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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

by 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.
      - fogx 4y ago
        image-to-text models for captioning already exist. The most common one is CLIP from openAI. https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/ Jina AI has an out-of-the-box implementation for it https://clip-as-service.jina.ai/ https://clip-as-service.jina.ai/
  - syntheweave 4y ago
    I see it playing out this way too. Technology at societal scale is "and" not "or", and computers have long been cast in the scapegoat role because of a basic principle that is not unique to them, but is made all the more clear by their existence: it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast. When sampled digital audio first appeared in music, it went from experimental to pop hook(e.g. Paul Hardcastle "Nineteen") and then to the subject of court cases that clarified IP law for samples over the span of maybe 20 years. In the middle of that period one can find scare pieces about pit orchestras being replaced by synthesizers and so forth. The articles tend to be correct in that the same jobs don't exist when they get automated, but you get new jobs instead. And so the panic, where it exists, is tied to whether you specifically are on the chopping block. For digital illustrators who are focused on a high degree of finish and polish, AI art threatens because it's so good at replication of a high-effort stylistic mode of production. Cartoonists are much less impressed since they are already in a streamlined, symbolic mode, so the net savings of AI is harder to come by. With a few years of traditional training, most of it just focused on the core "you can draw what you see" skill, you have what you need to build up a library of reusable visual language for your work: an arm seen from various angles is still an arm, you can add more anatomy to it or stylize it, but it has a symbolic function tied to particular shapes. And an AI can bring out more detail from the symbol, just as when an artist follows a reference more closely and renders it more carefully, but it isn't creating novel representation. That's still coming from the illustrator operating symbolically. And when you lean into that, it's like, OK: presumably the AI will be able to do some style transfer and turn a crude cartoon into a fancy painting. That levels the playing field a lot but it doesn't change the nature of what makes an illustration good: having a sense of composition, storytelling and so forth. A lot of cultural context things are in there that will evade automation.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Vinyl has come back for a variety of reasons, but digital abundance is one of the lesser reasons. - Potentially superior quality to algorithmically destroyed dynamics, but this is truly on a per-case scenario. - Exclusive content not on streaming platforms, either intentionally, or because labels or artists are dead and gone, or the IP is in limbo. - Directly supporting artists because streaming platforms pay a pittance. - Elitism/snobbery. Whether professionally, within a fanbase, as an influencer, in an audiophile community, whichever. - The community/culture. People love to belong, never underestimate the importance of that. - USP. - Distribution to actual brick-and-mortar stores where you'll get in front of tastemakers and influencers. - DJ culture is huge, particularly vinyl-only nights where they want to show their skills without hitting the sync button. - It makes a great gift and people like to put them on display as adults in place of posters. - People take comfort in disconnecting and doing a physical ritual, just like tea ceremonies in Japan. - Listening bars are important in Japan. To anybody reading, if you're ever in the position to do so, I implore you to check one out. - One of the few ways to own some music in the long-term. I could go on for another 100+ points before reaching "digital abundance".
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      It should be noted that many of your points are already hit by "buying digital music instead of using streaming platforms". Those points are important to me, yet I’d never buy a vinyl.
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        It honestly depends. I can name quite literally hundreds of digital releases that are objectively, measurably worse than their vinyl counterpart. Anecdotal. It doesn't matter if you yourself would never buy a vinyl, what matters is that a lot of other people are. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you would never buy a supercar/helicopter/Breitling/Rolex/swimming pool/jetski/yacht/vegan food/meat/gluten-free/keto-friendly/whatever, because others are.
        Semaphor 4y ago
karpierz 4y ago
> 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. So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code. The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.
- johnfn 4y ago
  Saying "The artist's job is to elicit emotion" is such a broad statement that it stops being a meaningful lens to look at the world and draw conclusions from. If you say that, then you say that a painter is the same as a cinematographer, or a fine chef, or a therapist, or my family. The conversation that this blog post brings up is about the very precise boundary of people who create art through static visual mediums. Saying that their job is the same as a cinematographer - when a professional artist has probably spent ten thousand hours learning to draw, and virtually zero on film, is meaningless.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  I’m a professional artist and while this is true to an extent, most of my job - and a lot of what I enjoy about it - is “drawing”. Running a thousand prompts through an AI black box sounds infinitely tedious compared to drawing stuff. I don’t want to live in that world.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Don't worry, you won't have to. AI-generated images aren't possible to copyright, and as they're all derived from existing sources (read: plagiarized), you're not going to be replaced any time soon.
    - astrange 4y ago
      They're not necessarily plagiarized anymore than a human artist plagiarizes from looking at an existing image. If you accepted this, Disney would basically own every animation ever made. StableDiffusion is a 10GB model made from 100TB of images, so there probably isn't even room to have memorized inputs - there's also some built-in defenses against that. It's possible to make an AI that does explicitly make collages out of inputs (that goes under "fine tuning") and such a thing would be useful. OpenAI has a similar paper about a text AI that cites its sources called WebGPT.

