million annual profit and that's it.
        • orangecat 4y ago
          This leaves me suspecting that projects like DALL-E are gunning for Shutterstock's $500 million annual profit and that's it. Do you think AlphaGo was motivated by a burning desire to discover better board game strategies?
          • superchroma 4y ago
            Elsewhere in this thread, people celebrate AI for some reasons. I'm not so impressed by the tech when the goal is just profit without some sort of ethical upside.
      • teakettle42 4y ago
        Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress. Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.
        • cercatrova 4y ago
          The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.
          • teakettle42 4y ago
            All CC licenses, other than the “CC0 public domain dedication”, require attribution, but CC themselves have taken what I’d consider to be an ass-backwards position on the matter: > At CC, we believe that, as a matter of copyright law, the use of works to train AI should be considered non-infringing by default, assuming that access to the copyright works was lawful at the point of input. https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-content-be-used-to-train-ai-it-depends/ https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-co...
            • charcircuit 4y ago
              >backwards position It's not backwards. It's the same as if a human artist studied it. Backwards would be thinking that any creative work you make is a derivative work of many creative works that you've seen in the past which you aren't copying from.
              • teakettle42 4y ago
                > It's the same as if a human artist studied it. It’s not a human artist, and it can only regurgitate mash-ups of work stolen from others.
          • egypturnash 4y ago
            Where is this said? I'm looking at the collection of artists this site is happily offering to rip off (https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo/1 https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo...) and there's a lot of people with long careers making copyrighted work. I really can't imagine finding a ton of CC work by Bernie Wrightson or Wayne Barlowe or Brom or Junji Ito, for instance.
      • egypturnash 4y ago
        Please save this comment to refer to when an iteration of Copilot starts to make you truly worried for the future of your career. Thanks in advance.
        • orangecat 4y ago
          Yeah, and we should really do something about those abominations like Excel and Python that let ordinary people create programs without hiring us to do it the right way.
          • egypturnash 4y ago
            There is a big difference between "this is a tool that makes some things easier" and "this is definitely endangering the skill I spent a lifetime learning". You will know it when you see it.
            • MacsHeadroom 4y ago
              There is no big difference. The steam engine put 90% of the world out of agricultural work. That is a big difference. Now you can buy strawberries all year round and drink coconut water in Alaska. Nobody will care where their art comes from any more than you care about how your food's field was plowed; and all their lives will be better for it.
              • egypturnash 4y ago
                There is a huge difference in how you will feel when the tool that might put you out of work shows up. Keep your comment somewhere. Come back to it when you look at a new tool that promises to merrily trample on your entire field’s income and provide an endless source of “usable, I guess” substitutes. Let it provide solace as you stare into a future with no room for the craft you’ve spent a lifetime honing.
        • yanderekko 4y ago
          Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards.
      • t_mann 4y ago
        This. People thought that photography would make artists obsolete, then Picasso came round (simplifying here, ofc). Who knows what crazy creative things humans will do in the presence of those tools?
• superchroma 4y ago
  The linked reaction is probably slightly too alarmist but I am also still surprised that this was the field that some manager decided to devote millions of dollars of research and development funds to automate. I've read in advice for technical founders that programmers tend to want to jump and automate the wrong problems, and this feels a bit like one of those cases in retrospect.
• marc_io 4y ago
  I sympathize with all artists who are concerned about these new tools. Once I thought about being a full time artist, but life got in the way. However, visual art creates a cultural feedback loop that is constantly evolving, it is a crucial mirror that shows us stark naked. Just read the history of art. People should not forget that there is no way this technology can make such a vital form of collective expression relevant without artists participating in it. Of course it will disrupt a lot of things, and nobody enjoys that, but new ways of meaningfully involving humans in it will continue to emerge. Otherwise it would just cease to be relevant.
• PaulsWallet 4y ago
  There is a response to this tweet where someone says "stop gatekeeping art" which while I understand the gist of what they mean, seems like a weird thing to say to console someone who is concerned they are about to be automated out of a job.
  • luckylion 4y ago
    I guess the context is "as an art seller, I am concerned", not so much "as an artist". Which is understandable, of course, as much as anyone would be concerned if their job is in jeopardy. But framing it as a matter of art does sound like gatekeeping. It'd be "that cannot be art, because x" when all they mean to say is "please don't stop paying me for this".
