18 ms·

The AI Unbundling

191 points by kaboro 4y ago

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
I don't understand the point the post is trying to make. Maybe it's generated? HN sure likes to upvote stuff with AI in the title.
- firasd 4y ago
  The article's point is: AI production and consumption is becoming so widespread that the tools and usage can't be controlled by a few entities
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Isn't there going to be the great bundling with AI? Contrary to the trend in the past of unbunding? He can't see the forrest for the trees: "I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet [...]" Most of those ideas will look shallow in the future and be generated by an AI, executed by an AI etc. aka the great bundling.
deleted 4y ago
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hertzrat 4y ago
Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team? The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all
- deleted 4y ago
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- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  This wasn't true of software, so I don't know that we should expect it to be true of AI.
  - mrfox321 4y ago
    But that's because the laws on software developed prior to tech becoming as powerful as they are now.
- gbasin 4y ago
  anti-trust law would prevent the most egregious forms of this
- awillen 4y ago
  The problem with patenting AI is that you have to describe how something works in order to patent it. The issue presently is that you can describe relatively obvious things (e.g. one click checkout) and patent those. AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to. My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.
  - jeffreyrogers 4y ago
    The patent would apply to the model's architecture rather than the trained values so the black box nature of deep learning doesn't matter too much.
- lacker 4y ago
  It's pretty rare that patent law makes a big difference in slowing down a field of software innovation. The main examples I can think of are eFax suing fax machine software companies, and Blackboard suing education companies. In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  It is heavily unlikely that there is exactly one route to intelligence: to take a card from biology, look at octopuses versus humans. Since only relatively specific architectures can be patented, I expect that one would have no issue circumventing any patent that could claimed.
megaman821 4y ago
I am not sure I see the unbundling here. AI generated art may be a threat to generic stock photography and small jobs for custom blog art, but artists higher up on the food chain now have a new tool for them to use. They can quickly generate a bunch of concepts to tryout ideas, and polish those into a higher quality piece of art than if left to their own devices.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    I think this will be many things. A force multiplier, allowing existing professionals to generate more art. The creation of a new profession. Digital artists are already doing a very different job with very different tools. These tools will be another step and there will be demand for human and generated art in different applications. The empowerment of non artists. Same as how digital art democratized art. This will let people without hours of skill generate images of their liking with relatively minimal effort. Anyone can generate scenarios or images, even if they aren't perfect. These aren't exclusive and will probably all happen at the same time. It will also 100 percent devalue artists work since it's now easier to meet people's needs. This won't make them obsolete, but it'll reduce demand and put people out of business.
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Devalue, yes. Put people out of work? That's less obvious to me. Imagine: - Instead of video advertising with a handful of regional variations, hundreds or thousands of variants tweaked for specific preferences, target profiles, as part of A/B testing, etc. Changes to accent, emphasis, copy, maybe even which parts of the product being advertised are focused on. - Increasing variation in open world game locations and interactions, with AI able to insert much more meaningful distinction between instances of a template (as compared with recent Assassins Creed games, where identical towns and forts are copy-pasted dozens of times all over the map). - Much greater accessibility of visual art as an accent for other kinds of creators— illustrations to accompany poetry, blog posts, fanfic, etc. - Increasing ability for AI to do first-cut assembly of video content, particularly review-type YouTubers (think: SkillUp, Critical Drinker) where the video is kind of secondary and the majority of the audience may even be listening to it as a podcast anyway. The AI being able to understand from the script what is under discussion and select matching clips would likely match or approach what This is far from a sure thing— sometimes people really are the buggy-whip manufacturers in a situation and technology completely displaces them. But other times (as with software development), the market and use-cases have expanded considerably faster than the efficiency gains made by better tooling.
hacsky 4y ago
Network effects apply to almost every industry, not just social media apps. FMCG companies are a great example. The reason Nestle, Unilever, P&G have so many brands is because they have a phenomenal distribution network. Even a crappy product is guaranteed to make millions of dollars in revenue.
MOARDONGZPLZ 4y ago
I am very, very excited about Stable Diffusion and similar technologies. I do see a ton of pushback from human artists who seem fairly venomous in their attacks. But I tend to believe that this will pass once we have a new normal and they will use these AI assisted techniques to enhance their abilities.
