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Why DALL-E will not steal my job as an illustrator

120 points by sizzle 4y ago

plasticbugs 4y ago
*yet
- sizzle 4y ago
  yeah the generated examples were somewhat decent, with a few more iterations I can see it matching some turing-complete form that clients will pay for.
yrgulation 4y ago
“softwares” do improve over time. so while it may not steal your job it willower the entry barrier. so your income will likely drop significantly once the tech matures.
- soperj 4y ago
  they addressed that in the article.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    +1. i would downvote or delete my comment if i could. i stopped at “softwares”. shouldnt have.
larodi 4y ago
Why I don’t care about it stealing or not you job - because it does get me what I need without having to go the all the lint story how special illustrators work is.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  They came for the X but I was not an X…
  - version_five 4y ago
    You appear to be trying to Godwin a discussion about automated picture drawing... even accounting for how your carelessly your analogy normally gets used, I'd say you're reaching
    - ok_dad 4y ago
      You appear to have taken my intent wrongly. I meant that eventually this tech may come for us super special developers, too, in some aspect. I could imagine one good developer doing the work of several once code models are perfected. The commenter I replied to had zero respect for the effects this tech might have on real humans.
- bitmover 4y ago
  I’m always suprised by the disdain on HN for artists, like really? Paying an artist a living wage is what’s wrong with the world today?
  - xoz 4y ago
    It's not disdain for artists. It's the notion that artists' works are inherently valuable or worthy of a 'living wage'. They are unfortunately not, nor is anyone's labor inherently valuable.
  - version_five 4y ago
    There is not some universal right to get paid for things you like to do. Pay is a transaction between someone who wants something and someone who can provide it. I once saw a Ted Talk by a busker who was a mime or something and was calling what they do "work" (and was complaining about people who didn't respect that). I found it ridiculous because effectively they are a beggar, they are doing what they want to do and hoping someone gives them money, and in some cases, feeling entitled to it. I think it's this perception of entitlement (real or imagined) that rubs people the wrong way about artists, at least ones complaining about not getting paid. If you want someone to give you money, do something people want. The universe doesn't owe you a business model. Along the same lines, weavers and scribes and travel agents and a million other professions have moved on. Automating low value art is not any different, nobody owes you anything.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      > a busker who was a mime or something and was calling what they do "work" How is it not work? I mean, they are providing a service and then wanting money. The money is provided after the service and 100% voluntary, but does that make it less of a job than a waiter with a base pay of $2.15 an hour? That guaranteed $4,300 a year separates a job from a not-job?
  - Kalium 4y ago
    If I want a bit of clip art for a presentation or stock image for a website, is it disdainful to say it's irrelevant to me if it was made by a living human or a computer? I want the thing. An artist getting paid is a means to an end for this purpose. To you and others, the artist getting paid might be the end. That's fine for you, but I may not have reason to care.
- rvz 4y ago
  "It doesn't affect my job yet because I'm not an artist, so I don't care". Yet, we see managers at software companies off-shoring for cheap contractor coding sweatshops in the South East of the world and on the site, which HNers here see that as a 'problem' and is hated on. Well guess what? Copilot will make it worse and will have cheap software shops generating code / project templates and getting more for less rather than employing an expensive full time typical western software engineer. Open source will just accelerate the drive down against closed source alternatives as well. The start of the race to the bottom, Then it would be a problem for software engineers, software companies, etc. Open source alternatives is already eating itself and closed-source alternative and tools like Copilot used by contractors will just accelerate this much quicker. That would then be your problem.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  You seem to be replying to the headline in a knee-jerk manner. The article tries to communicate that the natural language is inherently poor at giving directions for artistic work. It's a valuable observation by an expert, and as someone who studies arts as a hobby I absolutely agree. Text-to-image isn't going to change anything on its own; higher order tools are needed.
Malcx 4y ago
I posted my experience in another thread a few weeks ago. No, it's not ready to wholesale replace human illustrators, but it's certainly nipping at their heels. https://malcx.com/blog/I-too-made-a-logo-using-AI-generated-images-MidJourney-rather-than-Dall-E-2.html https://malcx.com/blog/I-too-made-a-logo-using-AI-generated-...
frognumber 4y ago
To be fair, I've had similar experiences with professional illustrators. I describe what I want, and... something comes back. In practice, the technology will improve. I'm still waiting to see where the ceiling is to know how many people will keep their jobs. I see similar articles about codex, and v0 won't take my job, but v3 might. Or v3 might be identical to v0. It's too early to know. What I have found all these tools to do is to make me use whatever they generate far more. There was a pretty high bar for custom illustrations before DALL-E. With DALL-E, my last presentation had a half-dozen custom images. It was awesome. I'd never hire an illustrator to do that, but I definitely did "hire" DALL-E. codex and gpt-3 are starting to change how I work. If I use illustrations 10-fold more, which I seem to be doing, will illustrators get more work? Less? I don't know. It is a brave new world, though.
- kevinpet 4y ago
  This is an excellent point and easy for designers themselves to overlook. They may see DALLE as a tool that some are claiming does their entire job, and it can't quite yet. But it's really a question of how close it can match the actual result of employing an illustrator.
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    Yeah a lot of these articles are basically “it couldn’t read my mind so it’s bad”. I’ve employed a few artists before and the workflow is quite similar to the version 0.1 we’re dealing with for AI art now. Explain your concept and then get 1 out of 10 illustrations kind of in the right direction, start iterating on that for a few generations and so on.
- hamuraijack 4y ago
  I think you touch on a good point. I think, like the automation of other skilled labor, the first jobs to be affected are the low-hanging fruit jobs. The ones where they just need something good enough. While I think tools like these will decrease the total number of jobs, I think the jobs left over will be ones that artists will enjoy more, as they will require more creativity than just writing a prompt.
slimebot80 4y ago
There's a whole world of paying jobs out there where near enough is good enough. Where the client just wants to come up with something, and is happy to go in a direction that balances speed and cheapness. There are millions of these jobs, taken by juniors and people trying to build a portfolio, and they will be diminished greatly.
- usrusr 4y ago
  And that's the base higher ambitions build on, as a fallback layer. The "fine arts" certainly won't be the same without the lower levels of the pyramid. With the abundance of stable diffusion offerings, I'd expect that wave of "style transfer" ML that was all the rage a few years ago to become more important. Perhaps the act of shepherding recognisable ML identity providers won't be quite as bad a substitute of those low level graphics jobs as we think.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  This is the same hollowing-out that came for all other industries. The high end people trusted with non-obvious problems continue to be worth a ton (worth even more if they are good users of the new tool), while juniors who do rote practice become nearly worthless. It came for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and even writers. Now commercial artists and designers are in trouble.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    And if the juniors can’t pay their bills doing the thing, who’s gonna step into the high-end shoes as the people who mastered the thing start to retire?
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      If you look at lawyers, you can see a narrow pipeline where there once was a wide funnel. People from top law schools and people who distinguish themselves early basically get groomed for partnership, and other lawyers have a hard time cracking 6 figures. I assume this will be the same for artists and software engineers too.
Daub 4y ago
Art / design teacher here. In our school we are very worried about this software. Absolutely it will steal jobs sooner or later. A similar thing happened when photography was invented... Painters had to re-design the job of an artist. Result= modernism (kinda oversimplification but true enough).
- version_five 4y ago
  > A similar thing happened when photography was invented Good analogy, I'd be curious how many people argue that photography being invented was a bad thing, and if at the time it was invented there were essays about how dangerous it was going to be I'd speculate that when photography was invented, there was some gatekeeper group with a monopoly on it (to some extent true right up until digital photography became common) and so there was less vocal concern because portraiture (or whatever it's called) while evolving, still had some value capture for a small group, while recent image generation has been almost completely opened up, so there are no entrenched special interests that get to profit (and therefore more entrenched special interests whining)
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - Daub 4y ago
    No expert on photography history, but I know that it took quite a while for people to recognize the innate strengths of photography. Indeed, I have heard it said that the first true photographer did not arrive until around 50 years after the camera was invented. The first applications of photography in art were clearly trying to emulate the paintings of the time. Mobile RN otherwise I could throw a few links.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      Even now there are people who don’t consider photography an art form.
  - happyopossum 4y ago
xwdv 4y ago