    • PaulsWallet 4y ago
      I don't believe they are framing it as if it is not art. The problem they are raising and that it is an AI trained on other peoples' art down to copying their signature making it appear as if it were a genuine piece from that artist and of course yes, they are concerned that they are watching their career die in real time because of it.
• ayngg 4y ago
  A lot of art created now, especially for film/ media, already goes through a similar process that AI just automates and accelerates. Several big concept artists I have met have lamented on the fact that many artists in the industry basically churn compositions out through mashing references they gather on google images or asset stores, not to mention just straight photobashing, which has made a lot of the concepts produced fairly derivative and homogenized since everything is just referencing what google images serves or assets that everyone else uses. Even fine artists have likely had their practice influenced by the whims of what the algorithms on major social media outlets are willing to favor in order to get engagement. It kind of feels like many creatives have been incentivized into becoming slaves to these processes, which has in turn made them seem replaceable with AI.
  • olivertaylor 4y ago
    100% true.
  • gary_0 4y ago
    This sounds similar to complaints I've heard about music for film/TV. Often stock music is used as a placeholder during post-production, and then composers are told by producers to just rework the stock music instead of being given time to make something original. This leads to most shows having very "samey" soundtracks.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • RobRivera 4y ago
    strong concur, evaluating the creative processes requires acknowledging influences, and if pop culture referrence go beyond inspiration and become a core influence in style then the art aspect becomes industrializable, and in this case replaceable by AI. THE FUTURE IS HERE AND ITS AWESOME
• acadapter 4y ago
  Mail couriers had to teach themselves to drive after many years of using horses. Artists will have to learn how to stimulate AI models in effective ways and perform suitable post-processing.
  • WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
    I think a more 1:1 comparison would be self-driving delivery vehicles - which we haven't figured out yet. and I imagine a primary motivation for investing in art-generating AI is cost savings. disclaimer: By default, I tend to be less sympathetic to artists here. It's due to their communities' collective silence about decades of ever-ratcheting (and typically purchased) copyright laws.
  • salt-thrower 4y ago
    The corporate automation of creative work is not comparable to the choice between different modes of transportation for a courier job. I would gladly trade less efficiency in art generation for more artists being employed. "AI stimulation" is not a 1:1 swap for being an actual artist.
  • whateveracct 4y ago
    People are still gonna draw with pencils lol. That's not going anywhere. No time like the present to pick one up if you have a reason to need to render images imo.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    Artists will have to find people who pay for the genuine thing. We can all buy cheap mass-produced tableware, accessories, and so on, yet many thrived on Etsy.
• MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Transfer learning to emulate artistic style [0] has been around for the better part of a decade and has had zero impact on artists’ livelihoods. People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of. It’s the same reason people watch sports—they enjoy admiring the top echelon of human physical ability. Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids. I do agree that tools like this could eliminate mediocre graphic designers, or anyone else creating visual products that are so mundane that their viewers never bother to consider the artist. Corporate Memphis [1] designers’ days are numbered. [0] https://blog.paperspace.com/art-style-transfer-neural-networks/ https://blog.paperspace.com/art-style-transfer-neural-networ... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
  • kimi 4y ago
    > Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids. Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It would just be different, more like F1.
    • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      People celebrate F1 drivers a lot more than the automakers. Senna and Schumacher are far more famous as individuals than the teams they drove for. I guarantee that if there is ever a self-driving cup, people will be mostly focused on the human engineering talent.
      • kimi 4y ago
        Definitely - they would watch androids play because they'd root for a team and the people involved.
    • marc_io 4y ago
      > Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It would just be different, more like F1. But the human element is the main thing. This is the crucial part. Take us out of the picture and there's nothing very meaningful left for other humans to see.
• morelisp 4y ago
  https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ didn't predict precisely this step of the process, but it's still the solution.
  • WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
    Can you offer up a synopsis?
    • morelisp 4y ago
      Collective labor action.
• adamhi 4y ago
  I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not. One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good". There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks". There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right. It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%. But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore. If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.
  • cercatrova 4y ago
    Have you seen Stable Diffusion, the AI in question in the tweet? The images are astoundingly good, much better than DALL-E 2 even. https://twitter.com/StableDiffusion/ https://twitter.com/StableDiffusion/
    • hgomersall 4y ago
      The shadow was wrong in the man-tree-beach-sea image. I guess it might be artistically wrong, but I'm sceptical of what that even means in this context.
    • exitb 4y ago
      Oh, that just drives the point home. Any flaw you can find in these models to build your hope on will just get corrected in the next iteration, only a couple months down the line.