- sixQuarks 4y ago
  In the short term, It will certainly enhance artist’s abilities, Because artists still have that creative aspect that AI does not But what happens when AI becomes more creative than humans? There will really be no need for a human artist at that point.
brundolf 4y ago
I think "Creation" was the wrong word for the first step. "Ideation" gets across the idea better: that first stage is just "thinking of the thing"; "Substantiation" is then actually executing on it ("creating it") Otherwise- really good points, well-written
phailhaus 4y ago
I think his breakdown of the value chain is a bit redundant, and can more effectively be factored into: Creation, Distribution, and Consumption. With this framing, it is apparent that distribution has almost always been the target of major optimizations until AI came along: - Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally. - Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand. - Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced. That's not to say that we've ignored creation. We've built hundreds of tools to make producing content easier: word processors, Photoshop, and even TikTok to name a few. It's just that AI has recently taken a huge leap in this area. For that reason, I don't think "unbundling" is the right metaphor here.
bambax 4y ago
Good article, although "unbundling" is an odd choice of word. Before AI, the execution step was necessary, but not necessarily attached to the "coming up with an idea" step. Conceptual artists have for years (centuries?) produced ideas that were executed by others. AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are being removed as gatekeepers. A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model? If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to. If we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?
- harperlee 4y ago
  > If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to. If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format. In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.
  - akavi 4y ago
    What could contain information is a book of all 512x512 images that a human being would perceive as being "an image". Ie, the vast majority of possible 512x512 images look like random noise to humans. Excluding those massively shrinks the size of the book. So that does mean image model AI like dall-e/SD are effectively compression over this space of images that they can generate (which is at least attempting to emulate the space of 'meaningful images' to a human), since given a seed, they'll deterministically produce the same image, and that seed is much smaller than the information needed to describe every pixel in the image.
egypturnash 4y ago
Welcome to the world where every blog has a vaguely painterly smear of a header image that falls to pieces when you actually look at it. Kinda tacky, really.
- yunwal 4y ago
  Yeah, I really hope people stop just letting AI generate images with no human direction beyond the text prompt. It looks terrible 99% of the time, and Midjourney especially is so same-y. There are good uses for human guided AI, but I fear most people are down for accepting whatever the algorithm happens to crap out at you
gizmo 4y ago
Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change. Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant. Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be. Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't. Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists. There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  > People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art. I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures. In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues. I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.
JackFr 4y ago
Having recently watched the Warhol Diaries on Netflix, I can't help but think of the examples of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and think that calls for the death of the artist are premature. The funny thing is that I don't find Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat's work particularly compelling, and from the a technical perspective, I don't think either of them were blazing new paths, but what they (and Andy Warhol) offered was something Stable Diffusion simply cannot offer, that is, something new. You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring
- soared 4y ago
  It seems it is possible to achieve that, but it may look different. Since we still have to give text prompts to generate images, and these prompts need qualifiers (x subject “oil painting”) it seems possible that a prompt giver could generate images in a specific way to achieve their own unique style. Difficult now since the tools are new and don’t have a ton of features, but down the road if the tools are built out more and prompts get more nuanced I could see “prompt givers” as “artists with their own unique style”
cleandreams 4y ago
I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists. The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist. I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience). Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.
- pyaamb 4y ago
  Can Dall-E be extended to generate 3d models?
  - ryoshu 4y ago
    https://www.kaedim3d.com/ https://www.kaedim3d.com/ is working on 2D -> 3D.
- deleted 4y ago
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- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  I think if you dig into the latest research you would find that AI is much closer to what you’re imagining than you think. One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.
burlesona 4y ago
> I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher... You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around. In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off. In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed. If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.