IMO, the most successful artists will learn to embrace AI artists to quickly generate ideas and concepts at scale, and then refine them into brilliantly perfect works of art for production usage.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I'm imagining some artists will master prompt writing and then use AI image generation to fill in sections of an image one at a time, taking direct control of composition and style selection - but leaving the fine details mostly up to the AI. But for most utilitarian images the artist is soon dead.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  The analogy is use is that renaissance masters had workshops with multiple apprentices who would do things like paint gross details according to the master's guidance, then the master would finish the work. I expect this will play out similarly.
NoPicklez 4y ago
I’m seeing a lot of these posts lately. I think if you’re writing about it, debating over it and trying to justify it, it’s likely inevitable that it will erode atleast a part of your job.
deleted 4y ago
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Fricken 4y ago
At least in the realm of editorial illustration, concept is king. You can get away with very simple art so long as it is conceptually effective. Like, it wasn't the widespread availability of pencil and paper that put the poets out of work.
noobermin 4y ago
One of things AI still cannot do is create things out of whole cloth. They still are trained on pre-existing data and create new things based on what they are trained on. One example of this is Japanese Anime and Manga styles which have changed since the 80s till now. You can tell which era an artwork is from by looking at the style. Like a lot of art, the medium goes through phases which arise by individual artists making small changes which influence other artists, and so on. The actual "creation" then of style really isn't a single creative event, but it is a social process which develops over time from the culmination of additions from different artists, more or less unintentionally. Once in a while, one artist or another may be so influential that they inspire many from one artwork, but usual the development is more gradual. At least as it has been done so far, AI cannot reproduce what is essentially the result of a social process, which is the true source of creativity. The NNs so far can just reproduce what it is already trained on which is already the result of existing works in the current style since that's all it has to train on, and I don't know how to a NN can reproduce a "social process" without merely recreating a community of artists.
- Geonode 4y ago
  Your statements seem contradictory: AI creates new things based on what they are trained on, artists create new things based on what they are trained on. Soon enough, the training and the process will pull AI into the ability level of humans, and this is a huge step in that direction.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - roywiggins 4y ago
    I guess I'll believe it when an AI trained entirely on 19th century art manages to reinvent 20th century art based on that alone.
    - alar44 4y ago
      A human couldn't do that either. It literally took all of humanity 100 years to do that.
arecurrence 4y ago
DALL-E as it stands perhaps not. However, Stable Diffusion's img2img is going to absolutely blow this person's mind... and it's just the beginning.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Yeah. A lower skilled artist using basic sketches and prompt-engineering with img2img could make this work. I’m surprised you’re the only person to mention img2img in this thread but I guess it’s pretty new. And as you say, this is just the beginning.
  - sizzle 4y ago
    Link to examples of what it’s capable of?
    - rahimnathwani 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32634139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32634139
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      This example shows how you can make a drawing with stick figures and then run that through img2img with a prompt to make some art that looks artistic. The model is able to understand what the stick figures represent and then make real art in their place. People often stack output so they take the output of img2img and run it through again to let the style drift more while maintaining the original locations. You can also quickly and poorly photoshop multiple image elements together to form a composite, then pass that through img2img to make something nice. Stick figures to art (see both images): https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wxc8bj/experimenting_with_img2img_so_much_fun/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wxc8bj/exp... Other examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/search/?q=img2img&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw= https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/search/?q=img2img&r... I am well and truly jaded from decades of silicon valley's hype train bullshit, but after playing with this tool for a week on my home desktop, I feel like it is powerful enough to find a niche that will displace some artists. It may be though that it makes art so much more accessible that it mostly just increases our use of art, I don't really know.
johnfn 4y ago
A lot of OP's comparisons don't ring true to me. Art isn't like chess. Chess is an event, like boxing, where the interest is in seeing two humans square off. Art is not an event. No one pays for artwork so they can watch someone draw on a canvas for 5 hours - it's not really the same thing at all. They pay for artwork to get the final product. (Or conversely, if chess was like art, then you'd be paying money to read the moves after the game is over.) > A machine can lift a house, but people still love to participate in and watch the strongmen competitions. Yeah, but who would pay to watch a bunch of people lift a house? I mean, maybe as a spectacle, but certainly not as a replacement for a forklift. > We don’t care if any average Joe is faster on his motorbike This isn't really true, either. Have you heard of NASCAR? :P
shadowfoxx 4y ago
The article almost gets to this point when they touch on the idea that "People still play Chess even though people can't win against computers" but 1) People don't do things just because it means a Job for them 2) New Jobs will be created to work through the vacuum left by new Tech 2.B) We'll sooner-or-later have to grasp with a different conceptualization/organization of how we allocate the resources for human life (Food, Shelter, Community)... or else. (Apply this sentiment for anything we can do to earn our livelihoods, Art is not exceptional in this regard) I see technologies like Dall-e being GREAT for capital A Art, in that I wholeheartedly believe our current system Art is worse-off than it otherwise could be. If 'Artist' stopped being a 'job', that'd be a good thing. The more 'Work' we eliminate from human life the closer we get to a place where our hand is forced to change, and in my view, for the better.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
There is a difference between art and illustration. People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of. It’s the same reason people watch sports—they enjoy admiring the top echelon of human physical ability. Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids. On the other hand, most illustration exists for such mundane purposes that viewers never bother to consider the illustrator. Corporate Memphis [1] designers’ days are numbered. That said, sometimes the two overlap. I’ve certainly ogled extremely good looking websites [2] or well-executed pieces of industrial design [3], implicitly admiring the human talent that created them. Perhaps the glut of human illustrator talent soon to enter the marketplace will kindle a design renaissance, with brands competing to distinguish themselves from the sea of DALL-E generated Corporate Memphis clipart, just as Apple distinguished itself from the sea of beige minitowers in the late 90s. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis [2] https://y-n10.com/ https://y-n10.com/ [3] https://www.bluebullettribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/no-10.jpg https://www.bluebullettribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/n...
andreyk 4y ago
Pretty fun post with specific examples of how current tech is not sufficient to take over his job. I have also found when trying to prompt for conceptually specific things (with layout and semantic aspects) it's not that good yet. Will it become massively better though? Probably, yes. Aside from all that, I like the way the piece ended: "Ai is a tool. What makes art is not a tool, it’s the will to make art. A machine doesn’t have will. A tool can transform art, improve it, expand it, not erase it. I’m very excited to see what those tools will bring to futur artists. I’m not worried they will steal our jobs. I mean ok, maybe just a little bit deep down haha, but not in the short or mid term at least, that I’m sure of :)"
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  I mean are most commercials or corporate brochures or startup websites “art” in some meaningful way? Not really.. What people are worried about is the death of the professional artist job market, not art as a concept
bubblicious 4y ago
I find it really fascinating to see the amount of similar posts theses past few months. Professional artists, fearing for their jobs due to AI-generated art, who find solace in the fact that the resulting artifacts are still missing on production quality by a tiny margin. This is somewhat similar to the fear that self-driving cars will one day replace the most common job in America. In the short term, I think there's a real opportunity for artists to leverage those tools to create things they didn't think were possible before. In the long term, it seems inevitable to me that all jobs today will one day be performed better by computers. I do like to think that we will adapt to those changes over time, like we have in the past technology breakthroughs. While the nature of our jobs will most likely change, ideally we all end up having more time to spend with the ones we love.
crazygringo 4y ago
> So all of that to say that it’s very, like very, difficult to describe an image with words. DALL-E isn't going to steal your job... but likely within a year a better interface for it will. I don't think it's going to take too long to be able to specify textual components for image parts to occupy certain areas, and then to do iterative non-textual refinement simply by selecting among rendered variations "genetically" until you get what you're looking for. > It took me maybe 10 to 15mins to generate all those images... And it took me something like 30mins to draw it myself, But the point is, I can't draw. We are very quickly going to reach a point where anybody can produce basically the exact illustration they want in 15 min. It's not here today, but will almost certainly be here in 2 years if programmers and designers are allowed to experiment with the raw models. I actually think discovering the best UI interface for generating illustrations, the magic combo of prompts+seeds+outlines+refinement, is going to be the main area of progress soon.
- adriand 4y ago