    • Thiez 4y ago
• h2odragon 4y ago
  I'm watching an artist play with DALL-E for the past few days; it's proving to be a useful tool for inspiring concepts and leading her to her own visualizations and execution of things that she had not gotten to "gel" previously. I can recall a little bit of the fuss at the beginning of digital art, "is that even real art?" I don't think this fuss has as much to stand on. It's a tool for making art; whether it's really art or not is a judgement only the individual viewer can make.
  • xor99 4y ago
    That's a good point. In a way DALL-E just shifts the burden of creativity on to how someone can come up with and idea and translate that into written language.
• bdw5204 4y ago
  AI generated art seems like a good way to open up solo game dev to people who can't draw. Just run the AI over and over again until you get artwork close to what you want. There are already tools out there for people who want to automate the programming part of game dev. I don't see how that's any different in principle from an AI that generates art. This seems like a better solution to the problem of making a game without being any good at art than buying assets since your assets should be unique.
• Kiro 4y ago
  In case anyone wonders, this is not about DALL-E or Midjourney. He's referring to https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement
• joecool1029 4y ago
  Can I get an "Amen, Brother"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break Not saying AI/ML won't be damaging and cause negative effects, just pointing out that other uncompensated prior art has been used to create transformative works before we ever had DALL-E.
  • xor99 4y ago
    Yeah sampling and remixing are actually extremely similar to one aspect of DALL-E's overall system. Sure its more technically impressive but from a HCI point of view you are really just sampling via text based input all be it with much more complexity and control over the synthesis parameters.
• api 4y ago
  I get the sense that the same thing is about to happen to many forms of creative work as happened to hand crafting during the industrial revolution, and if so the fallout may not be pretty. People still buy hand crafted items of course, but they tend to be relegated to high-end or niche markets. The same would apply here. The larger number of people employed churning out relatively uncreative material would be displaced just like weavers and seamstresses were by textile mills.
• forrestthewoods 4y ago
  I’m still not sure where the line is. Human artists steal style all the time. Maybe they eventually evolve into their own unique style. But any great artist could definitely imitate many other great artists’ style. I’m not sure where the line is for machines. Copying the signature is funny, but also fixable. Is copying the style fundamentally wrong? If yes, is it wrong when humans do as well? Feels like an impossible line to define.
• madelyn 4y ago
  I think my heuristic is Magic: the Gathering card artwork. Can DALL-E make set defining breathtaking high res promo art, with fantastic composition, style and proportion? Maybe, but probably not as well as ex. Raymond Swanland right now. Can DALL-E crank out the 50x lands and commons needed for the set? Almost certainly. Superstar artists will be fine but I fear the bottom will fall out of the craft.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kiernanmcgowan 4y ago
    A friend and I experimented with using it to generate images for DnD items. It’s a quick way to get a visual for something that doesn’t exist, and therefore, does not need to be totally accurate.
• xor99 4y ago
  Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out to people who feel like they will lose some of their business. However, a group of developers has shown what was always true about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always going to be reproducible and remixable. The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way and that's just very standard in art history. People went crazy when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g. something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing digital art in the way that Warhol's practice was a system for producing visual art as a commercial product.
  • analog31 4y ago
    Indeed, I'll get worried when DALL-E gets sick of everything it has seen, and comes up with something that's new, and maybe not even very good at first, but perseveres until it's recognized as important. All, while earning its living in some soul sucking day job. I'd actually love to see DALL-E take on the greeting card industry. Now that would be fun.
    • jmfldn 4y ago
      I literally just made a greeting card with DALL-E. Generated the image I wanted and had the card printed and posted to the recepient for no more than buying a pre-exisiting card. Advantage here is that this image concept, which was very tailored to the person, didn't exist anywhere in any form. All my friends and family will get AI cards now!
      • Kaibeezy 4y ago
        Same, but I just posted the screenshot with the birthday-related-items search string and thumbnails to her timeline. Free and she loved it. Done.
  • 4y ago
• status200 4y ago
  I think the tweet author is missing the meat and focusing on the gravy - they themselves indicate that the AI just replicates existing styles, so it will only ever produce existing art styles with the signature AI blurry weirdness on the details. A main hallmark of breakthrough artists is inventing new styles and making them their own, a feat that AI has yet to perform very well (unless you include the aforementioned blurry telltales of generation and scrambled letters). Otherwise artists are just borrowing ideas from each other anyway so AI removes the need to learn someone else's style to replicate it. In my opinion it will hurt the bottom tier of artists, but the ones who create new styles along with their own works will continue to thrive.