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aaroninsf 4y ago
Hottake on skimming the article: people don't yet fully get where this is going (fast). In the unbundling story, the premise is I gather that what is disruptive atm is that what's left as the god-in-the-gaps human role, is now democratized in the the technological acceleration in the the creation-substantiation phase at the head of the snake. What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem. Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some. What I am saying is, before we are ready, the aspects which remain human-domain in the cybernetic collaboration between humans and AI in what well call "content generation," namely, the agency and the intention—the "idea" which today is, the prompt; the editorial and curatorial functions; the insight and lightbulb and all... ...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well. What inspires "art" or whatever else? The filtering of media streams (aka cultural discourse, the zeitgeist) and the identification of symmetries, analogies, serendipity, humor... whatever that is, it like the "substantiation" phase is going to be ceded to the super-human in a few years. I speculated recently to a friend that the way the fine-art market reacts to this is going to be interesting. We're going to have Wintermute on tap. I wondered if gallerists will represent AIs, or, spin them up long enough for them to emit some stream of work then be ceremoniously destroyed. Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways. Anyway. The writing is on the wall. And it's not in OUR handwriting.
mr_mitm 4y ago
These recent developments make wonder whether in 30 years we aren't streaming movies anymore, and instead entire personalized movies will be generated for us on demand, based on a few keywords and our past history of rating movies, browser activity, search terms, or whatever else the machines will know about us.
- riskable 4y ago
  Looking a little further, we will be generated on demand when AI deems it necessary; based on what the machines know about us. With the specific keywords/features it deemed best.
- usehackernews 4y ago
  The combination of recommended media (TikTok) and generated media (SD) makes me believe this future is inevitable. Content will be created specifically for you.
yubozhao 4y ago
With stable diffusion out and making it trivial to generate fake images, Blockchain and NFT are going to be more indispensable in proving authenticity
DisjointedHunt 4y ago
Anything this guy writes gets gobbled up and worshipped mindlessly to no end. The opening here was so crass i didn't bother reading the rest (yet) until i find a better time to do so and have put my strong feelings aside. The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line. Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.
- ryan93 4y ago
  They aren't publishers. Me posting a link to the NYTimes on facebook is not the same as writing a NYTimes article. That fact that NYTimes articles get more boost from the algorithm than a sketchy right wing site does not make facebook a publisher
  - DisjointedHunt 4y ago
    If your Intellectual Property is used in any commercial setting without reimbursement, that's theft. Just because you post a link somewhere, it does not automatically waive the commercial interests of the platform you're posting to. In another strain of the argument, you posting to Facebook and Facebook later choosing to rank and distribute that content to their liking with you having ZERO control over that is the equivalent of using individuals as proxies to steal and propagate content. You can't just start a website with stolen content plastered all over, say its coming "From the users" and deny any culpability.
ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
A lot of the discussion around AI now is about the transition of AI from tool to tool-user. Very few are considering how close we might be to the tool-user to tool-maker transition and how much more world changing that will be. We are at the cusp. https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...
inkcapmushroom 4y ago
> This image, like the first two in this Article, was created by AI (Midjourney, specifically). It is, like those two images, not quite right: I wanted “A door that is slightly open with light flooding through the crack”, but I ended up with a door with a crack of light down the middle and a literal flood of water; I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.
Hippieblog 4y ago
[dead]
dzonga 4y ago
people forget that art is something unique to the artist. you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings. reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art. but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style. and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities. it's the same reason, we tend to overlook countless paintings of trees done by street artists unless the style is so unique and evokes our emotions by beauty or novelty. for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and say AI art won't push artists out of jobs
yalogin 4y ago
What about the negative side of this? All these generators will be used for evil. Looks like we need a way to figure out if an image or video is real or not and we need it desperately. Not sure if we are working on that at all. The implications of not having that are huge.
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  These models won’t appear in a vacuum. Models will compete with other models designed to improve and report on other models.
djenendik 4y ago
The irony should be mentioned. many comments here point to human artists becoming obsolete, but it is a common refrain on this forum that people with art degrees already struggle to make a living. So which is it? I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.