  > But the point is, I can't draw. We are very quickly going to reach a point where anybody can produce basically the exact illustration they want in 15 min. I’m curious about the economic impact to illustrators, artists and designers because while I agree with you that this opens up the ability for people who can’t draw to produce stuff they couldn’t before, it seems to me that this is a fairly marginal use-case. I’m personally excited about these tools because, like many electronic musicians, it’s helpful to be able to produce cool album art easily. But I wouldn’t have paid good money for this before. At best I’d pay some freelancer on the internet $20 to throw something together. Meanwhile, in the professional contexts where I’ve dealt with profesional artists and designers, the demands are far too precise and nuanced for these tools to be really useful. I understand that these tools are still in their early stages, but is it possible that, like self-driving cars, the last mile in terms of professional-level suitability will be much more difficult than we might expect?
  - mlboss 4y ago
    We cannot compare self-driving with art generation. If self driving fails at an edge cases somebody is hurt or dies. When art fails you just need a better prompt.
sxp 4y ago
DALL-E won't steal jobs. But Stable Diffusion (a publicly available model similar to DALL-E) will flood the job market once people bolt on various GUIs. E.g, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/show_rstablediffusion_integrating_sd_in_photoshop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho... is a Photoshop plugin that uses Stable Diffusion as a backend for interactive image generation. Stuff like this will make it much easier for more people to become >90th percentile illustrators (as defined today). This means the market for many digital arts degrees is going to become glutted and salaries are going to crash like a rock.
- majormajor 4y ago
  The standard could also change. It's done it before. Today's tools already let countless people do things that would've required huge expense three decades ago. We've recently been in a fairly grounded/realistic style in many types of commercial art, maybe more imaginative imagery will start to grab the eye if this more clip-art-y sort of thing becomes easier and easier. (Imaginative in the "not along the existing trends" sense, not just purely "nothing like this has ever been conceived before.") A DIY website today can look better than the most professional one from 20 years ago. And it took away the jobs of folks who just wrote HTML to lay things out on a page. But very few people want to put "the same level of thing that anyone without any artistic talent can whip up" as their public facing website, so the question is what will the most skilled masters of the new tools end up doing to differentiate themselves. (In terms of any single particular digital artist who doesn't want to learn new tools, that's still bad, though... ;) )
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    This reminds me of how VisiCalc / Lotus 123 / Microsoft Office made many tasks traditionally done by a dedicated office worker semi-obsolete. A middle/upper manager no longer had to call on a tabulator to calculate figures or make a spreadsheet. Yet for all the power of these applications, the need for actual accountants never went away.
    - 4y ago
fsociety999 4y ago
Crazy, this article was rising on the homepage of hacker news. Got up to number nine when I checked and then all of a sudden, I refresh and it was gone. Demoted to page two. It’s a shame too cause more people need to read this. I think DALL-E will end up more as a tool to provide inspiration for artists as opposed to one that will replace them. I can see AI working the same way in other mediums in the future (music ideas for musicians, for example).
- echelon 4y ago
  No. You're watching the beginnings of these tools now. In a few years they'll blow your mind. There's no reason to believe these won't be an order of magnitude more powerful in short order. Just as an artist starts with an outline and iteratively refines, so too will these tools enable such workflows for complete novices. You'll be able to create an illustration in ten minutes exactly as you'd like, without the artist's five hours of work and ten thousand hours of practice. Unlike an artist, you'll have thousands of paths to choose from at your fingertips. Illustrators are about to go the way of basket weavers, crocheters, and elevator attendants. This isn't like photography where you need to hire someone for your event. Illustration is offline, async, and now it can be done for fractions of pennies.
ekianjo 4y ago
This is a very narrow viewpoint. This is 2022. You can be sure that DALL-E and Stable Diffusion and subsequent iterations will be continuously improving at a faster pace (especially those that become more open), and 5 years, 10 years from now, you will be able to make very convincing images that will absolutely compete with the best artists out there. It will not "steal your job" right now, but that's besides the point. With image generators you can produce 100's of images for "free", and you can just spend your time selecting the best in the lot. For most needs out there, it's enough.
- fny 4y ago
  Yup, this article is some heavy, heavy copium. It feels like digital job automation is only a matter of time at this point. However, I for one am not looking forward to the piles of copilot spaghetti vomit we're going to have to clean up in five years... because copilot will be abused to hell just like Access and Excel were in the 90s-00s.
- dogcomplex 4y ago
  Even if it never reached such peaks, it'll still steal the majority of lower-level jobs in every industry it touches, creating a giant expertise gap between new graduates and the level required to improve upon AI generators. That's clear just from current tools working now.
kosyblysk666 4y ago
jyu 4y ago
How did that opinion age for professional go players? It's absolutely amazing seeing AI advancing very rapidly on multiple fronts.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  The difference is that nobody really cares that a computer can win in chess/go/etc. It's almost a given, and the novelty of "when" came and passed. People follow those scenes because they enjoy the history/lore/sport itself/etc. Artwork/illustration, on the other hand, is ultimately an end-product to consume. There's potentially a larger impact here.
tamrix 4y ago
Someone has to give this thing entropy.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
In my opinion, image generation models will replace some jobs - the low-value stuff that's basically "I need somebody to draw a bunch of random things and I don't particularly care about the outcome". Now, moving up the value chain we find ourselves at design agencies that do 2 things: they gather requirements and then they convert those requirements into an output. Many times a client themselves don't know what they want, and part of a good agency's job is turning nebulous requirements into something usable (and charging through the roof for it). The technology will make images much more accessible - the same way Google translate is crap, but it opened up me communicating with a random foreign dude when travelling in a new country that nobody would've ever hired a translator for. The translators moved up market to industries where it's important that a human verified everything looks good like official government/corporate publications. Same thing here; one day you'll have these models in powerpoint and people will click on the model when they need some kind of image there. The high-end won't go away, but the low-value work almost certainly will.
- godelski 4y ago
  As a computer vision researcher who has worked with these T2I generators, this is more spot on. I think a lot of people are making a lot of assumptions without having actually worked with these networks. There's also a highly fundamental problem that is not only unsolved, but we don't even have great directions to solve: alignment. Alignment is even a difficult task when you're communicating to another person. Everyone has had an experience of working with someone and they are asking you to do something (or vise versa) and there is a gross misinterpretation. That's alignment. Now try properly aligning with an "entity" that thinks nothing like you, has a vastly different set of experiences, doesn't know how to count, and has no real concept of physical mechanisms (and more). The technology will definitely help us see a lot more unique art and a lot more amateur artists (a good thing). But it would be naive to think that artists are going away anytime soon. I'd even argue that there will be new jobs from this (prompt engineer comes to mind). It is really difficult to speculate how this technology (even as it progresses rapidly) will change the future. But considering that no one is creating machines that think like humans we will always have alignment issues. This isn't a fact that can be ignored. It is also worth noting that if you haven't worked with these systems, that what you are seeing is extremely biased. People aren't showing their failures. But there are some twitter accounts that do: WeirdStableAI and weirddalle are probably the most famous. Of course, you can also follow Gary Marcus who is going to retweet every example of failure that he can get his hands on. Other side note: some of these conversations remind me about how people used to talk about 3D printers
LeicaLatte 4y ago
I have spent some time with dall-e and it is really useful for touchups and content that can stay at the edges. The centerpiece still has to be hand designed by a living breathing team. That said, using anything other than dall-e for social media content feels like a waste. Why use a human for generating low effort read once content anymore?
WXLCKNO 4y ago
Can't wait to redecorate by telling my digital frames to paint me something different.
renewiltord 4y ago
I won't get stock art, I'll tell you that.
yyyk 4y ago
DALL-E and other AIs are ultimately doing a cheap, very 'human' task with unclear utility function. I expect professional human artists will always be able to compete for the high end. However, there's an economic risk. AI will definitely cramp the lower end of the market, and with that there'll be fewer humans who are able to get to the high end market (since they won't be paid before gaining enough experience to become better artists - leading to getting another job which means less time to draw...).
dsabanin 4y ago
Oh, but it will! Maybe not DALL-E 2, but 4, but it will.
willjp 4y ago
lol, former animator/illustrator. It's a race to the bottom. The jobs looking for quality won't be replaced, but the entry-level jobs are changing. Where in the 80s they used to develop skillsets that you could build on, working towards feature work, increasingly they are optimized for quantity. The skills are not necessarily transferrable. Look at 3D modelers. There used to be several more environment artists that have been replaced with 3D scanners in videogames. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different skillset. It reduces the unit cost. I think entry level illustration jobs are at a higher risk. I've done plenty of album covers, promotional posters early in my career on a shoestring budget. They don't care if it's interesting - they want something cheap that gets the job done. Storyboard artists have a very different skillset. You need to communicate an idea as a cohesive sequence of images. Dall-E isn't designed for this, it's designed for standalone images. If you're investing in storyboard artists to begin with, you care about this visual communication, otherwise it's much cheaper to just yolo with a camera and and hand it off to post.