  • karamanolev 4y ago
    Let's someone creates an AI where you describe your program and it writes it using only existing code snippets. It might put 90% or more of software engineers out of work. Saying "but software engineers who create truly innovative systems, design patterns, languages and approaches will continue to thrive" is very limiting. I fully grasp the concern here. It's not unlike what happened during industrialization, but on an intellectual level. I don't know what the solution is. Basic income has been floated, but I'm having a hard time evaluating all the arguments for and against.
    • dcow 4y ago
      What you describe sounds ideal for the software industry.
      • karamanolev 4y ago
        Automated trucking, rail and ocean transportation sound ideal for the cargo industry, except for the millions of truck drivers. You put those people out of a job and you have a societal problem that needs to be solved. I'm not against progress in any way, but it comes with problems in need of a solution
        • dcow 4y ago
• throwaway82388 4y ago
  I think it’s telling that the primary ethical concerns around AI development (at least at OpenAI, if not others) are that AI tools not be used to enable propagandists, or to generate violent or sexual imagery. I see comparatively few ethical concerns about the economic fallout professional artists and illustrators will experience as a result.
  • vincnetas 4y ago
    Why no sexual imagery?
    • chaps 4y ago
      (Illegal stuff)
• alexashka 4y ago
  It'll be just another tool in an artist's toolkit. The jump in quality among artists since tablets (pens to draw on a computer screen) and stock photography became widely available 15-20 years ago, has been astronomical. Not to mention the 3D graphics of the past 2 decades, oh ma gawd! It's artist paradise compared to what people had 50 years ago.
• digitalsushi 4y ago
  Hire a human and "pick any two: fast, cheap, or good". Or hire the computer and you can have all three. You're telling me I don't appreciate the genuine artifact? Well, tell me how realist painters survived film photography, and how film photographers survived digital photography. I'd ask but I don't know any anymore. Subjectivity defines what is good. This thing makes art as reliably as 9 bucks gets you fries, a coke, and a burger. Talk about disruptive technology.
• 0x20cowboy 4y ago
  “A girl in a red dress throwing a Molotov cocktail in a field of flowers in the style of Banksy” “An obese politician smoking a cigar being held up by a crowd of starving people wearing American flag pants in the style of Norman Rockwell” “A web page sign up form in the style of Uber” Content violation or ??. Heck, any cartoon in the New Yorker would probably be a content violation. The hard part, I think, is art making an “on the edge” statement. If they allowed this, it could easily - and would - be taken too far (depending on what your version of too far is). I just don’t think human art and all the subtleties behind it can be algorithmically replaced. They weren’t algorithmically created. Corporate soda ads… that’ll probably get replaced (but will still need layout and mixing) UI design and video game art (not concept art in game art) seems too precise. And meaningful art seems to have too much in baked human judgments. I am as afraid of this as I am of Github copilot. Meaning, not much. DALL-E is super cool, but like AI becoming conscious, I am not holding my breath.
• kradeelav 4y ago
  It's odd as a design manager, I feel like people focus on the wrong things to be alarmed about with DALL-E, and aren't alarmed enough about others. * feels like there will be a subtle shift from (corporate) designers as creators to designers as technical sheepherders and retouchers. senior designers who have a real nose for art direction and understanding the fundementals will be fine. interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of blindly using these tools without understanding why the "base" styles/logos look good. the act of creation is a learning experience that this removes. * I feel like phi-y in a different comment has the most accurate read on the situation, given how this will not replace the superstar artists who've already gone through the years of training and sweat-shop work to refine their craft, but the beginner artists who "need" the sweatshop years to get a real-world sense of their craft and the money from the more easily reproducible works. * there is a difference from using digital art as a tool (say, an apple pencil) to digital art as a resource-crutch (photobashing) when crunched for time or resources. I have mixed feelings about photo bashing as an art but those who rely on the resource-crutch sign may get hit hardest versus the ones that already have the raw illustration skills and can adapt/art-direct on the spot. * copyright laws are gonna be interesting when people start trying to "base" results on logos like disney and coca-cola and get lawyers sent after them if it's too obvious. My fear is this creates yet another power imbalance between those who have the money to sic lawyers on others versus not. * I'm mixed on DALL-E because on one hand and to be perfectly blunt, I feel like the most easily reproduced work is ugly/same-y as sin, and lacks all originality compared with the more creative/taboo-art circles who are the first ones to push stylistic and thematic boundaries. I'm not worried about DALL-E replacing styles that are inherently harder to reproduce. On the other hand ... a sense of grace should be extended to artists who are affected. Being slowly replaced/treated as obsolete is a hard thing to experience, much like how natural age is rough on people's emotional states to the point where it's a type of trauma. It's messy, and it's hard, and I acknowledge there's going to be casualties.
