6 ms·

Yeah, the fact that these models are necessarily based on existing works leaves me hopeful that humans will remain the leaders in this space for the time being.

BobbyJo 4y ago
Humans are trained on other humans' work as well though. Is there a type of ideological or aesthetic exploration that can't be expressed as part of an AI model?
soulofmischief 4y ago
Human works are needed to create the initial datasets, but an increasing amount of models use generative feedback loops to create more training data. This layer can easily introduce novel styles and concepts without further human input. The time is coming where we will need to, as patrons, reevaluate our relationships with art. I fear art is returning to a patronage model, at least for now, as certainly an industry which already massively exploits digital artists will be more than happy to replace them with 25% worse performing AI for 100% less cost.
- quadcore 4y ago
  The generated pictures that are posted in the blog post are superior than the average artist work. Which isnt surprising, AI corrects "human mistake" (e.g. composition, colors, contrasts, lines, etc) easily.
- archagon 4y ago
  Why would people want to consume art that says nothing and means nothing? While this technology is fascinating, it produces the visual equivalent of muzak, and will continue to do so in perpetuity without the ability to reason.
  - jmfldn 4y ago
    That's the problem for me too. This tech is cool for games, stock images etc but for actual art it's pretty meaningless. The artist's experience, biography and relationship with the world and how that feeds into their work is the WHOLE point for me. I want to engage, via any real artistic product, with a lived human experience. Human consciousness in other words. To me this technology is very clever but it's meaningless as far as real art goes, or it's a sideshow at best. Perhaps best case, it can augment a human artistic practice.
    - visarga 4y ago
      It's easy to generate believable backstory. A large LM comes to write the bio of the "artist" and even a few press interviews. If you like you can chat with it, and of course request art to specification. You can even keep it as a digital companion. So you can extend the realism of the game as much as you like.
    - Yntec 4y ago
      Oh, nice take! Reminds me of the chess world, long time ago chess entities that could beat any human in the world have existed, people wouldn't play them because losing all the time was boring. But then came the neural network chess engines (powered by the same training technology of text to images generators), which even people enjoyed playing for some time due to novelty and how they learned how to play from scratch (Alpha Zero, Lc0, et al.) In the process to get there, we got networks of all kinds of strengths, you could find one exactly as strong as you, and its mistakes were like the mistakes you would make. And yet, they were missing the "human factor", people would rather play against other humans online, some even willing to pay for accounts in places like playchess and chess.com to play other humans. As the networks became stronger and then stockfish assimilated them to get the best of both worlds with NNUE, nobody cared and there was even an explosion of human vs. human chess (when twitch.tv and youtube stars were playing each other and the audience didn't even care how bad the chess was, it turned out that it held up as a great spectacle despite, or thanks to the stars being novices - and the race to get better at chess.) Now chess bots are just a curiosity and only used by people without online access to other humans, I wonder if it'll be the same for art, and if "show your work" becomes a thing. You can ask an AI to produce a great picture... now try asking it to make a video of you making that art from scratch and the creative process - the whole art section of twitch tv is about the artist's process, and yes, there'S some people that get enough from that to dedicate all their time to their art.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    How much is really being said by the highest dollar-valued modern music? https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ and https://youtu.be/L2cfxv8Pq-Q https://youtu.be/L2cfxv8Pq-Q come to mind for different reasons.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    We can tell the difference between muzak and "real music"; we just dislike the muzak. But the real risk and likelihood is that we get to the point that AI will be generating art that is indistinguishable from human-generated art, and it's only muzak if someone subscribes to the idea that the content of art is less relevant than its provenance. Some people will, particularly rich people who use art as a status signifier/money laundering vehicle, but mass media artists will struggle to find buyers among the less discerning mass audience.
  - buildartefact 4y ago
    Marvel Studios makes billions of dollars every year
    - archagon 4y ago
      And I'm fairly confident in saying that AI will never be able to generate a Marvel movie! (Not in our lifetimes, anyway.)
      - optimalsolver 4y ago
        Considering the phenomenal progression of Dall-E-1 to Dall-E-2 in just over a year, I'm not really understanding your confidence on the limits of AI content generation.
        archagon 4y ago
        An AI would need to generate: * Coherent video * Characters with backstory * Dialogue (including jokes and witty banter) * Music ...among many other things. Plus, the training set for video is orders of magnitude smaller than for digital art. (And is additionally burdened with copyright issues.) As I see it, there's simply no path from the DALL-E of today to something like that. And all for art that, essentially, "says nothing and means nothing".
        danielbln 4y ago
        Check out https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo - progress is being made on coherent video generation. Characters and dialogue are effectively solved, just look at GPT-3. The entity behind StableDiffusion is also supporting generative music art, so let's see what is coming out of that: https://www.harmonai.org/ https://www.harmonai.org/ We are currently far away from generating a production quality movie with AI, but I don't think it's going to be nearly as long as a lifetime. In my opinion, we'll have high quality AI shorts within the decade.
        4y ago
  - robocat 4y ago
    Can photography be good art? Is Marcel Duchamp (found object) art? Can good art be discovered almost serendipitously, or can good art only be created by slowly learning and applying a skill? I think art is mostly about perception and selection, by the viewer. There are others that think art is more about the crafting process by the artist. How do you tell the difference between an artist and a craftsperson? One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875 Disclaimer: I am engineer.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  For those who are lucky enough to make it, I foresee patronage as being much more stable than making art to sell to the masses/corporate ad contracts.

