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> 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 ha

> 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.

johnfn 4y ago
> 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. I don't know. As Wait But Why likes to say, cars sure did put horses out of business, pretty much thoroughly and permanently.
- astrange 4y ago
  Artists aren't horses because artists are actually intentionally participating in the economy. Horses just want to do horse stuff and don't particularly have any desire to be employed by carriage drivers.
  - johnfn 4y ago
    I don't really see what the difference is. If I want to intentionally participate in the economy by dragging a carriage with people in it around in exchange for money, no one is going to employ me because my services are obviously inferior to those that a car can provide. Similarly, perhaps artists will wish to participate in the economy by making art, but they're going to find scanty employment when compared with machines which can operate 100x faster than they can, and arguably at a higher quality of output.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Well, what I mean is the horses and carriages aren’t even produced anymore since we don’t want them, and they didn’t do anything to make themselves useful again, not being sentient. The human beings previously called artists will still be around as humans and will still have jobs, even if it’s some other job. “Artist” is a vague term though, and I think we’d still have a lot of them due to Jevons’ paradox, the same way ATM machines have actually caused the number of bank tellers to increase. Especially because it’s high-status for society to say they support artists, which isn’t the case for other service workers like bank tellers. There is a niche for horse rides, though - they’re romantic and I’ve seen them as tourist gimmicks in different cities. Artists have a bigger niche, as AI art (so far) produces digital images and not, say, physical sculpture or paintings.
      - personalidea 4y ago
        Exactly. Which is why Vinyl sales have grown, because of the digital abundance analog scarcity is attractive. This whole debate reminds me of the early aughts, when digital music was said to kill all music. I predict a similar development here too. Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit.
        indigochill 4y ago
        > Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit. And some of them are already doing that. In Peter Mohrbacher's latest newsletter he shared a digital painting which was started by Disco Diffusion which he then touched up to give it his characteristic look. Given the details and feel of the painting were unmistakably his, I wouldn't have guessed that the base of the image was AI-generated.
        astrange 4y ago
        It'll be good for accessibility too; if you can make a text-to-image model then you can make an image-to-text model, and now you have a screen reader.
dahfizz 4y ago
> DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up. It moves artists so far "up the stack" that being an artist becomes redundant. If C-level execs could just ask their computer to generate the exact website they wanted, there would be a lot less web devs out there. Tools allow _skilled professionals_ to do their job better. The existence of GCC doesn't make the average Joe a programmer; it makes programmers more productive. DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists. DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers.
- karpierz 4y ago
  > DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists. The same way Wordpress obviates the need for web devs. > DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers. Always 10 years away from replacing them?
  - tschwimmer 4y ago
    Like many iterative technologies, Wordpress had the right idea with clunky, underdeveloped execution. Nevertheless it was wildly successful but the way that it works often requires some web development (or at least technical administration). Wix and Squarespace (the spiritual successors to Wordpress) however have undoubtedly put lots (most?) contract WebDevs out of business. There are still plenty around - go check Fiverr or UpWork. However it's impossible to argue that these tools haven't made it easier for non-web devs to build a fully-featured and beautiful site for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. It used to be that these no-code site builders all looked crappy and cookie cutter but in the past few years they've really upped the quality of their templates such that they often are indistinguishable from a "handmade" landing page. I think the path is likely to be similar for these AI image and text generators.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Depends on what kind of complexity a website requires. Predominantly static portfolio or a website with basic ecommerce functions? Sure. Custom internal workflow and lots of externally interactive stuff with an API? Yeah, you're not going to be served well by Wix or Squarespace. Different tools for different tasks. It's silly to compare a website for the local salon with a platform/utility/tool/whatever.
sailingparrot 4y ago
> Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up That’s a terrible analogy. Compilers didn’t put devs out of business because it still would takes months of learning before someone that needs a program made could leverage a compiler to do basic things. So they hire devs. It takes 0 hours of learning before someone that want a nice illustration made for them can do it with dalle/midjourney. Why would they hire anyone to do it ? Some people are going to say prompt engineering is a new skill, but I bet that prompt engineering is going to disappear as fast as it arrived as we build more practical ways of exploring the image space.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Has anyone connected one of these models to zork or planetfall yet?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    no, but I've used some descriptions as prompts (mostly on Craiyon) and got quite acceptable results. Plain descriptors like how you are standing in an open field to the west of a white house, with a small mailbox visible produced multiple usable candidates (if you didn't mind some quirky impressionism). 'A maze of twisty little passages, all alike' gave me all 2d mazes, but adding '3d first person, photorealistic' gave some entertainingly weird choices.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- OJFord 4y ago
  The good images come from detailed prompts, it requires creativity, visualising what you want out of it. I think anyone writing a prompt and getting what they want out of it (vs. something surreal and hilarious for its unexpected whackiness, at least while the novelty lasts) is 'doing art', just as a photographer chooses a subject and frames a shot.
  - sailingparrot 4y ago

johnfn 4y ago

> 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. I don't know. As Wait But Why likes to say, cars sure did put horses out of business, pretty much thoroughly and permanently.