  • notahacker 4y ago
    Agree with most of what you're saying, but a bit perplexed by this >interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of blindly using these tools without understanding why the "base" styles/logos look good. the act of creation is a learning experience that this removes Surely with digital art more than most professions the understanding of why the end product works is pretty orthogonal to the actual technical implementation details anyway? You don't understand composition or style or taste or brand identity or proportions by creating textures and shapes from scratch or knowing your way around a tool. To that extent, spending their days filtering mediocre compositions not created by them and fixing their flaws might give them a much keener sense of what isn't quite working than trying to judge mediocre compositions they've put a lot of effort into themselves objectively. I can see bigger issues with the thought that might be comparatively dull work for a lot of people.
• satyrnein 4y ago
  I wonder what is at the end of this road. Hopefully it's not just that some junior artists get fired and everything else stays the same. Does the line between novel and graphic novel blur, as more authors "direct" AIs to depict what's in their brains? Is this how we get to infinite generated worlds in the metaverse?
• seydor 4y ago
  I suppose they can make a disclaimer that prohibits AI companies form using pictures of their work?
• PheonixPharts 4y ago
  I'm pretty unimpressed with the stuff coming out of Dall-E etc (I know, controversial opinion on HN, but bear with me). It's technically impressive, but imho, it still hasn't closed an essential gap need to make AI truly compelling, and still feels like just a modern ELIZA: simultaneously impressive given the technology and a parlor trick. That said, I'm also not too impressed with many contemporary "artists", especially the type this person is afraid of being replaced with AI. What I see here is that artists that have turned themselves into art making robots are vulnerable to being replaced by robots that are making art. As a counter example I present the work of Ben Kovach [0], a generative artist, who makes art with robots essentially. All of his work is generated from computer programs but there are many (and certainly not all) pieces that capture a genuine sense of art that I have not seen in either the slew of human artists churning out robotic work to satisfy customer demand or current generation AI generated art. Kovach's work reminds me of the work of Factory Record's designer Peter Saville, probably most famous for the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures [1]. In a sense Saville is pushing form the opposite direction of Kovach, trying to use human skills to create art that feels somehow robotic and sterile (whereas Kovach does the opposite, create something that feels more human than your typical machine generated art). I don't see current generation a threat to art, but rather the trend towards the reduction of art towards being a reproducible, automatic process. That is the art that can be replaced with AI was already art created by an ad hoc "artifical" artist. 0. https://bendotk.com/ https://bendotk.com/ 1. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812FS2R2v6L._SL1500_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812FS2R2v6L._SL1500_.jpg
  • thejohnconway 4y ago
    Ha, yes, I feel many artists have been hacking away at styles that look good pretty much whatever you throw at them. There's a few tricks, and one you get it, you can produce stuff that looks great quickly and easily. It's not surprising these can be imitated by AI.
• flipbrad 4y ago
  We'll want to be a little careful with how society responds to this. Basquiat put it well ( http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html) Excerpt follows: "We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us . We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."
  • upwardbound 4y ago
    Just to avoid confusion, the page & excerpts you cite are from an 1800's French economist named Bastiat, not from the legendary 1980's neo-expressionist painter Basquiat. Since this thread is about art, I figured people might read the name Basquiat in your comment and think that he wrote the quote you cite, which would in my mind give it greater relevance to this discussion than it has.
    • flipbrad 4y ago
      I appreciate the correction - I only wish I could still edit my original post! But thank you
    • deleted 4y ago
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• thejohnconway 4y ago
  Speaking as a professional digital artist, I am not very concerned by this. Images created by AI without comparable human experience (and therefore meaning), is not the same as art, although it can of course look like it. People who are more than casual appreciators of images follow and admire artists, and their translation of human meaning into an artwork. I can see this eating into the commercial artwork market, which is bad news for the artists that rely on that for income, but it's not an existential threat to the meaning of art.
