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The AI Art Apocalypse

• mjan22640 4y ago
  The Art aspect of current AI Art is uninteresting.
• aaroninsf 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I love MidJourney. It's the most provocative and addictive tool I've played with on a computer for many a year. Largely agree with AW the OP, but think the question of "what art are we talking about" needs more air. A lot of the turmoil around these tools appears to be about the threat they pose to the careers of artists and designers (and soon, most related domains). But some of the simple versions of this story (not this one) overlook the nuances IMO. Some of those being, - the distinction between "fine" art in the commercial "art world" gallerist sense, and graphic design/illustration/commercial art - that professional commercial artists are going to adopt and exploit these tools with the same intrinsic advantages they have using with other tools - that in a very short time there is already an explosion of work that uses these tools as one (large) element to produce synthetic work across media that would have been prohibitively expensive/time consuming without them Even as a bystander, but with a background and interest as a serious and modestly successful artist in a different medium, it's been remarkable to see just how quickly people with fewer kids, better ideas, and more time than me, seized upon these tools not as simple image-making widgets, but as sophisticated tools to exploit to generate a stream of imagery to be applied to create Other Things, both as proofs of concept, commercially, and as yes "real art" in the gallerist sense. These things are quite obviously disruptive in a way most VC only dream of. Idle other comments: The "eerie" uncanny sense that scaling up the visual cortex abstraction stack toward "grandmother neurons" that these systems has, is IMO considerably more unsettling than the impact on specific industries. What we can see (literally) in these systems is a visualization (in the data viz sense) of how much further along towards AGI these things may soon be. Their failure modes are more interesting to me than their successes. The ramifications for how they fail and how they are of course unaware of their own failure, is a true cautionary tale. IMO those failures offer an excellent basis for "cautionary tales" and illustration to the general public of why we need oversight and governance for the deployment of these systems. It's one thing for them to produce "nightmare fuel" when asked to create kittens in the kitchen; it's another for a comparable (smaller less tuned closed-source closed-training-dataset...) system to be put in service approving mortgages, assigning credit risks, or (as made ProPublica famous) assessing whether someone is a candidate for bail. (Highly recommended: The Alignment Problem) Anyway. The singularity is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
• DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I just completed a “show” of some of my art at my regular cafe that hosts local art on their wall for one month each. I need to write about this experience (mostly so I can feel “done” about it), but my show was titled “Is This Art?” and consisted of around a dozen images generated by VQGAN/VQGAN+CLIP. I sold almost every single piece! Not bad for a non-artist, frankly. Anyways, I think the key to my “success” was two fold: One, most images took an input image, all were photographs I took in the local area. Second, I was brutal in my curation of what I actually decided to print and include in the show. The keystone piece was actually a warped image of the coffee shop itself! In an art medium without clear constraints, my challenge was to define those constrains for myself. Not exactly a knew problem for artists. I also chose to overlay the output image and original photograph in some cases, and unmask the photograph in certain locations in the image. I used this opportunity to touch up the output in photoshop, and add/remove artificers and details. I was limited by my lack of digital art skills here, but this was the fun part. Final thought, a good eye for color and composition helps any artistic endeavor, and the same is true for this medium.
  • delusional 4y ago
    No need to call yourself a non-artist. To me it sounds like you're an artist :) Congratulations on the successful show. Is it possible to see the final results anywhere on the internet?
    • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Thanks! And I’ve actually been joking that now that I’ve sold something, I’m an artist. “Art is whatever you can get away with,” someone once said. I don’t yet have the curated pieces available online, but that’s on my TODO list. I really appreciate you asking, though, especially now that I’ve got the physical part figured out, over, and one with. :)
      • matttb 4y ago
        Put your website or something in your profile when you do. I would like to be able to see them
• dsign 4y ago
  I don't think that AI is going to replace those artists, but if it does, maybe some will be convinced to become AI researchers :-) ? These art AIs are very good at driving the point home that our DNN AIs are seriously capable. But those capabilities need to be nursed by ever-growing armies of people. True, maybe there is a limit to the amount of people needed to profit from coloring pixels in images, and maybe, just maybe, that ceiling is going to go down the more these artist AIs are used. But AI has the potential to break open areas we can't even imagine now. I for example have trouble imagining that in the time of the horses, there was an industry for traffic signals, another for transporting horse fuel between countries (but maybe there was?), another for teaching teenagers to drive the carriages and get their horse-driving licenses, and so on and so on. Although I don't know much about those days, maybe it was popular to be young and to horse around on top of a good steed. Maybe we will be teaching our kids about how to survive in the jungle of wild AIs we have created for them, and teachers will be needed. Maybe we will hemorrhage AI-produced content, and in twenty years, there will be an industry for certifying that something is human-made (maybe a lesson to learn about how chess survived in the age of incredibly capable chess-playing computer programs?). Or maybe something else we can't quite see yet.
  • notart666 4y ago
    A bit too speculative. Even though this can generate images at a rapid pace the creative space does not. Rapidly prototyping is not really that useful when it comes to things in concept design, nor does it fill the niche of making an entire scene. Realistically, it's only practical uses are in doing things most artists are not able to do well, such as defining characteristics of individuals to prop and assert generation which in the current scenario it is quite useless for but it isn't to condemn the entire GAN space it will likely never replace artists. Nor the human centered design.
• samfriedman 4y ago
  Without this technology, if I want to procure a concept-art quality image to promote my video game, I need to pay at least an amateur artist for their time and skill. With this technology, I can simply run some generations and maybe tweak or combine the output in Photoshop. I don't see how AI won't gobble up the bottom X% of the visual art industry almost immediately. Fine arts, contemporary artists showing in galleries, mediums that can't be printed on photo paper (sculpture, canvas paintings, etc) will be more resistant to displacement. But the massive majority of commodity art & visuals - adverts, billboards, book covers, article images and so on - will definitely be displaced in the very near future.
  • i_am_proteus 4y ago
    Yes, and: as the space evolves, human artists will figure out what AI art is bad at doing and find new niches. And then software will "learn," and the arms race will continue.
    • mysterydip 4y ago
      Right now, I think the winning move for artists is feedback and iteration: "make his head tilt more to the left. make his tie a lighter shade of blue." etc kind of modifications that aren't easily parseable by an AI. That being said, I'm quite enjoying generating pixel art to stand in for my programmer art before I commission artists.
      • astrange 4y ago
        I think that's something AI will actually be very good at - GLIDE and StyleGAN are better at editing than DALLE is at image generation. But that's a tool artists can use; you just won't have to do the highlights and shadows in your art if you don't want to. Newer art programs like CSP already have a lot of tools Photoshop didn't, even if it's just 3D models for poses.
      • fleddr 4y ago
        You really need to have a closer look at this thing, because it can definitely do all of that, and much more. Earlier today I saw a video (sorry, lost the link) of an AI editing program (still a prototype). It generates layers of a scene in place, say sky, mountains, rivers, foreground, etc. each of which would be individually manipulated. Next the program seamlessly blends the layers. The host then continued to add objects/subjects and through "in-painting" made all of it blend into a single coherent scene. This kind of capability is close to being released. This year.
• colechristensen 4y ago
  Right now it is new, but soon people will start to see the common sorts of failures that AI generated art has (and will have a very difficult time getting rid of) will become obvious and seem tacky and cheap. Look at the coins with the dragon and his horde for example. The newness will wear off, people will become sensitized to the flaws, and AI "art" will find a niche which is quite a lot smaller than people impressed with technology imagine. Art and artists aren't dead, AI is not at all "creative" just derivative. It will be one influence among many for actual artists, become a tool for some, and for the rest of us, take the place of "art mill" art for the kinds of places that want to look fancy without putting any effort into it. (I'm looking at you, "luxury" apartment building with the exact same bad, inoffensive abstract print on every floor's elevator lobby)
  • mkaic 4y ago
    >AI is not at all "creative" just derivative. And humans are not derivative? Every image human artists make is based off of something that artist has seen or experienced before. All creativity is derivative.
