5 ms·

I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. It makes me rethink my involvement in the cre

I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. It makes me rethink my involvement in the creation of software and its ethical implications.

jermaustin1 4y ago
Having worked with a lot of artists, they are seeing stable diffusion and other image generators as a way to generate lots of ideas. A base they would then ,usually starting from scratch, build their end product off of. So even though to a casual glance, these images look amazing, if you look closely, you see all the flaws that come with them being generated. Weird artifacts, a lack of symmetry that humans usually add to their creations. These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a professional artist paints the same scene.
- tartoran 4y ago
  > Having worked with a lot of artists, they are seeing stable diffusion and other image generators as a way to generate lots of ideas. But it also dillutes their own ideas. I know of painters painting AI generated stuff and that is likely a new genre but a lot of genuine artwork will lose interest on the market. It is what it is and don’t I love or hate it…
  - jermaustin1 4y ago
    You don't just paint a better version of the generated images, you look at a bunch of generated images, and get a better idea of what you want to paint from that. Say you know you want to do a portrait of a woman in armor, you can generate a dozen of those in around a minute on a 3090, look at the generated armors, the faces (usually all sorts of screwed up), and the composition. Its just a way to kickstart the creation process.
    - tartoran 4y ago
      Yes, I get that but if everyone’s doing it it becomes a race to the bottom sort of thing… I hope I am wrong and things turn out in a completely different direction that I can’t see now
    - Applejinx 4y ago
      You say 'look at the generated armors' etc. but this does not mention what you use to look with: the artist's eye. People so quickly assume that access to these tools will make everyone an artist, but the raw output is so lacking in a voice and intentionality. If you supply the voice and intentionality through your iterative process and a hybrid visual/text language playing the generator like a violin… you're playing the generator like a violin. Your artistic skills have been translated to a wholly new set of vocabularies, and it's your eye that is tested most. Can you see/imagine better than the next guy?
- dweekly 4y ago
  Yes - this will make artists hyper productive IMO; and will make a lot more people willing to make art! If you've ever had a little ditty and wondered what it would sound like as a violin concerto in D minor, now you can know! If you ever wanted your wife painted as a Rembrandt, there you have it. If your five year old comes up with an idea for a fun video game called Laser Chicken, now his friends can play it. Imagine pairing this with bespoke automated clothing output - take a photo of an outfit, verbally describe the changes you want to it ("a little more debonair, dark lapels, 1920's styling"), click a button, preview it as it would look on you in several recent pictures you took, and a week later your tailored suit arrives. Now for sneakers. Hats. Bags. Watches. The 20th century was about mass production to ensure everyone could have things: food, clothing, transport, entertainment. The 21st century may turn to expression: allowing each person to express themselves however they want in their goods and services. Or just following along to buy whatever your favorite tastemakers recommend. However involved you want to be! The world is about to get a lot weirder and more interesting.
  - protonbob 4y ago
    Making artists hyper productive will cheapen even further their output. If one artist can do the work that you are currently paying 8 to do, you only need to pay one artist that can wrangle these tools. I would agree that this is like 20th century mass production. To be clear, I don't necessarily think that mass production is a good thing either. In fact, it has been probably the most detrimental thing to our environment that humans have ever done.
    - skydhash 4y ago
      They cheapen the entry fees for learning, but the expectation will keep getting higher. It's like games where, even for indies, they won't accept N64 quality these days. Text to speech is quite good now, but people prefer real narrators. Everyone can create music with a cheap laptop and some midi keyboards, but only those really talented will make it.
      - Retric 4y ago
- protonbob 4y ago
  I would argue that the technology will soon be at a point where these flaws are much less visible and will then further cheapen the work done by a human.
- josephg 4y ago