BobbyJo 4y ago

Humans are trained on other humans' work as well though. Is there a type of ideological or aesthetic exploration that can't be expressed as part of an AI model?

soulofmischief 4y ago

Human works are needed to create the initial datasets, but an increasing amount of models use generative feedback loops to create more training data. This layer can easily introduce novel styles and concepts without further human input. The time is coming where we will need to, as patrons, reevaluate our relationships with art. I fear art is returning to a patronage model, at least for now, as certainly an industry which already massively exploits digital artists will be more than happy to replace them with 25% worse performing AI for 100% less cost.

quadcore 4y ago
The generated pictures that are posted in the blog post are superior than the average artist work. Which isnt surprising, AI corrects "human mistake" (e.g. composition, colors, contrasts, lines, etc) easily.
archagon 4y ago
Why would people want to consume art that says nothing and means nothing? While this technology is fascinating, it produces the visual equivalent of muzak, and will continue to do so in perpetuity without the ability to reason.
- jmfldn 4y ago
  That's the problem for me too. This tech is cool for games, stock images etc but for actual art it's pretty meaningless. The artist's experience, biography and relationship with the world and how that feeds into their work is the WHOLE point for me. I want to engage, via any real artistic product, with a lived human experience. Human consciousness in other words. To me this technology is very clever but it's meaningless as far as real art goes, or it's a sideshow at best. Perhaps best case, it can augment a human artistic practice.
  - visarga 4y ago
    It's easy to generate believable backstory. A large LM comes to write the bio of the "artist" and even a few press interviews. If you like you can chat with it, and of course request art to specification. You can even keep it as a digital companion. So you can extend the realism of the game as much as you like.
  - Yntec 4y ago
    Oh, nice take! Reminds me of the chess world, long time ago chess entities that could beat any human in the world have existed, people wouldn't play them because losing all the time was boring. But then came the neural network chess engines (powered by the same training technology of text to images generators), which even people enjoyed playing for some time due to novelty and how they learned how to play from scratch (Alpha Zero, Lc0, et al.) In the process to get there, we got networks of all kinds of strengths, you could find one exactly as strong as you, and its mistakes were like the mistakes you would make. And yet, they were missing the "human factor", people would rather play against other humans online, some even willing to pay for accounts in places like playchess and chess.com to play other humans. As the networks became stronger and then stockfish assimilated them to get the best of both worlds with NNUE, nobody cared and there was even an explosion of human vs. human chess (when twitch.tv and youtube stars were playing each other and the audience didn't even care how bad the chess was, it turned out that it held up as a great spectacle despite, or thanks to the stars being novices - and the race to get better at chess.) Now chess bots are just a curiosity and only used by people without online access to other humans, I wonder if it'll be the same for art, and if "show your work" becomes a thing. You can ask an AI to produce a great picture... now try asking it to make a video of you making that art from scratch and the creative process - the whole art section of twitch tv is about the artist's process, and yes, there'S some people that get enough from that to dedicate all their time to their art.
- ben_w 4y ago
  How much is really being said by the highest dollar-valued modern music? https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ and https://youtu.be/L2cfxv8Pq-Q https://youtu.be/L2cfxv8Pq-Q come to mind for different reasons.
- scarmig 4y ago
  We can tell the difference between muzak and "real music"; we just dislike the muzak. But the real risk and likelihood is that we get to the point that AI will be generating art that is indistinguishable from human-generated art, and it's only muzak if someone subscribes to the idea that the content of art is less relevant than its provenance. Some people will, particularly rich people who use art as a status signifier/money laundering vehicle, but mass media artists will struggle to find buyers among the less discerning mass audience.
- buildartefact 4y ago
  Marvel Studios makes billions of dollars every year
  - archagon 4y ago
    And I'm fairly confident in saying that AI will never be able to generate a Marvel movie! (Not in our lifetimes, anyway.)
    - optimalsolver 4y ago
      Considering the phenomenal progression of Dall-E-1 to Dall-E-2 in just over a year, I'm not really understanding your confidence on the limits of AI content generation.
      - archagon 4y ago
        An AI would need to generate: * Coherent video * Characters with backstory * Dialogue (including jokes and witty banter) * Music ...among many other things. Plus, the training set for video is orders of magnitude smaller than for digital art. (And is additionally burdened with copyright issues.) As I see it, there's simply no path from the DALL-E of today to something like that. And all for art that, essentially, "says nothing and means nothing".
        danielbln 4y ago
        Check out https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo - progress is being made on coherent video generation. Characters and dialogue are effectively solved, just look at GPT-3. The entity behind StableDiffusion is also supporting generative music art, so let's see what is coming out of that: https://www.harmonai.org/ https://www.harmonai.org/ We are currently far away from generating a production quality movie with AI, but I don't think it's going to be nearly as long as a lifetime. In my opinion, we'll have high quality AI shorts within the decade.
        4y ago
- robocat 4y ago
  Can photography be good art? Is Marcel Duchamp (found object) art? Can good art be discovered almost serendipitously, or can good art only be created by slowly learning and applying a skill? I think art is mostly about perception and selection, by the viewer. There are others that think art is more about the crafting process by the artist. How do you tell the difference between an artist and a craftsperson? One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875 Disclaimer: I am engineer.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
For those who are lucky enough to make it, I foresee patronage as being much more stable than making art to sell to the masses/corporate ad contracts.