    • kmeisthax 4y ago
      Derivative is a term of art with several different overloads. Critics will reach for the term to describe something that doesn't seem to do anything new; while lawyers further use it to describe a work that owes some kind of economic debt to the original[0]. The inverse of the legal sense of this word is "transformative". If you are making something new, then that debt goes away to the extent that such a debt would prohibit the creation of that work. Generalizing from these concepts... we don't care so much that literally every bit of art is "based on" or "influenced by" something. We care if the end result is novel or not. This is very much an "I know it when I see it" kind of standard, so it might sound like I'm just talking in circles, but there is a difference. Currently, it's difficult to get an AI system[1] to generate more novel images. There are certain patterns it knows how to do very well, and if you ask it for something that violates those patterns it gets confused because nobody's drawn that before. This puts us closer to "derivative" rather than "transformative", because it's harder to use the system for the latter purpose. [0] Existing precedent and law specifically names a few categories of work that are assumed to be derivative; such as sequels and translations. [1] I have only tried Craiyon / DALL-E Mini, and a handful of very primitive systems, both of which are not the most powerful image generators available.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  I wouldn't have predicted artists, so-called "creatives", would have been the first to get displaced by AI, yet here we are.
• astrange 4y ago
  Context being that another AI art model (StableDiffusion) knows the names of many popular artists and can create images that sort of kind of look like their work. This terrified a lot of artists on Twitter who've now gone around harassing AI developers and claiming they're plagiarists, then simultaneously posting things like "umm this is all uncreative and ugly collages" and "this is going to take all our jobs". Oddly, the main instigator turned out to be a "Pokemon in real life" fanartist who didn't notice he's already a professional plagiarist. > So in that context, saying “horses stuck around when the automobile came” is true, but if you went up to a painter and said “hey, within your lifetime painting will see a 90% decline, stop being taught formally, disappear from daily life or awareness”. The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons' paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace paintings because they aren't paintings! Print shops already exist and may have replaced you though. > I’ve had a lot of struggles with this. I have a specific image in my head, I’m trying to prompt for it, and the AI just does not want to do it. The most trouble that I’ve had so far has been with trying to get a tavern running across the plain with chicken legs. There's a general unfixable problem here, which is it's hard to be aligned with silly prompts without giving you silly output for "normal" prompts. That's also why they're complaining the model output has too safe composition - the developers are lucky they even got it to do that, it's better than random blobs of color and body parts like older models would generate. But the picture they want probably is hiding somewhere in Midjourney's latent space; it's just a matter of finding a prompt that recreates it. One way to do that could be to sketch the picture you want some other way and run it through a reverse image-to-text notebook like https://github.com/pharmapsychotic/clip-interrogator https://github.com/pharmapsychotic/clip-interrogator. Another would be prompting it with your sketch so that you can get an image in its "house style" - which doesn't seem very appealing for most models, but Midjourney has a pretty strong one.
  • emporas 4y ago
    Btw, stable diffusion official channel got suspended off twitter, because their model is open source, and it can create anything the person desires. >The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons' paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace paintings because they aren't paintings! It is conceivable, that a popular artist will become replicated using an automated method or a manual one. We see that happening all the time with music and art. The best artists are the ones who influenced others the most.
• bambax 4y ago
  > So, would people stop making art? An analogy that TFA curiously doesn't touch is the advent of photography. What did it do to painting? Painting became less and less figurative as photography became more and more accurate. The point of painting was to represent reality; but as photography became so much more accurate, that point became moot. And so, painting went into a different direction. Represent not reality, but feelings, what the artist feels when looking at reality; something that's out of reach of photography. AI is trying to conquer this as well. Human art needs to go further. Something weird that AI cannot touch.
  • bsenftner 4y ago
    Art that human beings actually care about is not the commercial art many people are referencing here. Art is not pretty pictures. Art is not a expensively produced media. Art is a human communication concerning the realizations of finite life. However, Art being Art, it does not communicate these issues in immature direct language, Art communicates through richly layered metaphor. Real Art, that which moves one's soul, is beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence for a large number of reasons, chief of which because it is a communication between beings aware of finite existence. Note, I am not saying the consumer markets will not be flooded with cheap mimicry of art as pooped out by ignorant noncomprehending AIs. That will most definitely happen. And a generation of would be fine artists will never pursue their innate vocation thanks to the misconception that AI is capable of creating Art (which it cannot.) However, you do not have to fall for the stupidity most are caught. If you have an artistic vocation, realize that indirection and metaphor are your human creative super powers that AI cannot touch. Metaphor requires comprehension and often complex interwoven comprehensions, which is so far out of AI’s reach it is laughable the general pubic believes otherwise. AIs are idiots when you know them well. They have zero capacity to create Real Art composed of complex metaphors embodied in a form other than how they appear.
    • dqpb 4y ago
      > Real Art, that which moves one's soul, is beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence It’s easy to test. Show people “real” art and AI generated art and see how often they can tell which is which.
• crumpled 4y ago
  I've been dabbling with text-to-image generation quite a bit lately. I also do graphic design, drafting, and occasionally doodle with a pen or pencil. I really enjoy generating images, and I really enjoy drawing even though I'm not really good at it. I like to draw with my five-year-old, but I've also exposed him to Dalle-Mini. I think showing him dalle-mini was a mistake, and I'm going to avoid repeating it. (We are a low-media household.) My concern about AI art has to do with children learning art skills. Will it be hard to encourage developing art skills? If a person can just ask for an image rather than learning how to make one, will they be motivated to do the work to build the skill? Or will it suddenly become a waste of time to the young mind?
  • elefanten 4y ago
    Is that much different from being able to find ready-made images to look at in various media? I could see a difference in the case of wanting to see a custom image and being able to summon it via description vs. needing to learn to produce it. I’m not particularly artistic and never developed any such skills… so I don’t know: how crucial is that particular motivation to those who acquire art (production) skills?
    • crumpled 4y ago
      I think you described the difference pretty well. If you just want to look at an image of a thing, finding one is good. You might even find a real picture of something. ( In the future, this isn't a given. ) Plus you'll have to filter out images that are irrelevant, or even harmful. If you need to use the picture for something, there's a lot of advantage to crafting your own picture. (licensing, privacy, attribution, ownership, et al) When I wrote my comment I was trying to think of a parallel from the past, and I kept thinking of calculators. An even better example would be the decline of hand writing as a skill.
      • syntheweave 4y ago
        The difference between seeing art and drawing art is essentially one of a knowledge capture skill. When you learn to write, you have to copy the shapes of the letters. Often this is first done by tracing the lines or filling in an outline with color. Then you learn to reproduce it on your own, and eventually have it memorized. The same is basically true for drawing, but you're doing more of the early parts of the process more often. To draw a figure from imagination you have to learn the shapes. To do that you have to find a real figure in pose, and carefully copy it to get the proportions of the shapes as accurate as you can(which is assisted by various measuring techniques to correct your work). Then, after a few thousand of those, you try to draw an imagined figure and voila, your hand makes recognizable shapes - maybe a bit simplified, out of proportion, or with poor anatomy, but something others can parse correctly. And so doing a lot of drawing is like building up a vocabulary, becoming more observant and aware of subtle visual differences and therefore more able to communicate them back. I can't see AI replacing this: it can be a good servant and give a lot of options, but it can't mind-read that you want a hand posed slightly differently.
• bsenftner 4y ago
  Actually, truthfully, AI is merely a complex tool. Any “art” created by an AI with no human interaction is pure rubbish. It is the humans operating the AI that knowingly discard the rubbish, and after significant effort entailing a lot of trials and random experimentation they manage to get something their human mind comprehends is integrated with the goal they have in their imagination. It is the human curating and editing the AIs generations that produces the “art” and not the software. The software is merely a sophisticated idiot savant, and I significantly stress the idiot part because they are innately capable of zero art themselves.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    So you're just going to skip over the fact that you don't even need to know how to draw/paint and what large manual effort that used to be?