noufalibrahim 4y ago
The author talks about the quality and professionalism of his work which is true. I'm not sure how much a model can replace that. However, with this is cheaper to produce a huge amount of substandard stuff. That will swamp out the quality stuff and will probably have economic effects too. One analogous example that comes to mind is cheap animation software. In a world where there were a few hand animated cartoons, now there are tons of quickly put together shows.
martin1975 4y ago
Thanks for reminding everyone that computers in all their glory and usefuleness, with all their AI will always remain a tool in service of human beings.
a_shovel 4y ago
This comment from the author was an interesting perspective on how it'll impact the market for illustrators. > "Those "clients" [who just need an image and don't care about the quality] you are talking about don't really exist. I know they do, but on a practical level they don't for us freelances. It's a long debate among graphic designers and illustrators. > To explain it simply, there are two big categories of "clients" for graphic designers, illustrator, photographers etc... 1-Those who want good stuff and can pay, > 2-Those who don't care/can't make the difference between good and bad, and/or who don't have money. > The first category is the only "real" clients who exist, on a practical level. They are the only one I work with, like any illustrator. > The others, AI or not, will NEVER pay for a "real" illustrator anyway. Never. That has nothing to do with AI. I know them, they contact me often. Then I tell them my rates, they try to negotiate, then they give up. I never ended up working with them. > They either contact a very junior illustrator who have no idea what they are doing, or they buy cheap illustrations on Shutterstock. They don't have money to spend anyway. They will do the same horrible images with AI that they already do with shutterstock. If they "leave" the market, it will impact nobody."
cercatrova 4y ago
I honestly don't care how many jobs AI will replace, it's a neo-Luddite argument. The point of AI is to replace jobs, and I certainly won't stop human progress just because some people won't have a job in the future.
balls187 4y ago
Eventually, it will. Not today. Not tomorrow. But eventually.
spoonjim 4y ago
LOL. This guy doesn’t realize what DALL-E is going to be like in 18 months.
foxes 4y ago
HN on copepilot : NOoOoO muh hecken techerino tech job muh Linux muh source license blah blah blah ramble nooo muh codddeee aaaa HN on putting other people out of work: it’s fine it’s just the free market :)
sizzle 4y ago
Did AI tumor detection have any impact on the field of radiology?
sinuhe69 4y ago
Like every other kind of technology before, DALL-E and Co. will help the mass to create a lot of amusing and sometimes passable artworks. Just like the compact camera and the phone camera had helped create billions more photos compared to the previous generations of equipments. But arguably, the trillions of photos and billions of potential photographers didn't help to bring further the art of photography much. Combined with myriads photo apps, they help created tons of amusing and pleasant photo artworks. They raised the bar for what is considered a good, acceptable photo and montage work today. They made creating good photo work much faster and cheaper for the mass, and ways more accessible. However, they didn't change the standard for professional work because they still require the hand and the mind of a talented artist. It will democratize the illustration process but like in every democracy, the elites still set the tone and exercise enormous influences. In other word, new technology will skew the distribution to the right, increase the median dramatically and leave the old bottom half obsolete. But not the top 5%.
fxtentacle 4y ago
"when camera became cheap, and everybody had a good camera on their phones, people assumed it would be the death of professional photographers. But it was not." Prices for stock photography fell so low that it stopped being a viable way to pay for housing and food. All those displaced stock photographers then tried to get into adjacent markets, which ruined wedding photography prices, too. I predict the author will soon face increased competition by other storyboard artists. Those that used to do art which has now been replaced by AI.
CMCDragonkai 4y ago
This blog post seems invalidated by having the ability to pass graphical prompts in. So combined graphical and text prompts together with some constraints will be enough eventually.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Almost every image in this blog post features existing images as input. The blog post may or may not be valid in the future, but it certainly isn't invalidated by something already included within it.
xtiansimon 4y ago
This is my first look at anything “DALL-E”. DALL-E doesn’t need to be better. It just needs to lower the bar that consumers can’t tell or don’t care about the differences. “So to all the people talking about the end of illustration and animation, or even art, be aware that art cannot die.“ Still could eat your lunch. Beware the Ides of March.
salawat 4y ago
I don't see the big deal with either DALL-E or Stable Diffusion. It's compositional value is nil. At best it's text-to-img mapping may help some with getting to learn what different artistic styles look like, but I see it as the same dynamic as GitHub CoPilot. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The more it's used, the more it's weights will be skewed toward SD'ness, and to be frank, I'm not entirely convinced that there won't be rapidly discovered "verbatim" reproductions of things as outputs that'll turn into legal challenges a la license enforcement. Further, the user experience is extremely disappointing. One is quickly left feeling as if one's time may be better spent articulating one's vision enough such that a human artist can make it happen. It's much like what I call "the hair stylist" problem. The hard part around communicating is figuring out the hairstylist vocabulary. DALL-E may make learning that easier. Then again, my track record with "meh, never happens" has been abysmal lately.
nickelcitymario 4y ago
The only reason we see articles like this about AI stealing (or not stealing) jobs is because we have a collective fantasy that generalized intelligence is right around the corner. It's not. But that doesn't mean we won't get there eventually. AI (and AR/VR, but that's another topic), to me, is like PCs in the early 80s. Everyone can kinda sorta theoretically understand the value, but the technology has not advanced enough to have a meaningful impact on our day to day lives, outside of very well defined problems. The use cases that most of us can think of require massive leaps in technology. Once upon a time, people thought of computers as fancy calculators. Steve Jobs had to compare them to bicycles to get people to understand the benefit. Computers were so bad for so long that any movie that tried to feature a hacker subplot had to come up with all kinds of crazy visuals to help the audience relate to this strange new world. Same with AI. We can see what it's doing now, and be disappointed when we realize it's nowhere near as good as we've been led to believe. Or we can zoom into some distant future where AI is just as conscious as anyone else, but super intelligent. What we struggle with is the in-between, the journey to getting there. DALL-E is amazing. One day we'll look back and be able to see how crucial of an advance this is. But the PR story around DALL-E is all smokes and mirrors. It's the classic tale: Scientists make a discovery; the general public doesn't understand the significance of the discovery; so someone (usually in marketing or PR) has to paint a picture to show how incredible it is, otherwise funding will dry up. That picture, inevitably, is both useful and inaccurate. For another analogy: Just like a map of the world is inaccurate but useful, so are these fantastical stories. We just need to remember: the map is not the territory. It's just a tool to help us navigate the territory.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  > Same with AI. We can see what it's doing now, and be disappointed when we realize it's nowhere near as good as we've been led to believe. I won't be disappointed. I will be relieved! Tech fetishism can have dangerous consequences, as we are seeing with self-driving cars.
  - nickelcitymario 4y ago
    Don't self-driving cars still have a much better safety record (per mile driven) than regular cars?
mark_l_watson 4y ago
The author is probably correct, for the next several months. After that I would expect new types of careers for people who are good with “prompt text” and abilities to touch up generated images. In a few years, being really good with prompt text will probably be good enough. Last weekend I used DALL-E to make a 101 year old birthday card for my Dad and everyone loved it. Last week I started generating images for a sci-fi story I am writing.
pwinnski 4y ago
I keep thinking about AI image models' effects on illustration and comparing/contrasting with things like GitHub's CoPilot for code. Inasmuch as someone starts with an exact mental image and wants something matching that mental image, then no, it could be quite a while before an AI model is able to do that. Maybe six months, maybe six years, maybe never. As always with AI, it's hard to say. How often is it true that someone insists on something that exactly matches their mental image? I honestly don't know! If I write another novel, how picky am I going to be to be about the cover? If I get Stable Diffusion, or a future version of something similar, to generate a dozen images that match my text prompt, do I just pick the one I like best and lay some text over it? Or do I decide that no, I need something very specific, and hire someone to draw exactly what I want? I think one of the main criticisms of AI code generation is that you end up needing to be so specific with your "text prompts" that you're essentially writing the code yourself and letting the AI handle syntactic sugar. A sort of "AI IntelliSense™," if you will. But that's because we're developers. Like the illustrator in this piece, we have an exact idea of what we want, and nothing else will do. What if I were a non-technical person and could ask an AI model to give me code that collects names and email address into a database I can later use for a mailing list? Could an AI model do that? If not today, then surely soon. Isn't that a similar issue? Does it put me out of work? No, not immediately. But it does potentially eliminate an entire category of work, specifically the work that people generally use to learn how to be good developers. Will this cause problems with training future developers, since they have to rise above a certain skill level to exceed AI models? It might! I wonder if the same is true of illustrators. Maybe existing illustrators have their niche, but how hard will future illustrators have to work before they can exceed AI models?