  > These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a professional artist paints the same scene. The flaws in AI generated art were 100x as obvious in systems like this only a few years ago. In 5 years I doubt anyone will be able to tell the difference between AI and human art. When the photograph displaced most portrait painters, we invented a new type of artist - the photographer. I hope we’ll see the same thing here - artists who specialise in using stable diffusion (and friends) to make new art in a new way. This blog post is like one of the world’s first photographers saying “hey look how the photo changes when I move the subject relative to a light source!”. I can’t wait to see what results we get with deep expertise (and better algorithms). How long before we have filmmakers using AI to cast, direct and shoot their films?
  - samatman 4y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. It didn't happen with CGI, the uncanny valley hasn't been surmounted, car chases aside. The mulchers, as Bruce Sterling calls them, have a fresh meat problem. They've consumed all the words, and all the pictures, and we already know that feeding them their own mulch gives worse results. We're not at the scale limit for data but we know where it is. It's not clear that refinements to the mulching process will create mulch good enough to tell apart from creation. It might. But it might not.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      > with CGI, the uncanny valley hasn't been surmounted I'm not so sure about this. While some scenes are still obviously using CGI, I think a lot of CGI in movies now passes unnoticed, even entirely digital characters. We certainly notice when those characters do things humans can't do, of course, and when budget or schedule or both result in things being pushed out too early, but how would we know when digital characters look natural on-screen? We wouldn't!
  - hbn 4y ago
    I wonder if anyone is gonna take advantage of this point in time where the average person isn't aware of these breakthrough AI models, and sets up themself an account as a professional-grade artist on Fiverr, offering to draw highly detailed landscapes or whatever where the client can provide reference material and ideas. You generate the image in 30 minutes (maybe less if you get the process down to a science), then wait around for a few weeks to keep up the illusion that you're actually doing the drawing by hand, and send it off to your satisfied client. You could be charging hundreds of dollars for your "artistic services," and have dozens of clients going on simultaneously.
- Retric 4y ago
  The issue is an ever smaller percentage of the population can be successful at ever more difficult opportunities that result from ever better automation. Manual labor still exists, but it’s a vastly smaller percentage of overall jobs. Productivity and automation seem like the same thing on the surface. However, the argument for a long tail of creators in an ever more wealth society breaks down when AI can start writing niche romance novels not just barely coherent news articles etc. In theory we might have ever more new types of jobs, but automation isn’t just getting better it’s also getting faster.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Meanwhile I've gotten into a lot of very heated arguments with artists who fear this will actively destroy their livelihood. I lean towards seeing these developments as a massive positive for a society as a whole, but I find it hard to ignore that. Most of the flaws you see today will be reduced over the next few months, and people will get better of finding ways of working around them. It will cause substantial upheaval for a lot of people, including job losses especially on the low end. Maybe many, or even all, of those job losses will be compensated with additional jobs elsewhere, but we don't know.
koala_man 4y ago
The fact that making work more efficient can be a problem highlights some fundamental flaws in our society.
- protonbob 4y ago
  I agree. But I also think that meaningful work that provides value to your community and to yourself is something that provides some of the greatest satisfaction available to man. If you remove that ability by either automating someone's job or reducing it to a kitschy "artisan" label which implies that their work is now inefficient and flawed compared to the efficient automated way, you are taking away something important about the human experience that cannot be replaced by leisure activities.
  - xapata 4y ago