    • throwaway1851 4y ago
      I don’t think that fact has been established. From what I’ve observed with Midjourney and Dall-E, the defects in the output of these models are more artistically significant than just mangled faces and missing details. The models don’t understand the styles they are aping, and they don’t understand the elements of visual art in a way that allows them use those elements in the service of an expressive goal. I think it’s quite plausible that we plateau to a point where the user of these systems still needs significant technical knowledge (drawing and painting) in order to correctly specify the requirements to the model.
    • bsenftner 4y ago
      The amount of time required is immaterial. It is the quality of the communication that matters. Unless you can realize the significance of when Duchamp submitted an ordinary yet upside down urinal as Fine Art, then you don't really understand the nature of Art. Like I say above, Art is not pretty pictures.
• lfnoise 4y ago
  Try to get an AI to render an upside down face. In my attempts, they can't do it at all. Deformity results. It is outside the training data.
  • throwaway1851 4y ago
    I think that’s a recurrent theme with deep learning: it’s incredible, almost magical, when it’s well adapted to a specific task that fits specific parameters. But failure modes are a minefield.
  • donkarma 4y ago
    it completely fails at composition or novel characters
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  How are these systems trained to make sure they're not polluted with images created by AI already? I can see how it's semi-easy to have a database of images up to a certain date (before AI generating algo existed), but what about if you want to train the AI with modern data? For example, say if I want to query, in 2035: "Flying hippos in the style of McGrundsBulle" where McGrundsBulle is an artist who only started producing art in 2025... How is the AI then not going to trained with "flying hippos" generated between now and 2035 by AI like DALL-E 2 / midjourney / etc.? I'd argue it wouldn't make sense to train better AIs using current AI's generated pictures for many of them are the stuff of nightmares and it doesn't seem to be because they've been trained by nightmarish datasets. They're just creepy due to how the current AI works and many details are obviously off, which makes them very creepy to humans.
  • ethav1 4y ago
    Datasets can be manually curated to contain primarily original images if this becomes a real issue. For example, classifiers can predict whether an image is generated or not. You could adapt the process used to create laion-aesthetic[0] to remove generated images. [0]: https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion-datasets/blob/main/laion-aesthetic.md https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion-datasets/blob/main/laion-a...
  • coffee_beqn 4y ago
    Ah I kind of want to see the alien horror of AIs teaching each other what art is for multiple generations
    • IIAOPSW 4y ago
      "AI's only know how to copy. They could never invent their own genre. Human creativity is safe for now."
  • lancesells 4y ago
    I don't know why someone isn't doing this already. Output giant datasets of the fantasy AI images and then train only on that.
• oraphalous 4y ago
  Have you noticed that young people use music less and less as a signalling device? That is to say they care far less about whether or not the music is cool and signals their affinity to some kind of subculture... and more about whether or not they just like the sound. This is because access to music has become cheap. Discovery of music has become cheap. Signalling behaviours though rely on the costliness of signalling through a particular medium. Costly signalling is the theoretical framework you want here to understand what is going to happen to art if the tech is as good as it is currently being hyped. We like to think of art as this inherently communicative act - as the author says. But the main psychological motivation is signalling. We would not waste so much energy as a species on such behaviour if it didn't have some kind of evolutionary benefit. So I expect much of the energy that goes into the artistic signalling medium will be redirected toward more costly mediums.
  • mushufasa 4y ago
    Yes, I think the tech evolution of music has a lot of parallels here. In the 60s-70s, production and distribution were expensive, so there was scarcity. In the 90s-early 2000s DAWs on laptops made it easy to self-record/produce, so there was a a lot more music made, then in the 2010s legal distribution became cheap through streaming. Nowadays there's more music being created and consumed than ever, but the musicians don't make nearly as much money as in the golden days of the CD. The mega-stars like Billy Eillish still make a good amount through brand deals / live shows, but the 'middle class' of musicians has fallen away. I think lower barriers to entry through creating art via AI assistance will mean more art available, but it probably will make it harder to make a living as a professional artist. That said, I don't think anyone who chooses to be an artist today is primarily motivated to earn money.
    • eyelidlessness 4y ago
      > Nowadays there's more music being created and consumed than ever, but the musicians don't make nearly as much money as in the golden days of the CD. The mega-stars like Billy Eillish still make a good amount through brand deals / live shows, but the 'middle class' of musicians has fallen away. I’m not sure where you got the impression that the bygone era of the CD was so lucrative, or that its largess was more evenly distributed in a meaningful way. If you’re open to challenging that conception, I’d highly recommend reading Steve Albini’s article, The Problem With Music (also sometimes titled Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked; not linked because it doesn’t have a canonical link and I’m never sure which site reposting it can be relied on not to edit it). Anyway the tl;dr is this: to the extent there’s ever been a more even distribution of earnings for musicians, that certainly wasn’t attributable to CD sales. The article was written fairly early in the CD era, and those dynamics deepened through that period. I’m doubtful it was ever attributable to any particular sale of recordings on any kind of media. Then, as now (and probably since well before recording technology was available) musicians making a decent or better living by and large made the majority of it performing live. For what it’s worth, the article I mentioned factored greatly into my decision not to pursue a music career, even as I embraced the early availability of cheap digital recording (and intermittently still do). I’m sure there’s an alternate universe where I’d be thrilled that my life’s work would be playing music, but I have little doubt that my entry into the middle class would have been far less likely than by taking up programming.
• mkaic 4y ago
  As an artist (music, film, 3D modeling/rendering, creative writing, portraiture) and an AI engineer, I'll admit I have a lot of uncertainty about the future of art. Some days I'm very scared, other days I figure I'll just "go with the flow" and not worry too much about a future I can't control. I read the papers. I see the pace of progress. I understand how these models work on a technical level and I am blown away by how quickly they are being iterated on. I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well). People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy. Photography and painting both survived because they're fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished in cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate themselves. AI art is different, because its entire purpose is to replicate, and no matter what human artists do with the medium of digital images, the AI will always be right there to gobble up the new wave changes and learn to replicate them. Whereas the advent of photography was never meant to kill the painting industry, these AI algorithms are very much meant to kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the researchers or not.
  • karpierz 4y ago
    > I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well). I would 100% take you up on this bet. > People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy. I think that painting-and-photography is the wrong analogy; stuff like DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up.
    • 4y ago
• nmat 4y ago
  Many successful artists don't paint, sculpt or build anything. It's not about the technique. Art is about sending a message, it's about what the artist is trying to say. It's about what the public feels and thinks when exposed to their work. AI has a place as a tool to produce content in a fast and cheap way. And yes, as a result of that certain jobs will likely disappear. But art will continue to exist and great artists will still be followed and admired by the public.
• VHRanger 4y ago
  Classic luddite argument at the core of the article. Technology both displaces jobs and enhances jobs. It's impossible to tell a priori the economic effect. It's just as possible that artists leveraging these tools are paid more because they're incredibly more productive than the overall demand for art somehow being sated and reducing artist employment
  • emporas 4y ago
    Very true. This technology will become dirt cheap in a matter of 2-3 years. Arguably a lot cheaper than brushes and paint were at the time of Leonardo Da Vinci. AI art, paints something beautiful which is computed using other paintings and real life objects. What an artist has in his head, the original idea, cannot be computed by the machine, by definition. The processes of the human mind, cannot be computed just like that.
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Missing the point of the article if you think it's similar to luddism. The industrial revolution had a huge impact on society, discussing that and how it will displace or transform some occupations isn't the same thing as actually fighting back against the new technology.
• lxe 4y ago
  I always reference "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" (https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Photographic_Image https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Phot...) by Andre Bazin, who expressed similar observations about photography entering the scene. I've been "successfully" creating AI art for a few months now, and although there are some staunch opponents (mostly on Reddit), the medium has been generally very well received by both the audiences and many artists in the established community.