by johnfn 4y ago

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.
    - fogx 4y ago
      image-to-text models for captioning already exist. The most common one is CLIP from openAI. https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/ Jina AI has an out-of-the-box implementation for it https://clip-as-service.jina.ai/ https://clip-as-service.jina.ai/
- syntheweave 4y ago
  I see it playing out this way too. Technology at societal scale is "and" not "or", and computers have long been cast in the scapegoat role because of a basic principle that is not unique to them, but is made all the more clear by their existence: it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast. When sampled digital audio first appeared in music, it went from experimental to pop hook(e.g. Paul Hardcastle "Nineteen") and then to the subject of court cases that clarified IP law for samples over the span of maybe 20 years. In the middle of that period one can find scare pieces about pit orchestras being replaced by synthesizers and so forth. The articles tend to be correct in that the same jobs don't exist when they get automated, but you get new jobs instead. And so the panic, where it exists, is tied to whether you specifically are on the chopping block. For digital illustrators who are focused on a high degree of finish and polish, AI art threatens because it's so good at replication of a high-effort stylistic mode of production. Cartoonists are much less impressed since they are already in a streamlined, symbolic mode, so the net savings of AI is harder to come by. With a few years of traditional training, most of it just focused on the core "you can draw what you see" skill, you have what you need to build up a library of reusable visual language for your work: an arm seen from various angles is still an arm, you can add more anatomy to it or stylize it, but it has a symbolic function tied to particular shapes. And an AI can bring out more detail from the symbol, just as when an artist follows a reference more closely and renders it more carefully, but it isn't creating novel representation. That's still coming from the illustrator operating symbolically. And when you lean into that, it's like, OK: presumably the AI will be able to do some style transfer and turn a crude cartoon into a fancy painting. That levels the playing field a lot but it doesn't change the nature of what makes an illustration good: having a sense of composition, storytelling and so forth. A lot of cultural context things are in there that will evade automation.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Vinyl has come back for a variety of reasons, but digital abundance is one of the lesser reasons. - Potentially superior quality to algorithmically destroyed dynamics, but this is truly on a per-case scenario. - Exclusive content not on streaming platforms, either intentionally, or because labels or artists are dead and gone, or the IP is in limbo. - Directly supporting artists because streaming platforms pay a pittance. - Elitism/snobbery. Whether professionally, within a fanbase, as an influencer, in an audiophile community, whichever. - The community/culture. People love to belong, never underestimate the importance of that. - USP. - Distribution to actual brick-and-mortar stores where you'll get in front of tastemakers and influencers. - DJ culture is huge, particularly vinyl-only nights where they want to show their skills without hitting the sync button. - It makes a great gift and people like to put them on display as adults in place of posters. - People take comfort in disconnecting and doing a physical ritual, just like tea ceremonies in Japan. - Listening bars are important in Japan. To anybody reading, if you're ever in the position to do so, I implore you to check one out. - One of the few ways to own some music in the long-term. I could go on for another 100+ points before reaching "digital abundance".
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    It should be noted that many of your points are already hit by "buying digital music instead of using streaming platforms". Those points are important to me, yet I’d never buy a vinyl.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      It honestly depends. I can name quite literally hundreds of digital releases that are objectively, measurably worse than their vinyl counterpart. Anecdotal. It doesn't matter if you yourself would never buy a vinyl, what matters is that a lot of other people are. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you would never buy a supercar/helicopter/Breitling/Rolex/swimming pool/jetski/yacht/vegan food/meat/gluten-free/keto-friendly/whatever, because others are.
      - Semaphor 4y ago

karpierz 4y ago

> 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. So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code. The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.

johnfn 4y ago
Saying "The artist's job is to elicit emotion" is such a broad statement that it stops being a meaningful lens to look at the world and draw conclusions from. If you say that, then you say that a painter is the same as a cinematographer, or a fine chef, or a therapist, or my family. The conversation that this blog post brings up is about the very precise boundary of people who create art through static visual mediums. Saying that their job is the same as a cinematographer - when a professional artist has probably spent ten thousand hours learning to draw, and virtually zero on film, is meaningless.
egypturnash 4y ago
I’m a professional artist and while this is true to an extent, most of my job - and a lot of what I enjoy about it - is “drawing”. Running a thousand prompts through an AI black box sounds infinitely tedious compared to drawing stuff. I don’t want to live in that world.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Don't worry, you won't have to. AI-generated images aren't possible to copyright, and as they're all derived from existing sources (read: plagiarized), you're not going to be replaced any time soon.
  - astrange 4y ago
    They're not necessarily plagiarized anymore than a human artist plagiarizes from looking at an existing image. If you accepted this, Disney would basically own every animation ever made. StableDiffusion is a 10GB model made from 100TB of images, so there probably isn't even room to have memorized inputs - there's also some built-in defenses against that. It's possible to make an AI that does explicitly make collages out of inputs (that goes under "fine tuning") and such a thing would be useful. OpenAI has a similar paper about a text AI that cites its sources called WebGPT.