120 points by sizzle 4y ago

plasticbugs 4y ago

*yet

sizzle 4y ago
yeah the generated examples were somewhat decent, with a few more iterations I can see it matching some turing-complete form that clients will pay for.

yrgulation 4y ago

“softwares” do improve over time. so while it may not steal your job it willower the entry barrier. so your income will likely drop significantly once the tech matures.

soperj 4y ago
they addressed that in the article.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  +1. i would downvote or delete my comment if i could. i stopped at “softwares”. shouldnt have.

larodi 4y ago

Why I don’t care about it stealing or not you job - because it does get me what I need without having to go the all the lint story how special illustrators work is.

ok_dad 4y ago
They came for the X but I was not an X…
- version_five 4y ago
  You appear to be trying to Godwin a discussion about automated picture drawing... even accounting for how your carelessly your analogy normally gets used, I'd say you're reaching
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    You appear to have taken my intent wrongly. I meant that eventually this tech may come for us super special developers, too, in some aspect. I could imagine one good developer doing the work of several once code models are perfected. The commenter I replied to had zero respect for the effects this tech might have on real humans.
bitmover 4y ago
I’m always suprised by the disdain on HN for artists, like really? Paying an artist a living wage is what’s wrong with the world today?
- xoz 4y ago
  It's not disdain for artists. It's the notion that artists' works are inherently valuable or worthy of a 'living wage'. They are unfortunately not, nor is anyone's labor inherently valuable.
- version_five 4y ago
  There is not some universal right to get paid for things you like to do. Pay is a transaction between someone who wants something and someone who can provide it. I once saw a Ted Talk by a busker who was a mime or something and was calling what they do "work" (and was complaining about people who didn't respect that). I found it ridiculous because effectively they are a beggar, they are doing what they want to do and hoping someone gives them money, and in some cases, feeling entitled to it. I think it's this perception of entitlement (real or imagined) that rubs people the wrong way about artists, at least ones complaining about not getting paid. If you want someone to give you money, do something people want. The universe doesn't owe you a business model. Along the same lines, weavers and scribes and travel agents and a million other professions have moved on. Automating low value art is not any different, nobody owes you anything.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > a busker who was a mime or something and was calling what they do "work" How is it not work? I mean, they are providing a service and then wanting money. The money is provided after the service and 100% voluntary, but does that make it less of a job than a waiter with a base pay of $2.15 an hour? That guaranteed $4,300 a year separates a job from a not-job?
- Kalium 4y ago
  If I want a bit of clip art for a presentation or stock image for a website, is it disdainful to say it's irrelevant to me if it was made by a living human or a computer? I want the thing. An artist getting paid is a means to an end for this purpose. To you and others, the artist getting paid might be the end. That's fine for you, but I may not have reason to care.
rvz 4y ago
"It doesn't affect my job yet because I'm not an artist, so I don't care". Yet, we see managers at software companies off-shoring for cheap contractor coding sweatshops in the South East of the world and on the site, which HNers here see that as a 'problem' and is hated on. Well guess what? Copilot will make it worse and will have cheap software shops generating code / project templates and getting more for less rather than employing an expensive full time typical western software engineer. Open source will just accelerate the drive down against closed source alternatives as well. The start of the race to the bottom, Then it would be a problem for software engineers, software companies, etc. Open source alternatives is already eating itself and closed-source alternative and tools like Copilot used by contractors will just accelerate this much quicker. That would then be your problem.
orbital-decay 4y ago
You seem to be replying to the headline in a knee-jerk manner. The article tries to communicate that the natural language is inherently poor at giving directions for artistic work. It's a valuable observation by an expert, and as someone who studies arts as a hobby I absolutely agree. Text-to-image isn't going to change anything on its own; higher order tools are needed.

Malcx 4y ago

I posted my experience in another thread a few weeks ago. No, it's not ready to wholesale replace human illustrators, but it's certainly nipping at their heels. https://malcx.com/blog/I-too-made-a-logo-using-AI-generated-images-MidJourney-rather-than-Dall-E-2.html https://malcx.com/blog/I-too-made-a-logo-using-AI-generated-...

frognumber 4y ago

To be fair, I've had similar experiences with professional illustrators. I describe what I want, and... something comes back. In practice, the technology will improve. I'm still waiting to see where the ceiling is to know how many people will keep their jobs. I see similar articles about codex, and v0 won't take my job, but v3 might. Or v3 might be identical to v0. It's too early to know. What I have found all these tools to do is to make me use whatever they generate far more. There was a pretty high bar for custom illustrations before DALL-E. With DALL-E, my last presentation had a half-dozen custom images. It was awesome. I'd never hire an illustrator to do that, but I definitely did "hire" DALL-E. codex and gpt-3 are starting to change how I work. If I use illustrations 10-fold more, which I seem to be doing, will illustrators get more work? Less? I don't know. It is a brave new world, though.

kevinpet 4y ago
This is an excellent point and easy for designers themselves to overlook. They may see DALLE as a tool that some are claiming does their entire job, and it can't quite yet. But it's really a question of how close it can match the actual result of employing an illustrator.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  Yeah a lot of these articles are basically “it couldn’t read my mind so it’s bad”. I’ve employed a few artists before and the workflow is quite similar to the version 0.1 we’re dealing with for AI art now. Explain your concept and then get 1 out of 10 illustrations kind of in the right direction, start iterating on that for a few generations and so on.
hamuraijack 4y ago
I think you touch on a good point. I think, like the automation of other skilled labor, the first jobs to be affected are the low-hanging fruit jobs. The ones where they just need something good enough. While I think tools like these will decrease the total number of jobs, I think the jobs left over will be ones that artists will enjoy more, as they will require more creativity than just writing a prompt.

slimebot80 4y ago

There's a whole world of paying jobs out there where near enough is good enough. Where the client just wants to come up with something, and is happy to go in a direction that balances speed and cheapness. There are millions of these jobs, taken by juniors and people trying to build a portfolio, and they will be diminished greatly.

usrusr 4y ago
And that's the base higher ambitions build on, as a fallback layer. The "fine arts" certainly won't be the same without the lower levels of the pyramid. With the abundance of stable diffusion offerings, I'd expect that wave of "style transfer" ML that was all the rage a few years ago to become more important. Perhaps the act of shepherding recognisable ML identity providers won't be quite as bad a substitute of those low level graphics jobs as we think.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
This is the same hollowing-out that came for all other industries. The high end people trusted with non-obvious problems continue to be worth a ton (worth even more if they are good users of the new tool), while juniors who do rote practice become nearly worthless. It came for lawyers, doctors, engineers, and even writers. Now commercial artists and designers are in trouble.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  And if the juniors can’t pay their bills doing the thing, who’s gonna step into the high-end shoes as the people who mastered the thing start to retire?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    If you look at lawyers, you can see a narrow pipeline where there once was a wide funnel. People from top law schools and people who distinguish themselves early basically get groomed for partnership, and other lawyers have a hard time cracking 6 figures. I assume this will be the same for artists and software engineers too.

Daub 4y ago

Art / design teacher here. In our school we are very worried about this software. Absolutely it will steal jobs sooner or later. A similar thing happened when photography was invented... Painters had to re-design the job of an artist. Result= modernism (kinda oversimplification but true enough).

version_five 4y ago
> A similar thing happened when photography was invented Good analogy, I'd be curious how many people argue that photography being invented was a bad thing, and if at the time it was invented there were essays about how dangerous it was going to be I'd speculate that when photography was invented, there was some gatekeeper group with a monopoly on it (to some extent true right up until digital photography became common) and so there was less vocal concern because portraiture (or whatever it's called) while evolving, still had some value capture for a small group, while recent image generation has been almost completely opened up, so there are no entrenched special interests that get to profit (and therefore more entrenched special interests whining)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Daub 4y ago
  No expert on photography history, but I know that it took quite a while for people to recognize the innate strengths of photography. Indeed, I have heard it said that the first true photographer did not arrive until around 50 years after the camera was invented. The first applications of photography in art were clearly trying to emulate the paintings of the time. Mobile RN otherwise I could throw a few links.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Even now there are people who don’t consider photography an art form.
- happyopossum 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago

IMO, the most successful artists will learn to embrace AI artists to quickly generate ideas and concepts at scale, and then refine them into brilliantly perfect works of art for production usage.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
I'm imagining some artists will master prompt writing and then use AI image generation to fill in sections of an image one at a time, taking direct control of composition and style selection - but leaving the fine details mostly up to the AI. But for most utilitarian images the artist is soon dead.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
The analogy is use is that renaissance masters had workshops with multiple apprentices who would do things like paint gross details according to the master's guidance, then the master would finish the work. I expect this will play out similarly.