• somethoughts 4y ago
  Perhaps its just because its early innings but a lot of the early examples of AI generated art seem to be in that uncanny valley stage. A bit dystopian - like from an unpleasant dream. I'm curious whether thats just the text descriptions people are putting into the generators to get clicks or inherent in the AI art generation techniques used. I'll also throw out that for most of the history of art - "art" has always been cheap to produce. My pre-schooler created "art". Its really only the outliers that we remember. And really the ones who make it do it through verbal communication of their ideas or have some mechanism for conveying a consistent, overarching theme/narrative. [1] A professional AI "artist" might need to figure out how to become more of a visual creator/curator - ushering the generated images into coherent story that can be shared via discussions at gallery showings, etc. Perhaps real professional visual artists need to find the equivalent of a live show that has kept music viable as a career or a live book reading that makes an author relatable. [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/the-hidden-side-of-the-art-market/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/the-hidden-side-of-the-...
• nperez 4y ago
  My gut feeling is that artists will be the primary users of these tools and there will be a large market for those who are very skilled at producing, curating, tweaking, and post-processing the results. Some jobs will be lost due to clients who do it themselves, but there will be enough people who don't want to learn the tools no matter how simple they are. I also think the tools will become more complex.
  • mostlylurks 4y ago
    A skilled user of such tools will also likely be able to produce content at a much greater rate than a skilled artist that uses more traditional means, so the demand for skilled artists will likely still be lower even if those artist all become skilled users of these tools.
  • lancesells 4y ago
    Agreed. My gut feeling is certain creative jobs will wither down and become other jobs. You'll need your AI text prompt specialist. You'll need a color specialist, a typographer, etc., a project manager to wrangle everything and get the best foot forward. You'll need someone to make the deck and present to the client, etc. Design agencies should be trying to build / buy these tools now as fast as they can. Otherwise the AI agencies will eat them up.
• deleted 4y ago
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• cortesoft 4y ago
  I can see AI replacing some kinds of art, but so much art is not about the technical skill. The thinking that AI can replace artists is the same thinking that causes some people to go to a modern art museum and say, “I could do that!” when looking at some piece of abstract art. Just because you could technically recreate the art you have seen doesn’t mean the art isn’t good or unique. Someone could build a machine that splatters paint like a Jackson Pollock, but that hasn’t devalued his art at all. Keyboard and synthesizers haven’t stopped people from playing real instruments.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    > Keyboard and synthesizers haven’t stopped people from playing real instruments. I'm not so sure about that. Trumpet playing appears to be largely dead. There's nobody like Herb Alpert today.
    • andybak 4y ago
      What a strange example to pick. There's been an explosion in virtuoso instrumentalists on YouTube from what I've observed. Jazz seems be having a big renaissance especially.
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        Where's the current Herb Alpert? I've heard some modern trumpeters, but they weren't very good. The trumpet is a very difficult instrument to play well. Guitars and keyboards are popular because of the wide range of sounds they can easily produce. Trumpets have a much more restricted set of sounds it can make, so I understand the reluctance to specialize on it. But when done well, a trumpet sounds heavenly. Nothing can match its beauty.
  • red75prime 4y ago
    You are talking about nineteenth century automation. That one aims to reproduce all people capabilities, including creativity. The machine will not splatter paint like Pollock, it will create new art form like Pollock. Yes, there always will be a place for the art of being human, but it is a niche thing.
• obert 4y ago
  With calculus, machines have replaced humans about 70 years ago, still, the best math and math innovation is still driven by humans. IMO AI will only accelerate art production, opening new opportunities and democratizing things like the ability to make a movie, personal music, instant wall papers, etc
  • spicyusername 4y ago
    Very well said. These AI algorithms only regurgitate new permutations of what they are trained on. There will always be the need for the pipeline of new material, but they're definitely won't be as large of a need for commodity artists who were already just regurgitating existing material in the first place.
    • lancesells 4y ago
      Agreed. I don't think the tools even scratch the surface of what art is.
  • mlyle 4y ago
    Maybe about 40 years ago computers started to replace humans in earnest doing calculus, and replaced 20-30 years ago. I mean, computer algebra systems only really came into their own in the 80's (even if there was some work in the 60's) and uptake took awhile.
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• 1dry 4y ago
  Every one of the MidJourney images featured in this article is obviously derived from averaging. The model is trained to correlate the average look of this or that with whatever keywords. For example, the "artist at work" – okay from afar with no real examination/consideration, it looks like something, kind of. As soon as you actually begin to look at it, it becomes glaringly uninspired. Hmm, what's he working on there...is that a hand? what even is going on in front of the artist? How about the front and center desk – nothing is actually definitive, I can't recognize a single thing on that desk! Etc etc, and similar observations can be made about all of the other images. Not that art should necessarily be a clear depiction of real things, far from that. Good art (read: art I feel a connection with and inspired by) is the presentation of a SUBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW. In these images, all I see is the averaging of many points of view (the actual artworks the model was trained on, I presume), resulting in no point of view at all. This technology will take jobs like designing 3-star hotel lobby wallpaper, not the places of human artists. Without a human point of view, "art" like this is flavorless jello.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    Your concerns regarding averaging and the lack of specifics are both addressed in the article. In short, it's a mistake to judge AI art by its current capability. It's about to go on an exponential tour.
    • 1dry 4y ago
      Well, the author says they keep up on "the latest papers" and whatnot, which leaves me as yet unconvinced of the artistic quality of the future output from these models. We will see. While I'm still rambling on about this – the author states: “In a strictly mechanical sense, yes, an artist can still create, knowing that the art could be done faster and better by AI.” The art cannot necessarily be done better by an AI, and the speed with which art is created does not matter, artistically.
    • throwaway1851 4y ago
      As with vehicular autonomy? We all heard predictions like that about 4-5 years ago.
• evouga 4y ago
  This is a strange article because the strongest counterpoint to its own argument: > The AI can make art. I’ve seen people dispute this, since what the AI makes by definition may not be art, under at least certain definitions. I think those definitions are stupid though, and will elect to ignore them. is in the article itself: > Art, at its core, is an attempt at expression and evocation. It’s a way of talking about things that are hard to put into words, a way of making arguments that don’t have their own formal logic, a way of connecting with others, of sharing. Some people paint or write because it’s a way of letting something out of themselves, of working through thoughts or trauma, or spending some time feeling some particular emotion or working on a thought... > Art is a communicative act. It’s a conversation. You see a picture and it makes you feel a certain way, and yes, sometimes you silently process that art, but most of my favorite aspects of art as discussing it with other people, wrestling with the art in public, teasing out what it’s trying to do, or what it’s doing without trying. I generally think that this is one of the best parts of being an author or an artist, this very public back and forth, sometimes with the art having to defend itself as the critic shadow-boxes... Sooner or later, a general artificial intelligence will create art and it will be a crisis for human artists. That's not today. DALL-E is not trying to make an argument, work through some trauma, or share a particular emotion, when it turns your text query into a feature vector into a JPG... I recently attended a talk by Aaron Hertzmann who compared the rise of AI-assisted art to the invention of the camera. Yes, some types of art will stop being commercially viable---stock images of D&D characters, to take the article's example---just as photorealistic portraits stopped being viable in the age of photography. But art as a social act of communication is alive and well...
• GlacierFox 4y ago
  I'm sure it's not just me that thinks that all of these AI generated images look like uninspired disjointed soulless garbage? Please, go ahead an generate an AI image to advertise your videogame or book. Take out as much of the human creative process as you can until we're left with a world of algorithmically formulated 'art'. I've got a moron friend that keeps showing me images he's made using an AI, at first glance they look interesting but after a couple of seconds you realise it's one dimensional and hasn't impacted you in the same way actual artwork does. There's a nuance to creating breathtaking art, and a lot of that comes from ideas and emotions far more complex than algorithmically smashing pixels together.
  • 1dry 4y ago
    preach
  • rafaelero 4y ago
    > I'm sure it's not just me that thinks that all of these AI generated images look like uninspired disjointed soulless garbage? That's probably just your knee-jerk reaction. The same that people express when they are told they are eating a vegan food. The right question to ask yourself is: how confident am I that I would be able to distinguish between AI and human art if I didn't know how it was created? You seem to be pretty confident that you can tell them apart, but I call that bs.