    > ... greatest satisfaction available to man. What about women? Yeah, yeah, I know it's uncouth to worry about gendered language. On to the real topic ... > reducing [a job] to a kitschy "artisan" label Automation doesn't (only) reduce jobs, it (also) allows people to get meta. They are now free to think about how the job gets done, rather than constrained by time to only do the job the way they did it yesterday. Or, they can do other jobs that they prefer. I used to live in an apartment without a washing machine, and where the closest laundromat was a 20-minute walk away. I got used to a bucket-and-plunger method for washing my clothes. It was enjoyable in that "I am the salt of the earth" way. When I found a used sink-attachable tiny washing machine on Craigslist, I had a smile on my face the rest of the day.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  I think it revolves around just one fundamental question that's become obvious since the start of the industrial revolution: why have workers if you can get work done without them? You can answer this question rather quickly; very often, the benefits of being able to produce something en masse outweigh the initial drop in quality due to adopting an automation process that is not yet mature but evolves over time, and that's been proven many times in the past two centuries. It's just the speed and the scale that have been following logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as more and more work becomes automated. If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the flaws you mention - or the flaw, I think, singular. They happen exactly in this one point.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
balutdev 4y ago
Technology is the amoral multiplier of output from using the mind & nature to reduce effort. If the highly ethical are avoiding involvement the advances will be left to the greedy and oppressive.
kirse 4y ago
All of these AI image-algorithm furnaces are ultimately powered by the raw material shoveled in by humans. If we stop providing the algorithms with unique material the capabilities will decrease. Further, when you automate one portion of the work you still need the human brain to strategize and orchestrate at a higher level. Job opportunities have only increased as a result of this, not decreased.
atemerev 4y ago
This happened before, and this will happen again. There are no more typists, nor data entry personnel. Hardly any human travel agents. No bank tellers. Human translators are next in line. However, much more positions in machine learning and data science. Software _is_ eating the world. The only viable survival strategy is learning to code. I don't believe that not everyone can learn to code. I teach people to code, and I have yet to meet one that couldn't learn, assuming some general intelligence (about the same that you need to learn a foreign language).
- bitwize 4y ago
  The coding skills I'm trained in will be handled by Copilot or its successor in a few years. I haven't gotten around to faffing about with Python and Tensorflow or whatever yet.
  - lightsandaounds 4y ago
    Don't think of "coding" as writing javascript to make websites. Think of "coding" as "talking to computers". As software eats the world, the value of people who can talk to computers will increase. Even if it takes fewer programmers to make a website, there will be more jobs for programmers to automate concept art production pipelines. You may not be writing javascript or python in fifteen years (I bet you will) but there will be code to tell the automation services what to do. The interesting question is the general population becoming more tech savvy? Will this change in work encourage more students to learn how to code (whatever that looks like in twenty years)? Or will the demand for coders rise without a corresponding increase in supply?
  - atemerev 4y ago
    Well, in software engineering, like in many modern professions, you don’t get trained once and then work for life. Learning is continuous, and this is not optional anymore.
    - schroeding 4y ago
      ... will there ever be a (better) Copilot for COBOL or PL1? This may be an escape hatch, just throw yourself at legacy mainframes, this may work for an additional 20-40 years. :D
onion2k 4y ago
I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. Technology has always enabled the creation of jobs faster than it displaces workers though. Sure, horse manure shovelers lamented the automobile, but people who became mechanics and petrol pump attendants didn't. The same will likely be true for artists - this will suck for them, but the proliferation of easily generated art assets will likely enable the creation of entirely new jobs we haven't considered yet.
whateveracct 4y ago
I doubt computers are gonna be good at physically using pencils or paintbrushes. Art will have value long after every commenter here is rotten in the ground.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
>I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. Yes, and isn't it wonderful? Ideally machines will do all of our work as soon as possible.
- bckr 4y ago
  Only if we engage in our political processes enough to ensure democracy survives this transition
boppo1 4y ago
I am a person who will, to a fairly serious extent, have my marketable skills displaced by this. You shouldn't worry too much about it. The ratio of people the printing press helped to those it hurt approaches 1.

