5 ms·

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

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.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learning that 10%, plus the new entrants wouldn't be burdened by having to unlearn a lot of things that were now better done in a different way. Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression. Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.
    - petra 4y ago
      I've read a little bit about prompt engineering. The author said the stuff he needed to learn to be good at using stable diffusion, is about art history - knowing many art styles and their parts. So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles. Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it. But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.
time_to_smile 4y ago
I don't think AI generated art is even a threat to stock photography, but rather clip art... which isn't too disruptive in my view. I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore thumb. Just like the clip art ascetic quickly becomes recognizable and somewhat nauseating, so too is AI generated art already starting to feel that way. As far as aiding experts I don't imagine synthetic art will be nearly as game changing as the Adobe suite. I do a fair bit of writing and find GPT-3 to be completely unnecessary for "quickly generating a bunch of concepts". I assume that visual arts, like writers, already have a bunch of ideas in their head for what to do. That's never the bottle neck. Writers block happens but it's not because you can't think of a general concept, it's because implementing that specific concept into text is what's hard.
- andreilys 4y ago
  I’m curious why do you think that AI generation will plateau at its current quality level?
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    Same reason that self driving cars have plateaued. The things that are really important for that last mile are also really hard and we're not really sure how to get there. The output between all the major AI image synthesis tools, while impressive, is quite clearly very high dimensional interpolation, and it shares the same limitations in that space as it does the 2d space. We've already thrown insane amounts of data and compute resources at the problem and it's made the things that were done well in the past even better but doesn't move us towards solving the hard parts.
    - andreilys 4y ago
      Self driving cars and generating AI are two completely different problem sets. Particularly as one deals with the world of atoms, where the cost of a mistake is much higher. There are already models that work to “aesthetically” rate images, and the results are quite promising. To think we won’t see leaps in quality over the coming months/years is narrow sighted.
andreilys 4y ago
How do you think artists “higher up the food chain” got there? Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up. If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  oh no, all those blue collar arts jobs are going to be lost! They'll have to retrain as classical guitarists.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Do you have some evidence of this being how we are currently getting quality artists? Talking with one digital artist, my impression was that stock art plus the ever-declining ad CPM rate eliminated most of the lower-level work years ago.
  - andreilys 4y ago
    I don’t see why AI generation would be restricted to stock art. There are plenty of very impressive results already that will displace artists further down the chain. I think of it more like, If an artist can support themselves doing commissions of low quality art so they can support their high quality art, that’s better than if they had to drive Uber. https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463219712 https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463...
    - simiones 4y ago
      The tweet you shared looks like low-effort stock art with a "deep" idea that I have already seen thousands of renditions of. It looks quite similar to a PowerPoint of 36 images picked from stock sites with (slightly fancier) fade transitions between them, and a background soundtrack.
  - soared 4y ago
    There are still plenty of entry and lower/mid level graphic artists working at creative agencies, ad agencies, etc. it’s possible some may be replaced but their skills would still likely be needed if AI is doing most of the work for edits, adjustments, exporting out of .PSD, etc
yojo 4y ago
If it’s a 10x force multiplier, then one person could do the work of 10. There are two possible outcomes: 1) the lower rate per piece enabled by higher productivity unlocks a much larger market for commissioned work. No one has to lose their job, people make up the price difference in volume. 2) there is not a much larger market waiting for cheaper art. The existing pool of artists is too big, and some of them need to find new work. My guess is lowering the price does grow the market some, but not enough to avoid displacing at least some of the artists. Whether that’s 10% or 99% depends on how good these tools ultimately end up being.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  AI is not a "force multiplier" in any literal or semi-literal way. Having an mediocre version of an image isn't something that gives an artist much of a leg up on producing a good version. If you want something a diffusion model can produce, you can get it for nearly free. If you want something significantly better, you have to pay an artist significant money for it.
  - thunderbird120 4y ago
    Except it is actually if you've been following the workflows which have popped up since stable diffusion's release. These models are not limited to just making a image which vaguely matches some description. They can also inpaint specific portions of an image, turn a vague sketch into a finished looking image, and blend together different images in convincing ways. A workflow for creating a high quality looking piece goes something like this: 1) Quick, low quality sketch 2) Generate detailed scene based on that sketch 3) Fix obvious errors by re-generating specific parts of the image
    - joe_the_user 4y ago
      I haven't heard of anything like this but I haven't following closely. I also have questions, what is the "Generate detailed scene based on that sketch" process? Can an algorithm do this? Can a person easily do this? I'd be more impressed than with the raw pictures. Similarly with your #3.