    • donkarma 4y ago
      i get them every time on the dalle vs not dalle comparison system, why not try yourself? https://crul.github.io/rDalle2OrRNotDalle2/ https://crul.github.io/rDalle2OrRNotDalle2/
    • GlacierFox 4y ago
      > You seem to be pretty confident that you can tell them apart, but I call that bs. Are you for real? I can confidently say that you could. If I put a generated image next to an actual piece of artwork I'm confident even you could very easily distinguish between the two. I mean, you making it out like it's in some way difficult which is confusing. I can pick up whether an image is generated using Dall-E within a few seconds, much like most people I know. Not sure what you mean with that vegan nonsense, but okay haha.
• Bjorkbat 4y ago
  One thing I'm still struggling to predict is just how far AI art will really penetrate into society. Namely, if you've shown this stuff off to "normal" people, you've probably noticed that their reactions are kind of mixed, most being fairly dismissive. Some might even be confused because they just sort of thought that this is how art was made on a computer in the first place. Personally, I don't think a hypothetical DALL-E 3 or even DALL-E 4 will change their minds. At a certain point a sophisticated AI art tool becomes indistinguishable from Google Search. Indeed, part of me wonders if where this is all heading. Google Search for things that don't actually exist. Infinite Pinterest. Indeed, I think this is the most serious scenario. I mean, think about it. Imagine what it would be like if Google search rolled out a new search engine where you paid to search for images, but you could use whatever images you found for whatever. Search for a dragon sitting on a pile of gold and you'll find a heap of dragons sitting on piles of gold in any style you could imagine which you. Download it and use it in whatever you want. Its yours now (or so they claim, you can't help but wonder if its too good to be true). That really is essentially what AI art is. And when you put it that way, it sounds pretty underwhelming. If you're a creative director /marketer on a budget, its infinite stock photos at a price just slightly cheaper than what you were paying anyway. If you're a creative on a budget who can't draw good, it's a good-enough source of creative imagery (so many damn NFTs). If you're a small business owner, you might be able to find a logo you like after enough digging, though you might feel that you're limited by your ability to ask for what you want. At the end of the day though, it amazes me how the smartest people in the room consistently fail to comprehend how unreliable spoken and written language are as a form of communication. It's a very slow way of communicating versus pictures and imagery. Honestly, this whole infatuation with AI makes me think that these people are trying to invent yesterday's future, the future of the 60s, one where you could talk to an "artificial brain" but the idea of a computer as a creative canvas was absolutely absurd. It feels like a strange step back. It feels very backwards to suggest that "prompt engineer" will be a future career. I think that's why the real future of AI art probably isn't machines that make the art for you, but "magic paintbrushes".
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• mattkevan 4y ago
  I’ve been making art with AI for over a year now, and as far as I see it, these AI tools are just fancy paintbrushes. Okay, it may be novel to prompt ‘A cat by Van Gogh’ and admire the result, but it’s not using the tools to their fullest. Once the novelty of swirly cats wears off, people will realise it’s just another tool. Where AI really shines is through combining styles, materials and mediums together in ways that are not possible otherwise. It’ll take time to find out how to use them to their full creative potential, and that’s something I’ve been trying to do over the last year. I’ve got a paintbrush possessed by a drunk genie that knows the entirety of art history and the possibilities are endless. The people who say AI art is not art because it’s all done by AI are the same who said 30 years ago that digital art is not art because it’s all done by computer, or who 200 years ago said that photography isn’t real art because… I do think we’re going to see a similar movement to the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1800s. They reacted to the industrialisation of the decorative arts by deliberately focusing on traditional craftsmanship and rejecting mechanisation. If art no longer needs to be created by a human, then only the things a human can do will be valuable - ideas and craft. AI tools need ideas to drive them. Left to its own devices, VQGAN + Clip, for example, is perhaps interesting but not particularly artistic. Grey and smudgy. Throw in a few ideas however, really push what it can do, and the results are phenomenal. Handmade furniture is more valuable than an IKEA flatpack because it’s unique, someone put time and effort and love into it. Human-made art will become more valued than before, not less.
  • coffee_beqn 4y ago
    I’m super excited about these new tools as a (sometimes) indie game developer. Now I can iterate and get good game graphics like portraits and load screens and backgrounds with a much easier immediate workflow. I’m sure there will be a 3D model generating AI not too long from now. Those are purely mathematic objects (graphs) so Id imagine it’s feasible. I’d much rather spend my time coming up with a prompt to generate characters and environments. I gave up on my last project after modeling a animal for three days and not being happy with it.
    • mattkevan 4y ago
      There already are models that can do 3D models. There’s a few Clip-guides text to image ones for avatar and character designs, one that can create 3D scenes with animated human figures, and Nvidia’s NERF looks amazing. Give it a few photos and it’ll create a full 3D fly through. These models are rudimentary for now, but will improve rapidly.
• JackMorgan 4y ago
  For anyone who has read the excellent Neil Stephenson book "Rise, or Dodge in Hell" (seriously, go read it!) you know he predicts an outcome of this: real time AI memes and art that generates per-user feeds that are maximally designed to be entertaining and addicting. Feeds that watching for a few hours can cause addictive behavior as the algorithm learns what content you like best. In his novel, since the algorithm draws from the human, and the human is changed by the algorithm, it causes weird "dreams" where groups of people suddenly all get really violent for a while, then regress into stupor. Having sat on the midjourney discord and gotten almost hypnotized by watching the feed, I can definitely attest it already is very pleasurable, and that's watching _other_ people's streams that they have to type in prompts to generate. I can't imagine what it will be like when mixed with GPL-4 to generate political memes.
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    > Feeds that watching for a few hours can cause addictive behavior as the algorithm learns what content you like best. So he basically predicted Tik-tok, wow
    • Archelaos 4y ago
      Nope. "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" was published in 2019. TikTok was launched in 2016.
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• _carbyau_ 4y ago
  One aspect of being an artist is to get precisely what you want, down to the last detail. Currently most generated images seem to need significant touchups to be a good image. For future generators to meet the specificity requirement they will need the language to describe it.
  • coffee_beqn 4y ago
    But for people like me I can never get what’s in my head out on paper. So is this better then me trying to explain to a third party what I want and then checking in a few days later if they got it? I think it very easily could be
    • _carbyau_ 4y ago
      Better for results that don't require absolute precision maybe. A nice picture to accompany something else of substance. But if you want precisely a thing. Then using a generator is unlikely to give it to you. As a tool for inspiration or for supplying foundational material to tweak from there, it could be brilliant. But I don't think it will fully automatically supply end game content for those with specificity in mind.
  • forsythe_ 4y ago
    I agree. This is one of the big factors that I haven't seen thoroughly addressed on this topic: no matter how capable AI tools are at interpreting broad declarative prompts there's still a wide degree of complexity in expressing detail and subtlety that I don't think they'll be able to match anytime soon, if ever. The author gives the example of needing dozens of images to accompany scenes in his book. If you feed DALL-E something like: "create a panoramic view of a grey ocean with four mountains and an ominous dark sky", then sure, it can handle that prompt fine. It'll do a great job at broadly interpreting adjectives and phrases that are unambiguous. Mass produced art for advertising/media is going to change drastically because it doesn't need precision. However, once you introduce specificity and detail the tools are going to suck. For example, telling it to generate a portrait of a specific person with subtlety in expression, body language, pose, and demeanor. It'll create something that looks aesthetically sane but not anywhere near what you had in mind. And just for some extra counter-predictions of my own: - The novelty of seeing thousands of "good enough" images in mass media is going to wear off - AI generated images will become obvious to the average person - Society will largely get tired of AI art due to the lack of novelty - The utter collapse of the art profession some are predicting is never going to come
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  The biggest problem with AI art is that it's evolving way faster than human Artists' ability to adapt. We've seen it in manufacturing of goods now we will see it in the manufacturing of art. Those in the lower end of the pay scale need to start looking at ways to adapt to the new reality. The market will start looking a lot like the actor's market where a few get paid very well, others get paid a little and most, by far, do it for free since they love doing it. I think it's possible for people to adapt by creating projects that use AI. They can use their creativity on the project rather than the art itself. One of the interesting side affects of AI art is that you can generate ideas with it. Here someone requested images of cups in the style of an architect. It would be great to have some of these in my house. https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/w7buyx/a_coffee_cup_designed_by_famous_architects/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/w7buyx/a_coffee_cup... AI art will have an impact on society as a whole.