jermaustin1 4y ago

Having worked with a lot of artists, they are seeing stable diffusion and other image generators as a way to generate lots of ideas. A base they would then ,usually starting from scratch, build their end product off of. So even though to a casual glance, these images look amazing, if you look closely, you see all the flaws that come with them being generated. Weird artifacts, a lack of symmetry that humans usually add to their creations. These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a professional artist paints the same scene.

tartoran 4y ago
> Having worked with a lot of artists, they are seeing stable diffusion and other image generators as a way to generate lots of ideas. But it also dillutes their own ideas. I know of painters painting AI generated stuff and that is likely a new genre but a lot of genuine artwork will lose interest on the market. It is what it is and don’t I love or hate it…
- jermaustin1 4y ago
  You don't just paint a better version of the generated images, you look at a bunch of generated images, and get a better idea of what you want to paint from that. Say you know you want to do a portrait of a woman in armor, you can generate a dozen of those in around a minute on a 3090, look at the generated armors, the faces (usually all sorts of screwed up), and the composition. Its just a way to kickstart the creation process.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Yes, I get that but if everyone’s doing it it becomes a race to the bottom sort of thing… I hope I am wrong and things turn out in a completely different direction that I can’t see now
  - Applejinx 4y ago
    You say 'look at the generated armors' etc. but this does not mention what you use to look with: the artist's eye. People so quickly assume that access to these tools will make everyone an artist, but the raw output is so lacking in a voice and intentionality. If you supply the voice and intentionality through your iterative process and a hybrid visual/text language playing the generator like a violin… you're playing the generator like a violin. Your artistic skills have been translated to a wholly new set of vocabularies, and it's your eye that is tested most. Can you see/imagine better than the next guy?
dweekly 4y ago
Yes - this will make artists hyper productive IMO; and will make a lot more people willing to make art! If you've ever had a little ditty and wondered what it would sound like as a violin concerto in D minor, now you can know! If you ever wanted your wife painted as a Rembrandt, there you have it. If your five year old comes up with an idea for a fun video game called Laser Chicken, now his friends can play it. Imagine pairing this with bespoke automated clothing output - take a photo of an outfit, verbally describe the changes you want to it ("a little more debonair, dark lapels, 1920's styling"), click a button, preview it as it would look on you in several recent pictures you took, and a week later your tailored suit arrives. Now for sneakers. Hats. Bags. Watches. The 20th century was about mass production to ensure everyone could have things: food, clothing, transport, entertainment. The 21st century may turn to expression: allowing each person to express themselves however they want in their goods and services. Or just following along to buy whatever your favorite tastemakers recommend. However involved you want to be! The world is about to get a lot weirder and more interesting.
- protonbob 4y ago
  Making artists hyper productive will cheapen even further their output. If one artist can do the work that you are currently paying 8 to do, you only need to pay one artist that can wrangle these tools. I would agree that this is like 20th century mass production. To be clear, I don't necessarily think that mass production is a good thing either. In fact, it has been probably the most detrimental thing to our environment that humans have ever done.
  - skydhash 4y ago
    They cheapen the entry fees for learning, but the expectation will keep getting higher. It's like games where, even for indies, they won't accept N64 quality these days. Text to speech is quite good now, but people prefer real narrators. Everyone can create music with a cheap laptop and some midi keyboards, but only those really talented will make it.
    - Retric 4y ago
protonbob 4y ago
I would argue that the technology will soon be at a point where these flaws are much less visible and will then further cheapen the work done by a human.
josephg 4y ago
> These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a professional artist paints the same scene. The flaws in AI generated art were 100x as obvious in systems like this only a few years ago. In 5 years I doubt anyone will be able to tell the difference between AI and human art. When the photograph displaced most portrait painters, we invented a new type of artist - the photographer. I hope we’ll see the same thing here - artists who specialise in using stable diffusion (and friends) to make new art in a new way. This blog post is like one of the world’s first photographers saying “hey look how the photo changes when I move the subject relative to a light source!”. I can’t wait to see what results we get with deep expertise (and better algorithms). How long before we have filmmakers using AI to cast, direct and shoot their films?
- samatman 4y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. It didn't happen with CGI, the uncanny valley hasn't been surmounted, car chases aside. The mulchers, as Bruce Sterling calls them, have a fresh meat problem. They've consumed all the words, and all the pictures, and we already know that feeding them their own mulch gives worse results. We're not at the scale limit for data but we know where it is. It's not clear that refinements to the mulching process will create mulch good enough to tell apart from creation. It might. But it might not.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    > with CGI, the uncanny valley hasn't been surmounted I'm not so sure about this. While some scenes are still obviously using CGI, I think a lot of CGI in movies now passes unnoticed, even entirely digital characters. We certainly notice when those characters do things humans can't do, of course, and when budget or schedule or both result in things being pushed out too early, but how would we know when digital characters look natural on-screen? We wouldn't!
- hbn 4y ago
  I wonder if anyone is gonna take advantage of this point in time where the average person isn't aware of these breakthrough AI models, and sets up themself an account as a professional-grade artist on Fiverr, offering to draw highly detailed landscapes or whatever where the client can provide reference material and ideas. You generate the image in 30 minutes (maybe less if you get the process down to a science), then wait around for a few weeks to keep up the illusion that you're actually doing the drawing by hand, and send it off to your satisfied client. You could be charging hundreds of dollars for your "artistic services," and have dozens of clients going on simultaneously.
Retric 4y ago
The issue is an ever smaller percentage of the population can be successful at ever more difficult opportunities that result from ever better automation. Manual labor still exists, but it’s a vastly smaller percentage of overall jobs. Productivity and automation seem like the same thing on the surface. However, the argument for a long tail of creators in an ever more wealth society breaks down when AI can start writing niche romance novels not just barely coherent news articles etc. In theory we might have ever more new types of jobs, but automation isn’t just getting better it’s also getting faster.
vidarh 4y ago
Meanwhile I've gotten into a lot of very heated arguments with artists who fear this will actively destroy their livelihood. I lean towards seeing these developments as a massive positive for a society as a whole, but I find it hard to ignore that. Most of the flaws you see today will be reduced over the next few months, and people will get better of finding ways of working around them. It will cause substantial upheaval for a lot of people, including job losses especially on the low end. Maybe many, or even all, of those job losses will be compensated with additional jobs elsewhere, but we don't know.

koala_man 4y ago

The fact that making work more efficient can be a problem highlights some fundamental flaws in our society.