• sitzkrieg 4y ago
  the only group that should seriously be concerned is maybe the stock photo industry
• vanadium1st 4y ago
  I am a working digital artist, my personal feed is filled with takes like this. I understand the crisis that artists go through currently and I understand their emotions. I've personally made peace with it already, but it will take time for everyone and there will be a lot of concern, rage and bargaining in the process. All of us artists woke up in the world where the thing we were learning to produce all of our lives became 100x cheaper. I've been kinda waiting for this to happen for truck drivers or translators and was honestly surprised that it got to the artists first. But, there's nothing to do now. There will be a lot of takes trying different ways to deny this reality. Like if we agree that this thing is immoral or anti-cultural it will go away and our potential customers will forget about it. I think that it's a waste of time The industry is not completely gone, but it will go though a massive transformation. The basic hierarchy of artists will probably stay the same - people who were good in the pre-ai era will still be good working with the ai. If you've learned your basic skills right - they will still work. I've personally already changed my workflow to use ai art for the sketches, ideas and references. And then polish them to commercial level using my old experience and skills. It's funny how this thing is so new, but I've gotten so used to it that it's already hard for me to come back to my old set of tools. And I do recommend all other artists to do the same and to try to find their place in the new reality - it really seems like there's no other way.
  • p1esk 4y ago
    Do you think the AI will become better than the best human artist? In the foreseeable future?
    • cercatrova 4y ago
      It is like chess and go, computers can beat even the best human player today, but people didn't stop playing these games for enjoyment.
    • vanadium1st 4y ago
      I believe that it already did, honestly. The output and range of Dalle-2 and Stable Diffusion is unmatched by any human artist. I am not only talking about quantity and range - the best illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion are honestly unbelievable and could totally get on the front pages on artstation on their own. The digital paintings, the 3d renders, landscapes, portraits, concept arts, character designs - I've seen too many world class examples of those generated by AI. The best human artists can usually be world-class at a single style or a genre, while Stable Diffusion is world class at hundreds of them. There's of course no way to judge art objectively. And there are at the moment a lot of gaps that AI is not the best at. Still, if there was a single human artist that could do the things that stable diffusion can do - he would be the best artist that ever lived, no doubt.
• tomatotomato37 4y ago
  As a hobbyist artist my main concern is less the automation will replace artist as much as that 99% of that automation will come from the 3 companies with deep enough coffers to train and run the most complex AIs, and 2 of those companies will be FAANGs. Ultimately it will be a future where instead of paying an artist X amount for decent art with the artist getting a ~7% margin, it will be paying 90% of X to a monopolistic tech company for almost decent art with the company's CEO getting a 70% margin
  • lostmsu 4y ago
    The Stable Diffusion models are very small though. You can probably train one with relatively low investment, e.g. 4x3090 under $20k.
• fleddr 4y ago
  I think the concern is fully justified. Those still being skeptical of AI art fail to understand exponential progress. Usage of various algorithms is about to explode, feeding back billions of signals to correct the model. A second or third generation model may really understand relations between objects, depth, lighting, etc. It's both amazing and scary. A little behind the curve, but expect similar developments in music generation. Given the speed of all of this, the socio-economic discussion on AI should really get prioritized, as very little cognitive work is going to be safe.
• tmslnz 4y ago
  Like I suppose many of us, I had a conversation with an artist friend about this very topic. They are concerned about it. Some of the generated results are impressive and surely can sufficiently replace some subset of the current human output. But! Seeing DALL-E artwork from a bird’s eye view, I am more and more convinced that it’s just another tool, not a replacement: It is amazing good at producing unexpected results, and just like GPT3, it does so by regurgitating what is already out there, remixing it in somewhat interesting ways. This is an especially useful tool to quickly produce mood boards, or communicate an artistic intent. However it is not a replacement for the kind of thinking required to produce good artwork.
• prvc 4y ago
  >t does not seem that they have any safeguards in place to protect artists From what? Until strong AI comes about, good human artists will always be able to compete on originality and relatability, and even afterwards, human art could be valued for its "authentic flavor", or something like that. Until then, among humans, only the hacks need fear these systems.
• donkarma 4y ago
  one area where human artists excel: learning. if i ask dall-e to draw something that was made after it was released then it wouldn't be able to do it without a very detailed description
• ChainOfFools 4y ago
  Ford CEO to Union boss: "how will you get your men to build cars as fast as my new robots?" Union boss: "I don't know Mr Ford, but how will you get those robots to buy your cars?"