• xor99 4y ago
  This article overgeneralises about art by subsuming all art under the category of visual art and more specifically digital visual art. The question of whether AI is art poison is not well formed because of this assumption as you are just talking about a significant but small section of the real art market. I agree in relation to both non-digital visual arts (kind of) and digital visual arts (especially). This may also apply to CAD, game design, ui/ux and 3D animation too. So it is a big deal. However, there's no real AI replacement metric if your art is outside of these, very digitally orientated categories. A big shark in formaldehyde, psychedelic peeing reindeer, silver bromide developing on a metal canvas, titanium pellets that roll through a game machine etc (e.g. all recent artworks). They're all art, mostly good (at least to many people in the art market or critics), and AI is in not really relevant in terms of labour replacement.
• politician 4y ago
  The point about the art being soulless, safe, and sanitized struck me as absolutely correct. The savage, provocative art will still reside with human artists because they won’t be shackled by their creator.
• bloaf 4y ago
  > I walk into a library or a bookstore sometimes and see how many of these things are on display, and I feel that same feeling, that there’s so much content you could drown in it all. It makes that howling feeling more intense, as my own contributions to the culture are rendered insignificant. This is the singularity. The typical definition of the singularity involves "unpredictability," but that is just a symptom. The cause of the singularity is AIs generating new information faster than we can consume or act on it. Of course in art there is no point in exceeding the rate of human consumption; as others have pointed out here we face a future in which AI continuously generates art tailored to each individual. As a result, this doesn't quite rise to the level of "unpredictability" envisioned by singulatarians. All fields will eventually face the same reckoning as this author has spelled out for art, and some (such as circuit or AI design) will introduce positive feedback loops that will not only put the relevant engineers out of work, but also cause the field to advance so rapidly that we humans will have no chance of catching up, let alone predicting what the AIs will develop next.
• jatins 4y ago
  Has it even been about the "Art"? A Picasso painting looks like something a group of toddlers scrambled together until you know it's Picasso. Emma Chamberlain could sell T-shirts to her fans tomorrow that's no better than what you'd find at local no-name store. Do you think people are buying them because it's fashionable? It's always been about the artist. And I don't see that changing. This does have the potential to affect a graphic designer at a startup because they are, in some sense, more fungible. And even that's a big "maybe" to me at this point. At least, in the short team, I see them using the new wave for AI generators as a co-pilot rather than an auto-pilot.
  • ska 4y ago
    > A Picasso painting looks like something a group of toddlers scrambled together until you know it's Picasso. IMO this really undermines your argument.
• furyofantares 4y ago
  I use AI art for something that would never be worth the time for a human to do it: solution images for a daily word game that tie the daily solution words together. It's a popular feature that takes me about 5-10 minutes per day to produce a good image. So that's new demand for art created by it being so accessible. Most of the art has some very obvious flaws and deficits; much of which could be cleaned up quickly by a human. I certainly imagine new jobs for artists that use this tool to assist in very quick jobs, for applications higher value than my use case but which still wouldn't exist if a human had to do all of the work.
  • UberFly 4y ago
    Though you can easily see a quick jump to a point where the creating and then the tweaking doesn't need a human involved.
    • furyofantares 4y ago
      I can't easily see that, no. That's a very presumptive way to word your speculation. I don't have much of a prediction except that it seems a long long ways from there not being value a human can by working on prompts and cleaning up images. For sure there's already applications where you don't need a human involved per image. But for applications where it makes sense to spend 5, 10, 60 minutes of a human's time to improve the output, I think the baseline output could improve drastically and as long as humans can still make improvements within a timeframe that makes sense for the application, it will still make sense to do so.
• greysphere 4y ago
  "A lot of artists feel like they own their work." I can almost hear the "would be a shame if something happened to it." Imagine you built a house, and someone came a long and said "I bet you feel like you own that house." Insanity.
• RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  Something I think is interesting about this, is that maybe 10-20 years ago, when you heard futurists speak of what the implications of AI would be, it was the accounting, driving, warehouse, positions that the scary future AI were going to automate out of existence. The speculation was that we'd all have to become artists or poets, since, obviously creative work would be out of the reach of AI.
  • throwaway290 4y ago
    Creative work is out of reach of AI. There can be no art without intent, and AI is nothing more than proverbial monkeys with typewriters in fancy wrapping. The artists in the equation are whoever gave input to the tool and whoever created the works the tool trained on.
    • ambrozk 4y ago
      "Yeah, but computers can't be creative!" is the last line of denial for humans who don't want to face their impending obsolescence in a field. People said the same thing about chess engines, right before chess engines defeated human beings at the game conclusively, and forever. A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work. Coming up with random shit and then discriminating among the results is what creative people do. If you think "creativity" is some magical human phenomenon that can't be learned by a sufficiently complicated artificial neural net, then you either don't get creativity or you don't get neural nets. Will a computer produce the next Rembrandt? Maybe not. But the average human painter isn't the next Rembrandt: they're a schmo with a bit of mechanical talent, practicing their craft. The reason human painting will survive is very simple: because 1) people value human-made objects independent of those objects' objective qualities, and because 2) paintings exist outside the digital world, and there is no robot sufficiently dexterous to match the skill of a painter in applying paint to a canvas. That being said, as this technology matures, lots of currently employed digital artists will no longer be needed.
      • throwaway290 4y ago
        > A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work Citation needed. We know how all ML starts with an RNG, since we built it. We don't know how human mind works.
• psi75 4y ago
  I started looking into this in the 2010s, and the evidence suggests that we're going to see everything humans do as subordinates face a 6-12% annual wage decline starting about now. If you do it as a subordinate, a machine can do your job well enough either to replace you, or to replace 90+ percent of the people in your job, leaving the rest of you to fight over scraps. The part of your job that a machine can't do might seem really important to you, but your boss's boss's boss probably doesn't care about it, since scalable mediocrity is more profitable than whatever "extra" you provide. Ignore the whining of frontline managers about how "no one wants to work" (i.e., their own bosses are squeezing them by refusing to let them hire, forcing them to do more grunt work). The long-term trend of wages is downward. Labor markets do not find equilibrium. They diverge. The lizardfolk who own all the capital can wait. But laborers cannot; they need to eat. The whole goddamn system is rigged and 99+ percent of us are losers. This isn't just about AI Art, or the mediocre but serviceable code generated by GPT-3 and the like. We are very likely headed for a broad-based, general wage collapse everywhere in the world, and this sort of situation is likely to result in a global violent conflict between people and capital, in which either an entire socioeconomic system is overthrown (a chaotic situation, but the good outcome) or humanity is thrown into slavery from which it is unlikely ever to recover.
  • throwaway1851 4y ago
    I see a vivid imagination and overextrapolation working tag-team in this post. Evidence, not so much.
    • psi75 4y ago
      "Overextrapolation" isn't a word.
• Diapason 4y ago
  Interesting (and very pleasing aesthetically) post. Very interesting comments thread (as usual here). I'll hijack this post to promote this event in which I'm involved: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/creative-ai-sydney-tickets-336053002577 https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/creative-ai-sydney-tickets-3... We will be discussing this 'issue' and address many of the questions raised with academic researchers and leading industry creatives from Canva (who have been disrupting the graphic design industry for a while already), NVidia AI (who are the n#1 hardware engine behind this revolution), as well as Spotify, Warner music, Google Creative labs and others. The event is free, online or F2F in Sydney! #CreativeAI_Sydney
• neilv 4y ago
  How likely is it that someone can convince a judge that an ML-generated image is not a "creative expression" but a "mechanical translation" (or whatever distinction works)?