astrange 4y ago
Artists aren't horses because artists are actually intentionally participating in the economy. Horses just want to do horse stuff and don't particularly have any desire to be employed by carriage drivers.
- johnfn 4y ago
  I don't really see what the difference is. If I want to intentionally participate in the economy by dragging a carriage with people in it around in exchange for money, no one is going to employ me because my services are obviously inferior to those that a car can provide. Similarly, perhaps artists will wish to participate in the economy by making art, but they're going to find scanty employment when compared with machines which can operate 100x faster than they can, and arguably at a higher quality of output.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Well, what I mean is the horses and carriages aren’t even produced anymore since we don’t want them, and they didn’t do anything to make themselves useful again, not being sentient. The human beings previously called artists will still be around as humans and will still have jobs, even if it’s some other job. “Artist” is a vague term though, and I think we’d still have a lot of them due to Jevons’ paradox, the same way ATM machines have actually caused the number of bank tellers to increase. Especially because it’s high-status for society to say they support artists, which isn’t the case for other service workers like bank tellers. There is a niche for horse rides, though - they’re romantic and I’ve seen them as tourist gimmicks in different cities. Artists have a bigger niche, as AI art (so far) produces digital images and not, say, physical sculpture or paintings.
    - personalidea 4y ago
      Exactly. Which is why Vinyl sales have grown, because of the digital abundance analog scarcity is attractive. This whole debate reminds me of the early aughts, when digital music was said to kill all music. I predict a similar development here too. Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit.
      - indigochill 4y ago
        > Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit. And some of them are already doing that. In Peter Mohrbacher's latest newsletter he shared a digital painting which was started by Disco Diffusion which he then touched up to give it his characteristic look. Given the details and feel of the painting were unmistakably his, I wouldn't have guessed that the base of the image was AI-generated.
        astrange 4y ago
        It'll be good for accessibility too; if you can make a text-to-image model then you can make an image-to-text model, and now you have a screen reader.

dahfizz 4y ago

> DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up. It moves artists so far "up the stack" that being an artist becomes redundant. If C-level execs could just ask their computer to generate the exact website they wanted, there would be a lot less web devs out there. Tools allow _skilled professionals_ to do their job better. The existence of GCC doesn't make the average Joe a programmer; it makes programmers more productive. DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists. DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers.

karpierz 4y ago
> DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists. The same way Wordpress obviates the need for web devs. > DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers. Always 10 years away from replacing them?
- tschwimmer 4y ago
  Like many iterative technologies, Wordpress had the right idea with clunky, underdeveloped execution. Nevertheless it was wildly successful but the way that it works often requires some web development (or at least technical administration). Wix and Squarespace (the spiritual successors to Wordpress) however have undoubtedly put lots (most?) contract WebDevs out of business. There are still plenty around - go check Fiverr or UpWork. However it's impossible to argue that these tools haven't made it easier for non-web devs to build a fully-featured and beautiful site for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. It used to be that these no-code site builders all looked crappy and cookie cutter but in the past few years they've really upped the quality of their templates such that they often are indistinguishable from a "handmade" landing page. I think the path is likely to be similar for these AI image and text generators.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Depends on what kind of complexity a website requires. Predominantly static portfolio or a website with basic ecommerce functions? Sure. Custom internal workflow and lots of externally interactive stuff with an API? Yeah, you're not going to be served well by Wix or Squarespace. Different tools for different tasks. It's silly to compare a website for the local salon with a platform/utility/tool/whatever.

sailingparrot 4y ago

> Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up That’s a terrible analogy. Compilers didn’t put devs out of business because it still would takes months of learning before someone that needs a program made could leverage a compiler to do basic things. So they hire devs. It takes 0 hours of learning before someone that want a nice illustration made for them can do it with dalle/midjourney. Why would they hire anyone to do it ? Some people are going to say prompt engineering is a new skill, but I bet that prompt engineering is going to disappear as fast as it arrived as we build more practical ways of exploring the image space.

galangalalgol 4y ago
Has anyone connected one of these models to zork or planetfall yet?
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  no, but I've used some descriptions as prompts (mostly on Craiyon) and got quite acceptable results. Plain descriptors like how you are standing in an open field to the west of a white house, with a small mailbox visible produced multiple usable candidates (if you didn't mind some quirky impressionism). 'A maze of twisty little passages, all alike' gave me all 2d mazes, but adding '3d first person, photorealistic' gave some entertainingly weird choices.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
OJFord 4y ago
The good images come from detailed prompts, it requires creativity, visualising what you want out of it. I think anyone writing a prompt and getting what they want out of it (vs. something surreal and hilarious for its unexpected whackiness, at least while the novelty lasts) is 'doing art', just as a photographer chooses a subject and frames a shot.
- sailingparrot 4y ago