191 points by kaboro 4y ago

I don't understand the point the post is trying to make. Maybe it's generated? HN sure likes to upvote stuff with AI in the title.

firasd 4y ago
The article's point is: AI production and consumption is becoming so widespread that the tools and usage can't be controlled by a few entities

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Isn't there going to be the great bundling with AI? Contrary to the trend in the past of unbunding? He can't see the forrest for the trees: "I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet [...]" Most of those ideas will look shallow in the future and be generated by an AI, executed by an AI etc. aka the great bundling.

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hertzrat 4y ago

Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team? The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all

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AbrahamParangi 4y ago
This wasn't true of software, so I don't know that we should expect it to be true of AI.
- mrfox321 4y ago
  But that's because the laws on software developed prior to tech becoming as powerful as they are now.
gbasin 4y ago
anti-trust law would prevent the most egregious forms of this
awillen 4y ago
The problem with patenting AI is that you have to describe how something works in order to patent it. The issue presently is that you can describe relatively obvious things (e.g. one click checkout) and patent those. AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to. My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  The patent would apply to the model's architecture rather than the trained values so the black box nature of deep learning doesn't matter too much.
lacker 4y ago
It's pretty rare that patent law makes a big difference in slowing down a field of software innovation. The main examples I can think of are eFax suing fax machine software companies, and Blackboard suing education companies. In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
It is heavily unlikely that there is exactly one route to intelligence: to take a card from biology, look at octopuses versus humans. Since only relatively specific architectures can be patented, I expect that one would have no issue circumventing any patent that could claimed.

megaman821 4y ago

I am not sure I see the unbundling here. AI generated art may be a threat to generic stock photography and small jobs for custom blog art, but artists higher up on the food chain now have a new tool for them to use. They can quickly generate a bunch of concepts to tryout ideas, and polish those into a higher quality piece of art than if left to their own devices.

mikepurvis 4y ago
I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I think this will be many things. A force multiplier, allowing existing professionals to generate more art. The creation of a new profession. Digital artists are already doing a very different job with very different tools. These tools will be another step and there will be demand for human and generated art in different applications. The empowerment of non artists. Same as how digital art democratized art. This will let people without hours of skill generate images of their liking with relatively minimal effort. Anyone can generate scenarios or images, even if they aren't perfect. These aren't exclusive and will probably all happen at the same time. It will also 100 percent devalue artists work since it's now easier to meet people's needs. This won't make them obsolete, but it'll reduce demand and put people out of business.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Devalue, yes. Put people out of work? That's less obvious to me. Imagine: - Instead of video advertising with a handful of regional variations, hundreds or thousands of variants tweaked for specific preferences, target profiles, as part of A/B testing, etc. Changes to accent, emphasis, copy, maybe even which parts of the product being advertised are focused on. - Increasing variation in open world game locations and interactions, with AI able to insert much more meaningful distinction between instances of a template (as compared with recent Assassins Creed games, where identical towns and forts are copy-pasted dozens of times all over the map). - Much greater accessibility of visual art as an accent for other kinds of creators— illustrations to accompany poetry, blog posts, fanfic, etc. - Increasing ability for AI to do first-cut assembly of video content, particularly review-type YouTubers (think: SkillUp, Critical Drinker) where the video is kind of secondary and the majority of the audience may even be listening to it as a podcast anyway. The AI being able to understand from the script what is under discussion and select matching clips would likely match or approach what This is far from a sure thing— sometimes people really are the buggy-whip manufacturers in a situation and technology completely displaces them. But other times (as with software development), the market and use-cases have expanded considerably faster than the efficiency gains made by better tooling.

hacsky 4y ago

Network effects apply to almost every industry, not just social media apps. FMCG companies are a great example. The reason Nestle, Unilever, P&G have so many brands is because they have a phenomenal distribution network. Even a crappy product is guaranteed to make millions of dollars in revenue.