• darepublic 4y ago
  > I think it’s time to point out some good things about AI art. The first and biggest is that art will now be cheap and available. Taking something previously rare and valuable and making it cheap and available and showering it upon people like rolls of toilet paper doesn't bring happiness imo. It reminds me of this story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa I once read, titled 'Yam Gruel'. Basically a peasant looks forward to a yearly bowl of yam gruel which to him is precious and rare. But as a cruel joke he is invited to a dinner by a noble expressly to be served unlimited supply of yam gruel, and from then on he can never enjoy it again.
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• oldstrangers 4y ago
  I think the fear of AI art is really unfounded. Once the novelty wears off, people will learn to view it for what it is: fancy clip art. You'll see pieces by Midjourney at your local Urban Outfitters as "cool" wall art, probably on some graphic tees; just a bunch of generic junk really. It's use online will become as ubiquitous as stock photography, and you'll see the same images used everywhere and for everything. Digital art as a whole will probably be most negatively impacted, because we will view things much more negatively knowing the tools involved. I already can't enjoy anything Midjourney makes because it all looks the same. I just immediately turn my brain off when I see that signature style. Was certainly cool for a few minutes though. ShutterStock should be concerned, but artists and graphic designers don't need to worry. Just another tool.
  • tartoran 4y ago
    Absolutely this but in the short term. I had a similar thought the first time I saw the sensational results of Dall-e. It reminded me of how many times I was impressed with technology only to see it go into the background and take their place not having taken over the world how it was expected in my naive mind. But I don’t doubt this will make a large impact in the future generations. I paint and this will indeed not deter me from painting - even if to never be seem by anyone - but am not sure I would have taken to painting if I had some future version of some AI generating tool at my fingertips from an early age… I think it will become something the rich will afford rejoice in, and also the rich will most likely afford to shield their children from technology.
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    I think you're greatly underselling the potential here. Stable Diffusion and Dall-e 2 can already make some legitimately great stuff, and they're going to keep getting better. For example, here's some art from a modified Stable Diffusion model: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wkd77a https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wkd77a I don't know how you can look at this and think, "ah yes, just some more generic junk."
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• karmasimida 4y ago
  I don't think this is the case here. Creating novel assets for games is crying for automation. Capitalism had reached its limit in optimizing the efficiency in that front, that most 3A games nowadays feels like unfinished. They already hired an army of artists but still the production isn't up to speed. Some automation like DallE-2 will surely turns up the speed. I think some shuffling of work force is inevitable, but art is about idea and expression, a model can realize it but it can't come up with cohesive one on its own. So art will change, but I think it will be changed for the better
• henning 4y ago
  It always looks dreamy and surreal, which is often kind of cool. If you need specific concept art that doesn't look like Salvador Dali painted it, you're fucked. You can't just dismiss this by saying it will "disappear".
• egypturnash 4y ago
  Lots of artists are likely to lose their jobs, have trouble finding commissions, commission rates are going to be pushed down, etc. These artists will need retraining, which they’re really unlikely to get. For some, their primary method of putting food on the table will instantly become unprofitable. This will be bad for them. But that said, the economics are both obvious and uninteresting. It’s the other stuff that I’ve seen most artists talking about, and what I want to at least touch on here. I may be biased by the fact that my fucking job is the one this shit is coming for but I think the economics of this shit is very much worth talking about. If I am a musician and I sample someone’s music, I have to pay them for the privilege. But this shit is evolving prompt books chock full of the names of working artists. Why don’t they have to pay (for example) James Gurney something every time someone types “fine art painting by James Gurney” into their prompt? Why don’t they have to work out licensing deals where Gurney can say “actually I do not want your black box to spit out anything based on my work at all, none of my work has ever been Creative Commons and I never gave you any kind of license to put any of my art into your database, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer soon”? When videocassette recorders came out, the movie industry threw a fit over the prospect of home taping eating all their profits, and every blank tape you bought had a few pennies of its price go into their pockets to cover this. Maybe all of the money going into these AI tools should have a percentage diverted towards artists. How to spread that out is a problem, given that we are generally a bunch of freelance entities - maybe it’d be a good reason for me to finally join the Graphic Artist Guild if that was how that money got spread out. But if this shit is gonna eat all the cheap work then maybe a lot of its profit needs to go to subsidizing the people still trying to get to the point where they’re good enough for art to pay their bills. All this shit is in a legal grey area, where the art it’s resampling and mashing up is assumed to be free to use and quite possibly may not be. This is something people have not understood for the entire life of the internet: just because an image is posted online does not mean it’s free for you to take and make money from. This shit may technically be “sufficiently transformative” under current copyright laws but I think there are some new copyright laws that need to be made here. Also, if you are about to post a reply to me about the inevitability of progress, know that I hate you for it, and that I hope that we see a sequel to GitHub’s Copilot very very soon that makes you just as fearful for your job’s future as this one does mine.
  • 4y ago
• reilly3000 4y ago
  I quite thoroughly disagree with this doomsday outlook. I've been having a ball with watching and participating in the TikTok community's embrace of a new AI art filter. Its adoption has been massive, and I presume massively expensive to operate. That said, my chief observation is that it is a lovely idea factory and little more. There were some deeply moving pieces that got generated from some of my input prompts around neurodivergence. They weren't quite right, but still profound to me. After seeing them, I've started looking for somebody I could commission to use them as a starting point to create a real art piece, something I've never even considered before. I would approach said artist and say here is this low res image, here are some things I do and do not like about it, here's what it means to me, and here's some money. With this, I'm now engaged as a creator, curator ,collaborator, and patron in a world I'd never considered participating in. Not only do I think this creates economic opportunity for artists who would like to work in such a capacity, it also gives way to new ideas for those who would react and reject this paradigm. Technology always has had a way of breathing new life into human endeavors. Sure, horses are no longer the primary drivers of transportation and agriculture, but equestrianism is a $100 billion industry in the US, growing 5% a year with an increasingly diverse pool of participation. The cruel and commodified low end of the sector is long gone, but it remains as a passionate and vibrant field. I expect the same from AI in all the fields it touches.
• zasdffaa 4y ago
  Those pictures are a whole heck of a lot better than much art I see produced by people, including some professional artists. I'm quite happy to look at them, and that it's produced by a non-human changes nothing. I guess this, in art terms, is the post-scarcity society. Now that's arrived, it's a big problem? Hmm.
• double_nan 4y ago
  I don’t think art or artists will disappear. But what might happen could be interesting: 1. Art production will not require any special motor skills, but rather will require to be good with the natural language: neural network whispers. 2. Directors/script writer will be much closer to software developers. 3. New neutral network developers will make fortunes and eat all the profits of the current entertainment and art industries.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Basically, DALL E violated copyright of 400 million artists and photographers whose works were used in training, but because of how it was done, there is no way to sue it. The law, as always, trails the technological development.
• TulliusCicero 4y ago
  A lot of commenters here are making a very common mistake with observing any burgeoning technology: assuming that its current weaknesses will be present indefinitely. Assuming that current models' problems with, say, details and specificity, will continue on is equivalent to looking at 19th century automobiles and scoffing that they'll ever largely replace horses. Or looking at "smartphones" from the 90's and determining that they'll never see much uptake from the average consumer. AI image generation models are going to continue getting better and better and better, and the flaws we see now will get less common and less severe.
  • Planktonne 4y ago
    It's equally, if not more, utopian to assume that progress down any one route will automatically lead to the imagined pinnacle of the entire discipline. Progress isn't smooth or automatic, and we often hit dead ends, having to try new techniques to get over plateaus. It's equivalent to looking at 19th Century automobiles and asserting that they'll be able to travel to other stars by the end of the decade.
    • TulliusCicero 4y ago
      > It's equivalent to looking at 19th Century automobiles and asserting that they'll be able to travel to other stars by the end of the decade. That's not actually equivalent at all. Looking at improvements to automobiles would mean them going faster, being more reliable, etc. Space is obviously a different domain. Your analogy is like if people were suggesting that AI image generation models were going to become advanced enough to start driving cars or folding your laundry.