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.
pessimizer 4y ago
But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learning that 10%, plus the new entrants wouldn't be burdened by having to unlearn a lot of things that were now better done in a different way. Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.
- wpietri 4y ago
  It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression. Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.
  - petra 4y ago
    I've read a little bit about prompt engineering. The author said the stuff he needed to learn to be good at using stable diffusion, is about art history - knowing many art styles and their parts. So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles. Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it. But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.

time_to_smile 4y ago

I don't think AI generated art is even a threat to stock photography, but rather clip art... which isn't too disruptive in my view. I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore thumb. Just like the clip art ascetic quickly becomes recognizable and somewhat nauseating, so too is AI generated art already starting to feel that way. As far as aiding experts I don't imagine synthetic art will be nearly as game changing as the Adobe suite. I do a fair bit of writing and find GPT-3 to be completely unnecessary for "quickly generating a bunch of concepts". I assume that visual arts, like writers, already have a bunch of ideas in their head for what to do. That's never the bottle neck. Writers block happens but it's not because you can't think of a general concept, it's because implementing that specific concept into text is what's hard.

andreilys 4y ago
I’m curious why do you think that AI generation will plateau at its current quality level?
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  Same reason that self driving cars have plateaued. The things that are really important for that last mile are also really hard and we're not really sure how to get there. The output between all the major AI image synthesis tools, while impressive, is quite clearly very high dimensional interpolation, and it shares the same limitations in that space as it does the 2d space. We've already thrown insane amounts of data and compute resources at the problem and it's made the things that were done well in the past even better but doesn't move us towards solving the hard parts.
  - andreilys 4y ago
    Self driving cars and generating AI are two completely different problem sets. Particularly as one deals with the world of atoms, where the cost of a mistake is much higher. There are already models that work to “aesthetically” rate images, and the results are quite promising. To think we won’t see leaps in quality over the coming months/years is narrow sighted.

andreilys 4y ago

How do you think artists “higher up the food chain” got there? Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up. If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.

ForHackernews 4y ago
oh no, all those blue collar arts jobs are going to be lost! They'll have to retrain as classical guitarists.
wpietri 4y ago
Do you have some evidence of this being how we are currently getting quality artists? Talking with one digital artist, my impression was that stock art plus the ever-declining ad CPM rate eliminated most of the lower-level work years ago.
- andreilys 4y ago
  I don’t see why AI generation would be restricted to stock art. There are plenty of very impressive results already that will displace artists further down the chain. I think of it more like, If an artist can support themselves doing commissions of low quality art so they can support their high quality art, that’s better than if they had to drive Uber. https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463219712 https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463...
  - simiones 4y ago
    The tweet you shared looks like low-effort stock art with a "deep" idea that I have already seen thousands of renditions of. It looks quite similar to a PowerPoint of 36 images picked from stock sites with (slightly fancier) fade transitions between them, and a background soundtrack.
- soared 4y ago
  There are still plenty of entry and lower/mid level graphic artists working at creative agencies, ad agencies, etc. it’s possible some may be replaced but their skills would still likely be needed if AI is doing most of the work for edits, adjustments, exporting out of .PSD, etc

yojo 4y ago

If it’s a 10x force multiplier, then one person could do the work of 10. There are two possible outcomes: 1) the lower rate per piece enabled by higher productivity unlocks a much larger market for commissioned work. No one has to lose their job, people make up the price difference in volume. 2) there is not a much larger market waiting for cheaper art. The existing pool of artists is too big, and some of them need to find new work. My guess is lowering the price does grow the market some, but not enough to avoid displacing at least some of the artists. Whether that’s 10% or 99% depends on how good these tools ultimately end up being.

joe_the_user 4y ago
AI is not a "force multiplier" in any literal or semi-literal way. Having an mediocre version of an image isn't something that gives an artist much of a leg up on producing a good version. If you want something a diffusion model can produce, you can get it for nearly free. If you want something significantly better, you have to pay an artist significant money for it.
- thunderbird120 4y ago
  Except it is actually if you've been following the workflows which have popped up since stable diffusion's release. These models are not limited to just making a image which vaguely matches some description. They can also inpaint specific portions of an image, turn a vague sketch into a finished looking image, and blend together different images in convincing ways. A workflow for creating a high quality looking piece goes something like this: 1) Quick, low quality sketch 2) Generate detailed scene based on that sketch 3) Fix obvious errors by re-generating specific parts of the image
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    I haven't heard of anything like this but I haven't following closely. I also have questions, what is the "Generate detailed scene based on that sketch" process? Can an algorithm do this? Can a person easily do this? I'd be more impressed than with the raw pictures. Similarly with your #3.