protonbob 4y ago
I agree. But I also think that meaningful work that provides value to your community and to yourself is something that provides some of the greatest satisfaction available to man. If you remove that ability by either automating someone's job or reducing it to a kitschy "artisan" label which implies that their work is now inefficient and flawed compared to the efficient automated way, you are taking away something important about the human experience that cannot be replaced by leisure activities.
- xapata 4y ago
  > ... greatest satisfaction available to man. What about women? Yeah, yeah, I know it's uncouth to worry about gendered language. On to the real topic ... > reducing [a job] to a kitschy "artisan" label Automation doesn't (only) reduce jobs, it (also) allows people to get meta. They are now free to think about how the job gets done, rather than constrained by time to only do the job the way they did it yesterday. Or, they can do other jobs that they prefer. I used to live in an apartment without a washing machine, and where the closest laundromat was a 20-minute walk away. I got used to a bucket-and-plunger method for washing my clothes. It was enjoyable in that "I am the salt of the earth" way. When I found a used sink-attachable tiny washing machine on Craigslist, I had a smile on my face the rest of the day.
phoe-krk 4y ago
I think it revolves around just one fundamental question that's become obvious since the start of the industrial revolution: why have workers if you can get work done without them? You can answer this question rather quickly; very often, the benefits of being able to produce something en masse outweigh the initial drop in quality due to adopting an automation process that is not yet mature but evolves over time, and that's been proven many times in the past two centuries. It's just the speed and the scale that have been following logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as more and more work becomes automated. If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the flaws you mention - or the flaw, I think, singular. They happen exactly in this one point.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

balutdev 4y ago

Technology is the amoral multiplier of output from using the mind & nature to reduce effort. If the highly ethical are avoiding involvement the advances will be left to the greedy and oppressive.

kirse 4y ago

All of these AI image-algorithm furnaces are ultimately powered by the raw material shoveled in by humans. If we stop providing the algorithms with unique material the capabilities will decrease. Further, when you automate one portion of the work you still need the human brain to strategize and orchestrate at a higher level. Job opportunities have only increased as a result of this, not decreased.

atemerev 4y ago

This happened before, and this will happen again. There are no more typists, nor data entry personnel. Hardly any human travel agents. No bank tellers. Human translators are next in line. However, much more positions in machine learning and data science. Software _is_ eating the world. The only viable survival strategy is learning to code. I don't believe that not everyone can learn to code. I teach people to code, and I have yet to meet one that couldn't learn, assuming some general intelligence (about the same that you need to learn a foreign language).

bitwize 4y ago
The coding skills I'm trained in will be handled by Copilot or its successor in a few years. I haven't gotten around to faffing about with Python and Tensorflow or whatever yet.
- lightsandaounds 4y ago
  Don't think of "coding" as writing javascript to make websites. Think of "coding" as "talking to computers". As software eats the world, the value of people who can talk to computers will increase. Even if it takes fewer programmers to make a website, there will be more jobs for programmers to automate concept art production pipelines. You may not be writing javascript or python in fifteen years (I bet you will) but there will be code to tell the automation services what to do. The interesting question is the general population becoming more tech savvy? Will this change in work encourage more students to learn how to code (whatever that looks like in twenty years)? Or will the demand for coders rise without a corresponding increase in supply?
- atemerev 4y ago
  Well, in software engineering, like in many modern professions, you don’t get trained once and then work for life. Learning is continuous, and this is not optional anymore.
  - schroeding 4y ago
    ... will there ever be a (better) Copilot for COBOL or PL1? This may be an escape hatch, just throw yourself at legacy mainframes, this may work for an additional 20-40 years. :D

onion2k 4y ago

I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. Technology has always enabled the creation of jobs faster than it displaces workers though. Sure, horse manure shovelers lamented the automobile, but people who became mechanics and petrol pump attendants didn't. The same will likely be true for artists - this will suck for them, but the proliferation of easily generated art assets will likely enable the creation of entirely new jobs we haven't considered yet.

whateveracct 4y ago

I doubt computers are gonna be good at physically using pencils or paintbrushes. Art will have value long after every commenter here is rotten in the ground.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago

>I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. Yes, and isn't it wonderful? Ideally machines will do all of our work as soon as possible.

bckr 4y ago
Only if we engage in our political processes enough to ensure democracy survives this transition

boppo1 4y ago

I am a person who will, to a fairly serious extent, have my marketable skills displaced by this. You shouldn't worry too much about it. The ratio of people the printing press helped to those it hurt approaches 1.