  • Archelaos 4y ago
    There is also this other common mistake with observing any burgeoning technology: the linear (or even exponential) extrapolation of early success into the future. Think of some technologies from fifty years ago that never realy took off, such as moon landings, super sonic passanger flights, maglev trains and (to a lesser extent) hydropneumatic suspension for cars. Instead of advancing further and further, these technologies reached plateaus and either stalled altogether or were adapted to a far lesser extent than originally anticipated. The fact that a lot of money has been poured into unsuccessful emerging technologies by very intelligent people in the past should be a warning that it may be impossible to predict the development of our current emerging complex technologies like AI beyond a few years. AI might as well soon reach a plateau -- or it might take off beyond most of us can imagine -- or something in between.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  Saying that DALL-E will leave real artists without job is the same thing as saying that GitHub Copilot will replace SWEs. Pardonable for lay people, but ridiculous whatsoever.
• wnkrshm 4y ago
  One thing that is not mentioned here or anywhere really is the human skill of illustrating what you mean as a communications tool for making art, e.g. in engineering or in world-building or cooperation on art. You sit together with people and talk about a design, you can quickly draw something and talk about that. It's an incredibly fast tool in an artistic process, you will not replicate that with text prompts.
• TulliusCicero 4y ago
  To provide some context, Stable Diffusion has some legit impressive stuff going on: Fantasy girls (modified SD model from NovelAI): https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wkd77a https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wkd77a The Rock in GTA: https://i.redd.it/9nq3xq2xpie91.png https://i.redd.it/9nq3xq2xpie91.png Fake anime: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wk53cf https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wk53cf Benedict Cumberbatch in different video games: https://i.redd.it/gg23dah9bih91.png https://i.redd.it/gg23dah9bih91.png Four stages of Elmo (NSFW: somewhat horror-y): https://i.redd.it/2qgugkwww1h91.png https://i.redd.it/2qgugkwww1h91.png
• kozikow 4y ago
  Look at music. You could have computer generate something that sounds like a pro for many years. Indistinguishable with good audio setup to non-musician ears. And yet music is probably standing stronger than ever.
  • Springtime 4y ago
    I'm guessing you mean instrumentation but that's separate than music as a whole (writing, engineering, singing (if any), etc). Would be interesting to track how studio musicians were affected by that, since it's only really their role (playing the instruments) that would have been potentially diminished. If AI were suddenly beginning to write and produce whole songs I think that would be a closer comparison to what's occurring here.
• crucialfelix 4y ago
  This process has happened before with electronic music. Musicians (and non-musicians) learned how to make music with computers and to discover new musical aesthetics. They didn't just try to replicate "real" music. After everybody gets bored and numb from all these fantasy pictures, artists will discover how to make art from latent spaces. What's encoded there is an input of human history. Many new things will arise by tweaking and distorting that history. Many new effects are discovered by playing with the machine. Things we cannot yet imagine, but one day a new style will pop out. As artists we work with the past and we work with our tools. With AI we take that to a new level. Copycat art is boring, but I'm sure we will see a lot more of it for a while.
• sam_bristow 4y ago
  The whole AI generation topic reminds me of a Roald Dahl short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"[1]. [1] https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator_(short_story) https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Gramma...
• otikik 4y ago
  I have always been bothered by the relationship between "art, the human creative endeavour" and "art, the business". On one hand the business has allowed artists to improve and grow by allowing them to spend their time on their art (instead of working on something else for at least 8 hours per day so they could eat, producing less art and of less quality) On the other hand, the fact that artists depends on their art doing well finantially in order to sustain themselves must have conditioned their output. The link between "art that sells well" and "art that is actually good" is ... unproven, at best. This could be an apocalypse, but it could be a good thing as well. Perhaps we do need art that isn't "businessy".
  • krapp 4y ago
    >The link between "art that sells well" and "art that is actually good" is ... unproven, at best. All of the classical works of art people consider "actually good" were done under patronage. The Sistene Chapel ceiling wasn't painted for love or passion or charity. Art and commerce have always been linked, for the simple reason that art takes time, effort and resources which need to be compensated for, so the artist can eat, afford housing or put food on the table. The "starving artist" archetype (and related belief that artists need to suffer to keep their art pure) is a romantic, exploitative fantasy, like that of the "mad genius" linking mental and emotional illness to creativity and insight, and unfortunately common. When AI puts all of the amateur and working artists out of work, they're not going to decide en masse to just stick it out for free, they're just going to quit. You're not going to get more, better art, you're going to get less of any kind of art that isn't machine-generated, because that's how the markets will optimize.
• songeater 4y ago
  I know that image generation with the latest models (DALL-E2, Stable Diffusion) has really captured collective attention as being mind-blowing. But as someone who has been working with ML-based audio/music generation [1]... continue to think that what Jukebox did with making songs is another level altogether. Yes its not as user-friendly or approachable (hence harder to dissipate to general use)... but I feel like that space is where image-generation/mods were 5+ years ago with generic style-transfer models... can't wait for Jukebox 2 (or similar) to come out with higher fidelity. I absolutely dont see Jukebox as "taking over/replacing" music... like all ML/AI models... it is yet another tool. "Learning to use Jukebox" (or DALL-E or StableDiffusion) is like "learning to play the guitar/learning to paint"... no need to be afraid. [1] https://songshtr.github.io https://songshtr.github.io
  • p1esk 4y ago
    How do you explain zero progress in raw audio based music generation since Jukebox paper? In the last two years we've seen huge progress in both NLP and image generation, but not in music.
    • songeater 4y ago
      in my opinion (again I'm a user / not a developer) feel like the data/computing/training requirements are MUCH higher. Think about the RGB values / pixel in an image vs raw audio waveform.... just takes more $$$. Let me see if I can find a note where someone calculated the cost to train Jukebox... was definitely in tens of millions.
      • p1esk 4y ago
        According to the paper, Jukebox was trained for approximately 7 weeks on 512 V100 GPUs. That's ~300k per training run assuming $0.5/hr/GPU. Obviously you need several runs to experiment with, so I'm guessing 1-2M to develop something similar. But sure, for a much larger Jukebox-2 it could be 10x more. Still, OpenAI has plenty of funding, so it's either they don't see much value in developing it further, or they can't improve it. I'm surprised that no one else does either. For example, with GPT models every big AI lab started to compete trying to outdo each other. Same is happening now with DALL-E. But no one has tried to train a Jukebox successor.
• PsySecGroup 4y ago
• nCave 4y ago
  The elephant in the room with all of these big AI models is whether we continue to allow any entity to scrape individuals' data off the internet and use it in the development of their software without any consideration to the rights of the owner of the data. Just because there isn't a perfect 1:1 copy of the data in their released software, doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that this data--which they do not have rights to--is critical for the development of their software. Many people are conflating this issue with the copyright of the software output (i.e., "you can't copyright a style"). But many artists are rightfully angry that their creative products, which they own the rights to, are being used as a critical component in the development of someone else's software and they have no say in it. They also have no recourse to get their data removed from the development chain. This is not a new problem, of course. But with the image generators it's become more explicit about how the output relates to the input: "Give me a painting of a clock by Salvador Dali". I think in terms of data usage rights, we need to consider the inputs of these models and not just the outputs. Data laundering through AI is only going to get worse.
• greenhearth 4y ago
  Don't know too much about AI image generation, but wouldn't there be gatekeepers still needed to see if these images work for the desired purpose and are up to a certain quality? The final sign-off can only be given by a human, and this human necessarily has to be aesthetically intelligent and theoretically sound, very viable and desired skills. From what I've seen so far, AI "art" sucks. And I'm not talking about fake/real. It's just crap, as far as my opinion is concerned.
• cvigoe 4y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if what happened in underground music scenes will happen in the visual arts: a lot of pioneering electronic music (eg techno & house) exists completely off of the internet and is only available on vinyl (or on digital if you happen to be extremely lucky and know the producer). A lot of underground producers exclusively release on vinyl because they want their music to reach a smaller audience, remain in club spaces and collected by thoughtful curators. If generative ML requires data to catch on to new trends, then it seems reasonable that many visual artists might try copy the path of underground music producers and keep all their work completely offline.