MOARDONGZPLZ 4y ago

I am very, very excited about Stable Diffusion and similar technologies. I do see a ton of pushback from human artists who seem fairly venomous in their attacks. But I tend to believe that this will pass once we have a new normal and they will use these AI assisted techniques to enhance their abilities.

sixQuarks 4y ago
In the short term, It will certainly enhance artist’s abilities, Because artists still have that creative aspect that AI does not But what happens when AI becomes more creative than humans? There will really be no need for a human artist at that point.

brundolf 4y ago

I think "Creation" was the wrong word for the first step. "Ideation" gets across the idea better: that first stage is just "thinking of the thing"; "Substantiation" is then actually executing on it ("creating it") Otherwise- really good points, well-written

phailhaus 4y ago

I think his breakdown of the value chain is a bit redundant, and can more effectively be factored into: Creation, Distribution, and Consumption. With this framing, it is apparent that distribution has almost always been the target of major optimizations until AI came along: - Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally. - Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand. - Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced. That's not to say that we've ignored creation. We've built hundreds of tools to make producing content easier: word processors, Photoshop, and even TikTok to name a few. It's just that AI has recently taken a huge leap in this area. For that reason, I don't think "unbundling" is the right metaphor here.

bambax 4y ago

Good article, although "unbundling" is an odd choice of word. Before AI, the execution step was necessary, but not necessarily attached to the "coming up with an idea" step. Conceptual artists have for years (centuries?) produced ideas that were executed by others. AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are being removed as gatekeepers. A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model? If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to. If we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?

harperlee 4y ago
> If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to. If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format. In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.
- akavi 4y ago
  What could contain information is a book of all 512x512 images that a human being would perceive as being "an image". Ie, the vast majority of possible 512x512 images look like random noise to humans. Excluding those massively shrinks the size of the book. So that does mean image model AI like dall-e/SD are effectively compression over this space of images that they can generate (which is at least attempting to emulate the space of 'meaningful images' to a human), since given a seed, they'll deterministically produce the same image, and that seed is much smaller than the information needed to describe every pixel in the image.

egypturnash 4y ago

Welcome to the world where every blog has a vaguely painterly smear of a header image that falls to pieces when you actually look at it. Kinda tacky, really.

yunwal 4y ago
Yeah, I really hope people stop just letting AI generate images with no human direction beyond the text prompt. It looks terrible 99% of the time, and Midjourney especially is so same-y. There are good uses for human guided AI, but I fear most people are down for accepting whatever the algorithm happens to crap out at you

gizmo 4y ago

Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change. Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant. Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be. Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't. Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists. There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.

mejutoco 4y ago
> People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art. I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures. In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues. I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.

JackFr 4y ago

Having recently watched the Warhol Diaries on Netflix, I can't help but think of the examples of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and think that calls for the death of the artist are premature. The funny thing is that I don't find Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat's work particularly compelling, and from the a technical perspective, I don't think either of them were blazing new paths, but what they (and Andy Warhol) offered was something Stable Diffusion simply cannot offer, that is, something new. You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring

soared 4y ago
It seems it is possible to achieve that, but it may look different. Since we still have to give text prompts to generate images, and these prompts need qualifiers (x subject “oil painting”) it seems possible that a prompt giver could generate images in a specific way to achieve their own unique style. Difficult now since the tools are new and don’t have a ton of features, but down the road if the tools are built out more and prompts get more nuanced I could see “prompt givers” as “artists with their own unique style”

cleandreams 4y ago

I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists. The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist. I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience). Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.

pyaamb 4y ago
Can Dall-E be extended to generate 3d models?
- ryoshu 4y ago
  https://www.kaedim3d.com/ https://www.kaedim3d.com/ is working on 2D -> 3D.
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AbrahamParangi 4y ago
I think if you dig into the latest research you would find that AI is much closer to what you’re imagining than you think. One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.

burlesona 4y ago

> I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher... You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around. In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off. In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed. If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.