NoPicklez 4y ago

I’m seeing a lot of these posts lately. I think if you’re writing about it, debating over it and trying to justify it, it’s likely inevitable that it will erode atleast a part of your job.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Fricken 4y ago

At least in the realm of editorial illustration, concept is king. You can get away with very simple art so long as it is conceptually effective. Like, it wasn't the widespread availability of pencil and paper that put the poets out of work.

noobermin 4y ago

One of things AI still cannot do is create things out of whole cloth. They still are trained on pre-existing data and create new things based on what they are trained on. One example of this is Japanese Anime and Manga styles which have changed since the 80s till now. You can tell which era an artwork is from by looking at the style. Like a lot of art, the medium goes through phases which arise by individual artists making small changes which influence other artists, and so on. The actual "creation" then of style really isn't a single creative event, but it is a social process which develops over time from the culmination of additions from different artists, more or less unintentionally. Once in a while, one artist or another may be so influential that they inspire many from one artwork, but usual the development is more gradual. At least as it has been done so far, AI cannot reproduce what is essentially the result of a social process, which is the true source of creativity. The NNs so far can just reproduce what it is already trained on which is already the result of existing works in the current style since that's all it has to train on, and I don't know how to a NN can reproduce a "social process" without merely recreating a community of artists.

Geonode 4y ago
Your statements seem contradictory: AI creates new things based on what they are trained on, artists create new things based on what they are trained on. Soon enough, the training and the process will pull AI into the ability level of humans, and this is a huge step in that direction.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- roywiggins 4y ago
  I guess I'll believe it when an AI trained entirely on 19th century art manages to reinvent 20th century art based on that alone.
  - alar44 4y ago
    A human couldn't do that either. It literally took all of humanity 100 years to do that.

arecurrence 4y ago

DALL-E as it stands perhaps not. However, Stable Diffusion's img2img is going to absolutely blow this person's mind... and it's just the beginning.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Yeah. A lower skilled artist using basic sketches and prompt-engineering with img2img could make this work. I’m surprised you’re the only person to mention img2img in this thread but I guess it’s pretty new. And as you say, this is just the beginning.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Link to examples of what it’s capable of?
  - rahimnathwani 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32634139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32634139
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    This example shows how you can make a drawing with stick figures and then run that through img2img with a prompt to make some art that looks artistic. The model is able to understand what the stick figures represent and then make real art in their place. People often stack output so they take the output of img2img and run it through again to let the style drift more while maintaining the original locations. You can also quickly and poorly photoshop multiple image elements together to form a composite, then pass that through img2img to make something nice. Stick figures to art (see both images): https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wxc8bj/experimenting_with_img2img_so_much_fun/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wxc8bj/exp... Other examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/search/?q=img2img&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw= https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/search/?q=img2img&r... I am well and truly jaded from decades of silicon valley's hype train bullshit, but after playing with this tool for a week on my home desktop, I feel like it is powerful enough to find a niche that will displace some artists. It may be though that it makes art so much more accessible that it mostly just increases our use of art, I don't really know.

johnfn 4y ago

A lot of OP's comparisons don't ring true to me. Art isn't like chess. Chess is an event, like boxing, where the interest is in seeing two humans square off. Art is not an event. No one pays for artwork so they can watch someone draw on a canvas for 5 hours - it's not really the same thing at all. They pay for artwork to get the final product. (Or conversely, if chess was like art, then you'd be paying money to read the moves after the game is over.) > A machine can lift a house, but people still love to participate in and watch the strongmen competitions. Yeah, but who would pay to watch a bunch of people lift a house? I mean, maybe as a spectacle, but certainly not as a replacement for a forklift. > We don’t care if any average Joe is faster on his motorbike This isn't really true, either. Have you heard of NASCAR? :P

shadowfoxx 4y ago

The article almost gets to this point when they touch on the idea that "People still play Chess even though people can't win against computers" but 1) People don't do things just because it means a Job for them 2) New Jobs will be created to work through the vacuum left by new Tech 2.B) We'll sooner-or-later have to grasp with a different conceptualization/organization of how we allocate the resources for human life (Food, Shelter, Community)... or else. (Apply this sentiment for anything we can do to earn our livelihoods, Art is not exceptional in this regard) I see technologies like Dall-e being GREAT for capital A Art, in that I wholeheartedly believe our current system Art is worse-off than it otherwise could be. If 'Artist' stopped being a 'job', that'd be a good thing. The more 'Work' we eliminate from human life the closer we get to a place where our hand is forced to change, and in my view, for the better.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

There is a difference between art and illustration. People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of. It’s the same reason people watch sports—they enjoy admiring the top echelon of human physical ability. Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids. On the other hand, most illustration exists for such mundane purposes that viewers never bother to consider the illustrator. Corporate Memphis [1] designers’ days are numbered. That said, sometimes the two overlap. I’ve certainly ogled extremely good looking websites [2] or well-executed pieces of industrial design [3], implicitly admiring the human talent that created them. Perhaps the glut of human illustrator talent soon to enter the marketplace will kindle a design renaissance, with brands competing to distinguish themselves from the sea of DALL-E generated Corporate Memphis clipart, just as Apple distinguished itself from the sea of beige minitowers in the late 90s. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis [2] https://y-n10.com/ https://y-n10.com/ [3] https://www.bluebullettribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/no-10.jpg https://www.bluebullettribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/n...

andreyk 4y ago

Pretty fun post with specific examples of how current tech is not sufficient to take over his job. I have also found when trying to prompt for conceptually specific things (with layout and semantic aspects) it's not that good yet. Will it become massively better though? Probably, yes. Aside from all that, I like the way the piece ended: "Ai is a tool. What makes art is not a tool, it’s the will to make art. A machine doesn’t have will. A tool can transform art, improve it, expand it, not erase it. I’m very excited to see what those tools will bring to futur artists. I’m not worried they will steal our jobs. I mean ok, maybe just a little bit deep down haha, but not in the short or mid term at least, that I’m sure of :)"

coffee_beqn 4y ago
I mean are most commercials or corporate brochures or startup websites “art” in some meaningful way? Not really.. What people are worried about is the death of the professional artist job market, not art as a concept

bubblicious 4y ago

I find it really fascinating to see the amount of similar posts theses past few months. Professional artists, fearing for their jobs due to AI-generated art, who find solace in the fact that the resulting artifacts are still missing on production quality by a tiny margin. This is somewhat similar to the fear that self-driving cars will one day replace the most common job in America. In the short term, I think there's a real opportunity for artists to leverage those tools to create things they didn't think were possible before. In the long term, it seems inevitable to me that all jobs today will one day be performed better by computers. I do like to think that we will adapt to those changes over time, like we have in the past technology breakthroughs. While the nature of our jobs will most likely change, ideally we all end up having more time to spend with the ones we love.

crazygringo 4y ago

> So all of that to say that it’s very, like very, difficult to describe an image with words. DALL-E isn't going to steal your job... but likely within a year a better interface for it will. I don't think it's going to take too long to be able to specify textual components for image parts to occupy certain areas, and then to do iterative non-textual refinement simply by selecting among rendered variations "genetically" until you get what you're looking for. > It took me maybe 10 to 15mins to generate all those images... And it took me something like 30mins to draw it myself, But the point is, I can't draw. We are very quickly going to reach a point where anybody can produce basically the exact illustration they want in 15 min. It's not here today, but will almost certainly be here in 2 years if programmers and designers are allowed to experiment with the raw models. I actually think discovering the best UI interface for generating illustrations, the magic combo of prompts+seeds+outlines+refinement, is going to be the main area of progress soon.

adriand 4y ago
> But the point is, I can't draw. We are very quickly going to reach a point where anybody can produce basically the exact illustration they want in 15 min. I’m curious about the economic impact to illustrators, artists and designers because while I agree with you that this opens up the ability for people who can’t draw to produce stuff they couldn’t before, it seems to me that this is a fairly marginal use-case. I’m personally excited about these tools because, like many electronic musicians, it’s helpful to be able to produce cool album art easily. But I wouldn’t have paid good money for this before. At best I’d pay some freelancer on the internet $20 to throw something together. Meanwhile, in the professional contexts where I’ve dealt with profesional artists and designers, the demands are far too precise and nuanced for these tools to be really useful. I understand that these tools are still in their early stages, but is it possible that, like self-driving cars, the last mile in terms of professional-level suitability will be much more difficult than we might expect?
- mlboss 4y ago
  We cannot compare self-driving with art generation. If self driving fails at an edge cases somebody is hurt or dies. When art fails you just need a better prompt.

sxp 4y ago

DALL-E won't steal jobs. But Stable Diffusion (a publicly available model similar to DALL-E) will flood the job market once people bolt on various GUIs. E.g, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/show_rstablediffusion_integrating_sd_in_photoshop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho... is a Photoshop plugin that uses Stable Diffusion as a backend for interactive image generation. Stuff like this will make it much easier for more people to become >90th percentile illustrators (as defined today). This means the market for many digital arts degrees is going to become glutted and salaries are going to crash like a rock.

majormajor 4y ago
The standard could also change. It's done it before. Today's tools already let countless people do things that would've required huge expense three decades ago. We've recently been in a fairly grounded/realistic style in many types of commercial art, maybe more imaginative imagery will start to grab the eye if this more clip-art-y sort of thing becomes easier and easier. (Imaginative in the "not along the existing trends" sense, not just purely "nothing like this has ever been conceived before.") A DIY website today can look better than the most professional one from 20 years ago. And it took away the jobs of folks who just wrote HTML to lay things out on a page. But very few people want to put "the same level of thing that anyone without any artistic talent can whip up" as their public facing website, so the question is what will the most skilled masters of the new tools end up doing to differentiate themselves. (In terms of any single particular digital artist who doesn't want to learn new tools, that's still bad, though... ;) )
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  This reminds me of how VisiCalc / Lotus 123 / Microsoft Office made many tasks traditionally done by a dedicated office worker semi-obsolete. A middle/upper manager no longer had to call on a tabulator to calculate figures or make a spreadsheet. Yet for all the power of these applications, the need for actual accountants never went away.
  - 4y ago

fsociety999 4y ago

Crazy, this article was rising on the homepage of hacker news. Got up to number nine when I checked and then all of a sudden, I refresh and it was gone. Demoted to page two. It’s a shame too cause more people need to read this. I think DALL-E will end up more as a tool to provide inspiration for artists as opposed to one that will replace them. I can see AI working the same way in other mediums in the future (music ideas for musicians, for example).

echelon 4y ago
No. You're watching the beginnings of these tools now. In a few years they'll blow your mind. There's no reason to believe these won't be an order of magnitude more powerful in short order. Just as an artist starts with an outline and iteratively refines, so too will these tools enable such workflows for complete novices. You'll be able to create an illustration in ten minutes exactly as you'd like, without the artist's five hours of work and ten thousand hours of practice. Unlike an artist, you'll have thousands of paths to choose from at your fingertips. Illustrators are about to go the way of basket weavers, crocheters, and elevator attendants. This isn't like photography where you need to hire someone for your event. Illustration is offline, async, and now it can be done for fractions of pennies.

ekianjo 4y ago

This is a very narrow viewpoint. This is 2022. You can be sure that DALL-E and Stable Diffusion and subsequent iterations will be continuously improving at a faster pace (especially those that become more open), and 5 years, 10 years from now, you will be able to make very convincing images that will absolutely compete with the best artists out there. It will not "steal your job" right now, but that's besides the point. With image generators you can produce 100's of images for "free", and you can just spend your time selecting the best in the lot. For most needs out there, it's enough.

fny 4y ago
Yup, this article is some heavy, heavy copium. It feels like digital job automation is only a matter of time at this point. However, I for one am not looking forward to the piles of copilot spaghetti vomit we're going to have to clean up in five years... because copilot will be abused to hell just like Access and Excel were in the 90s-00s.
dogcomplex 4y ago
Even if it never reached such peaks, it'll still steal the majority of lower-level jobs in every industry it touches, creating a giant expertise gap between new graduates and the level required to improve upon AI generators. That's clear just from current tools working now.

kosyblysk666 4y ago

jyu 4y ago

How did that opinion age for professional go players? It's absolutely amazing seeing AI advancing very rapidly on multiple fronts.

Klonoar 4y ago
The difference is that nobody really cares that a computer can win in chess/go/etc. It's almost a given, and the novelty of "when" came and passed. People follow those scenes because they enjoy the history/lore/sport itself/etc. Artwork/illustration, on the other hand, is ultimately an end-product to consume. There's potentially a larger impact here.

tamrix 4y ago

Someone has to give this thing entropy.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

In my opinion, image generation models will replace some jobs - the low-value stuff that's basically "I need somebody to draw a bunch of random things and I don't particularly care about the outcome". Now, moving up the value chain we find ourselves at design agencies that do 2 things: they gather requirements and then they convert those requirements into an output. Many times a client themselves don't know what they want, and part of a good agency's job is turning nebulous requirements into something usable (and charging through the roof for it). The technology will make images much more accessible - the same way Google translate is crap, but it opened up me communicating with a random foreign dude when travelling in a new country that nobody would've ever hired a translator for. The translators moved up market to industries where it's important that a human verified everything looks good like official government/corporate publications. Same thing here; one day you'll have these models in powerpoint and people will click on the model when they need some kind of image there. The high-end won't go away, but the low-value work almost certainly will.

godelski 4y ago
As a computer vision researcher who has worked with these T2I generators, this is more spot on. I think a lot of people are making a lot of assumptions without having actually worked with these networks. There's also a highly fundamental problem that is not only unsolved, but we don't even have great directions to solve: alignment. Alignment is even a difficult task when you're communicating to another person. Everyone has had an experience of working with someone and they are asking you to do something (or vise versa) and there is a gross misinterpretation. That's alignment. Now try properly aligning with an "entity" that thinks nothing like you, has a vastly different set of experiences, doesn't know how to count, and has no real concept of physical mechanisms (and more). The technology will definitely help us see a lot more unique art and a lot more amateur artists (a good thing). But it would be naive to think that artists are going away anytime soon. I'd even argue that there will be new jobs from this (prompt engineer comes to mind). It is really difficult to speculate how this technology (even as it progresses rapidly) will change the future. But considering that no one is creating machines that think like humans we will always have alignment issues. This isn't a fact that can be ignored. It is also worth noting that if you haven't worked with these systems, that what you are seeing is extremely biased. People aren't showing their failures. But there are some twitter accounts that do: WeirdStableAI and weirddalle are probably the most famous. Of course, you can also follow Gary Marcus who is going to retweet every example of failure that he can get his hands on. Other side note: some of these conversations remind me about how people used to talk about 3D printers

LeicaLatte 4y ago

I have spent some time with dall-e and it is really useful for touchups and content that can stay at the edges. The centerpiece still has to be hand designed by a living breathing team. That said, using anything other than dall-e for social media content feels like a waste. Why use a human for generating low effort read once content anymore?

WXLCKNO 4y ago

Can't wait to redecorate by telling my digital frames to paint me something different.

renewiltord 4y ago

I won't get stock art, I'll tell you that.

yyyk 4y ago

DALL-E and other AIs are ultimately doing a cheap, very 'human' task with unclear utility function. I expect professional human artists will always be able to compete for the high end. However, there's an economic risk. AI will definitely cramp the lower end of the market, and with that there'll be fewer humans who are able to get to the high end market (since they won't be paid before gaining enough experience to become better artists - leading to getting another job which means less time to draw...).

dsabanin 4y ago

Oh, but it will! Maybe not DALL-E 2, but 4, but it will.

willjp 4y ago

lol, former animator/illustrator. It's a race to the bottom. The jobs looking for quality won't be replaced, but the entry-level jobs are changing. Where in the 80s they used to develop skillsets that you could build on, working towards feature work, increasingly they are optimized for quantity. The skills are not necessarily transferrable. Look at 3D modelers. There used to be several more environment artists that have been replaced with 3D scanners in videogames. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different skillset. It reduces the unit cost. I think entry level illustration jobs are at a higher risk. I've done plenty of album covers, promotional posters early in my career on a shoestring budget. They don't care if it's interesting - they want something cheap that gets the job done. Storyboard artists have a very different skillset. You need to communicate an idea as a cohesive sequence of images. Dall-E isn't designed for this, it's designed for standalone images. If you're investing in storyboard artists to begin with, you care about this visual communication, otherwise it's much cheaper to just yolo with a camera and and hand it off to post.

noufalibrahim 4y ago

The author talks about the quality and professionalism of his work which is true. I'm not sure how much a model can replace that. However, with this is cheaper to produce a huge amount of substandard stuff. That will swamp out the quality stuff and will probably have economic effects too. One analogous example that comes to mind is cheap animation software. In a world where there were a few hand animated cartoons, now there are tons of quickly put together shows.