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aaroninsf 4y ago

Hottake on skimming the article: people don't yet fully get where this is going (fast). In the unbundling story, the premise is I gather that what is disruptive atm is that what's left as the god-in-the-gaps human role, is now democratized in the the technological acceleration in the the creation-substantiation phase at the head of the snake. What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem. Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some. What I am saying is, before we are ready, the aspects which remain human-domain in the cybernetic collaboration between humans and AI in what well call "content generation," namely, the agency and the intention—the "idea" which today is, the prompt; the editorial and curatorial functions; the insight and lightbulb and all... ...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well. What inspires "art" or whatever else? The filtering of media streams (aka cultural discourse, the zeitgeist) and the identification of symmetries, analogies, serendipity, humor... whatever that is, it like the "substantiation" phase is going to be ceded to the super-human in a few years. I speculated recently to a friend that the way the fine-art market reacts to this is going to be interesting. We're going to have Wintermute on tap. I wondered if gallerists will represent AIs, or, spin them up long enough for them to emit some stream of work then be ceremoniously destroyed. Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways. Anyway. The writing is on the wall. And it's not in OUR handwriting.

mr_mitm 4y ago

These recent developments make wonder whether in 30 years we aren't streaming movies anymore, and instead entire personalized movies will be generated for us on demand, based on a few keywords and our past history of rating movies, browser activity, search terms, or whatever else the machines will know about us.

riskable 4y ago
Looking a little further, we will be generated on demand when AI deems it necessary; based on what the machines know about us. With the specific keywords/features it deemed best.
usehackernews 4y ago
The combination of recommended media (TikTok) and generated media (SD) makes me believe this future is inevitable. Content will be created specifically for you.

yubozhao 4y ago

With stable diffusion out and making it trivial to generate fake images, Blockchain and NFT are going to be more indispensable in proving authenticity

DisjointedHunt 4y ago

Anything this guy writes gets gobbled up and worshipped mindlessly to no end. The opening here was so crass i didn't bother reading the rest (yet) until i find a better time to do so and have put my strong feelings aside. The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line. Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.

ryan93 4y ago
They aren't publishers. Me posting a link to the NYTimes on facebook is not the same as writing a NYTimes article. That fact that NYTimes articles get more boost from the algorithm than a sketchy right wing site does not make facebook a publisher
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  If your Intellectual Property is used in any commercial setting without reimbursement, that's theft. Just because you post a link somewhere, it does not automatically waive the commercial interests of the platform you're posting to. In another strain of the argument, you posting to Facebook and Facebook later choosing to rank and distribute that content to their liking with you having ZERO control over that is the equivalent of using individuals as proxies to steal and propagate content. You can't just start a website with stolen content plastered all over, say its coming "From the users" and deny any culpability.

ChaitanyaSai 4y ago

A lot of the discussion around AI now is about the transition of AI from tool to tool-user. Very few are considering how close we might be to the tool-user to tool-maker transition and how much more world changing that will be. We are at the cusp. https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...

inkcapmushroom 4y ago

> This image, like the first two in this Article, was created by AI (Midjourney, specifically). It is, like those two images, not quite right: I wanted “A door that is slightly open with light flooding through the crack”, but I ended up with a door with a crack of light down the middle and a literal flood of water; I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.

Hippieblog 4y ago

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dzonga 4y ago

people forget that art is something unique to the artist. you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings. reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art. but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style. and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities. it's the same reason, we tend to overlook countless paintings of trees done by street artists unless the style is so unique and evokes our emotions by beauty or novelty. for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and say AI art won't push artists out of jobs

yalogin 4y ago

What about the negative side of this? All these generators will be used for evil. Looks like we need a way to figure out if an image or video is real or not and we need it desperately. Not sure if we are working on that at all. The implications of not having that are huge.

kordlessagain 4y ago
These models won’t appear in a vacuum. Models will compete with other models designed to improve and report on other models.

djenendik 4y ago

The irony should be mentioned. many comments here point to human artists becoming obsolete, but it is a common refrain on this forum that people with art degrees already struggle to make a living. So which is it? I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.