martin1975 4y ago

Thanks for reminding everyone that computers in all their glory and usefuleness, with all their AI will always remain a tool in service of human beings.

a_shovel 4y ago

This comment from the author was an interesting perspective on how it'll impact the market for illustrators. > "Those "clients" [who just need an image and don't care about the quality] you are talking about don't really exist. I know they do, but on a practical level they don't for us freelances. It's a long debate among graphic designers and illustrators. > To explain it simply, there are two big categories of "clients" for graphic designers, illustrator, photographers etc... 1-Those who want good stuff and can pay, > 2-Those who don't care/can't make the difference between good and bad, and/or who don't have money. > The first category is the only "real" clients who exist, on a practical level. They are the only one I work with, like any illustrator. > The others, AI or not, will NEVER pay for a "real" illustrator anyway. Never. That has nothing to do with AI. I know them, they contact me often. Then I tell them my rates, they try to negotiate, then they give up. I never ended up working with them. > They either contact a very junior illustrator who have no idea what they are doing, or they buy cheap illustrations on Shutterstock. They don't have money to spend anyway. They will do the same horrible images with AI that they already do with shutterstock. If they "leave" the market, it will impact nobody."

cercatrova 4y ago

I honestly don't care how many jobs AI will replace, it's a neo-Luddite argument. The point of AI is to replace jobs, and I certainly won't stop human progress just because some people won't have a job in the future.

balls187 4y ago

Eventually, it will. Not today. Not tomorrow. But eventually.

spoonjim 4y ago

LOL. This guy doesn’t realize what DALL-E is going to be like in 18 months.

foxes 4y ago

HN on copepilot : NOoOoO muh hecken techerino tech job muh Linux muh source license blah blah blah ramble nooo muh codddeee aaaa HN on putting other people out of work: it’s fine it’s just the free market :)

sizzle 4y ago

Did AI tumor detection have any impact on the field of radiology?

sinuhe69 4y ago

Like every other kind of technology before, DALL-E and Co. will help the mass to create a lot of amusing and sometimes passable artworks. Just like the compact camera and the phone camera had helped create billions more photos compared to the previous generations of equipments. But arguably, the trillions of photos and billions of potential photographers didn't help to bring further the art of photography much. Combined with myriads photo apps, they help created tons of amusing and pleasant photo artworks. They raised the bar for what is considered a good, acceptable photo and montage work today. They made creating good photo work much faster and cheaper for the mass, and ways more accessible. However, they didn't change the standard for professional work because they still require the hand and the mind of a talented artist. It will democratize the illustration process but like in every democracy, the elites still set the tone and exercise enormous influences. In other word, new technology will skew the distribution to the right, increase the median dramatically and leave the old bottom half obsolete. But not the top 5%.

fxtentacle 4y ago

"when camera became cheap, and everybody had a good camera on their phones, people assumed it would be the death of professional photographers. But it was not." Prices for stock photography fell so low that it stopped being a viable way to pay for housing and food. All those displaced stock photographers then tried to get into adjacent markets, which ruined wedding photography prices, too. I predict the author will soon face increased competition by other storyboard artists. Those that used to do art which has now been replaced by AI.

CMCDragonkai 4y ago

This blog post seems invalidated by having the ability to pass graphical prompts in. So combined graphical and text prompts together with some constraints will be enough eventually.

pwinnski 4y ago
Almost every image in this blog post features existing images as input. The blog post may or may not be valid in the future, but it certainly isn't invalidated by something already included within it.

xtiansimon 4y ago

This is my first look at anything “DALL-E”. DALL-E doesn’t need to be better. It just needs to lower the bar that consumers can’t tell or don’t care about the differences. “So to all the people talking about the end of illustration and animation, or even art, be aware that art cannot die.“ Still could eat your lunch. Beware the Ides of March.

salawat 4y ago

I don't see the big deal with either DALL-E or Stable Diffusion. It's compositional value is nil. At best it's text-to-img mapping may help some with getting to learn what different artistic styles look like, but I see it as the same dynamic as GitHub CoPilot. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The more it's used, the more it's weights will be skewed toward SD'ness, and to be frank, I'm not entirely convinced that there won't be rapidly discovered "verbatim" reproductions of things as outputs that'll turn into legal challenges a la license enforcement. Further, the user experience is extremely disappointing. One is quickly left feeling as if one's time may be better spent articulating one's vision enough such that a human artist can make it happen. It's much like what I call "the hair stylist" problem. The hard part around communicating is figuring out the hairstylist vocabulary. DALL-E may make learning that easier. Then again, my track record with "meh, never happens" has been abysmal lately.

nickelcitymario 4y ago

The only reason we see articles like this about AI stealing (or not stealing) jobs is because we have a collective fantasy that generalized intelligence is right around the corner. It's not. But that doesn't mean we won't get there eventually. AI (and AR/VR, but that's another topic), to me, is like PCs in the early 80s. Everyone can kinda sorta theoretically understand the value, but the technology has not advanced enough to have a meaningful impact on our day to day lives, outside of very well defined problems. The use cases that most of us can think of require massive leaps in technology. Once upon a time, people thought of computers as fancy calculators. Steve Jobs had to compare them to bicycles to get people to understand the benefit. Computers were so bad for so long that any movie that tried to feature a hacker subplot had to come up with all kinds of crazy visuals to help the audience relate to this strange new world. Same with AI. We can see what it's doing now, and be disappointed when we realize it's nowhere near as good as we've been led to believe. Or we can zoom into some distant future where AI is just as conscious as anyone else, but super intelligent. What we struggle with is the in-between, the journey to getting there. DALL-E is amazing. One day we'll look back and be able to see how crucial of an advance this is. But the PR story around DALL-E is all smokes and mirrors. It's the classic tale: Scientists make a discovery; the general public doesn't understand the significance of the discovery; so someone (usually in marketing or PR) has to paint a picture to show how incredible it is, otherwise funding will dry up. That picture, inevitably, is both useful and inaccurate. For another analogy: Just like a map of the world is inaccurate but useful, so are these fantastical stories. We just need to remember: the map is not the territory. It's just a tool to help us navigate the territory.

mejutoco 4y ago
> Same with AI. We can see what it's doing now, and be disappointed when we realize it's nowhere near as good as we've been led to believe. I won't be disappointed. I will be relieved! Tech fetishism can have dangerous consequences, as we are seeing with self-driving cars.
- nickelcitymario 4y ago
  Don't self-driving cars still have a much better safety record (per mile driven) than regular cars?

mark_l_watson 4y ago

The author is probably correct, for the next several months. After that I would expect new types of careers for people who are good with “prompt text” and abilities to touch up generated images. In a few years, being really good with prompt text will probably be good enough. Last weekend I used DALL-E to make a 101 year old birthday card for my Dad and everyone loved it. Last week I started generating images for a sci-fi story I am writing.

pwinnski 4y ago

I keep thinking about AI image models' effects on illustration and comparing/contrasting with things like GitHub's CoPilot for code. Inasmuch as someone starts with an exact mental image and wants something matching that mental image, then no, it could be quite a while before an AI model is able to do that. Maybe six months, maybe six years, maybe never. As always with AI, it's hard to say. How often is it true that someone insists on something that exactly matches their mental image? I honestly don't know! If I write another novel, how picky am I going to be to be about the cover? If I get Stable Diffusion, or a future version of something similar, to generate a dozen images that match my text prompt, do I just pick the one I like best and lay some text over it? Or do I decide that no, I need something very specific, and hire someone to draw exactly what I want? I think one of the main criticisms of AI code generation is that you end up needing to be so specific with your "text prompts" that you're essentially writing the code yourself and letting the AI handle syntactic sugar. A sort of "AI IntelliSense™," if you will. But that's because we're developers. Like the illustrator in this piece, we have an exact idea of what we want, and nothing else will do. What if I were a non-technical person and could ask an AI model to give me code that collects names and email address into a database I can later use for a mailing list? Could an AI model do that? If not today, then surely soon. Isn't that a similar issue? Does it put me out of work? No, not immediately. But it does potentially eliminate an entire category of work, specifically the work that people generally use to learn how to be good developers. Will this cause problems with training future developers, since they have to rise above a certain skill level to exceed AI models? It might! I wonder if the same is true of illustrators. Maybe existing illustrators have their niche, but how hard will future illustrators have to work before they can exceed AI models?