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I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in s

by gdubs 4y ago

I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Duchamp poked the art establishment in the eye with his 'readymades' (urinals on the gallery wall, etc.) Warhol with his 'factory' making silkscreens. The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week was ironic – apparently people aren't aware that the impressionists themselves were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. The camera and photography made many painters sit up and say, 'hey, it can't just be about "image" anymore' – enter abstract expressionism, fauvism, cubism, etc. Work that shifted the focus from the image represented in the painting ('a window into a world') onto the surface of the canvas itself: Rothko, Albers, etc. The thing is, people have wild misconceptions about what this technology does. Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. When in fact what's been done is to take all of this online knowledge and create an incredible new tool with it. Like a music synthesizer times a million. It's understandable why this technology makes people uncomfortable. There are legit fears about displacement, economic uncertainty, etc. But we are fundamentally tool makers – it's arguably intrinsically part of what makes us human (borrowing from Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden"). If I were back in the art department last century, I'm pretty sure we'd be really excitedly discussing how these new tools will enable entirely new forms of expression. And sure, there'd be the old guard saying it was awful, and 'not Art'. This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context.

zasdffaa 4y ago
This is the kind of comment about art that is measured, constructive, non-absolutist, and too rare on HN in posts about art (and urban dictionary has an entry for 'reverse monet' cos I wondered, but I'd skip that one if I were you).
- gdubs 4y ago
  Ha! Oh dear. Here's the SFW link to what I was referencing: https://twitter.com/matthen2/status/1566424523125276672?s=20&t=1Z_TmHokUmcfL_VdjxnNdw https://twitter.com/matthen2/status/1566424523125276672?s=20... (And thanks :)
zackmorris 4y ago
I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died. That sounds a bit negative I guess, but techniques like stable diffusion will be applied to other problem domains, so all other art forms like music and creative writing will be automated within the next 5-10 years. And if computers can do that, they can do anything. Because that's how our brains work. Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides. Although science will only have recipes for creating consciousness, it will never be able to explain meaning, because it has nothing to say about it. That's the domain of personal experience, faith, the study of magic, etc. The big question for me is: if a liberal arts degree is worth even less than it is today, what will people do for work? We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution. This was predicted decades ago (see Asimov, Kurzweil, etc), but we're not prepared for what's coming. I just don't see us switching to UBI before we're subjugated beneath the yoke of corporate AI that gradually changes out human workers for machines. We're in the endgame now. I still hold out some small hope that kids today will run with this and do creative stuff we can't even imagine. Or will we just merge with AI when the Singularity arrives around 2040? Who knows.
- aortega 4y ago
  >I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died. It's like saying that computers killed artists. AI is just a tool, it still need a human in control and guiding it, can't generate anything on his own (yet). If anything, this can help creativity.
  - zackmorris 4y ago
    If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then an AI is a mind for the mind. Admittedly, my acquired lack of creativity after a lifetime of struggle is the very thing preventing me from seeing beyond this horizon. Too old to begin the training and all that! Ironically, I find the not-knowing to be somewhat comforting.
    - aortega 4y ago
mherdeg 4y ago
As a non-artist whose compensation is, so far, unaffected by ML-generated images, I'm more interested in the effects the technology has on people. Over the past 150 years it became possible to compute cube roots in milliseconds, instead of minutes. Slide rules became obsolete, and the things we learn to do do arithmetic changed. Over the past 20 years, the way we look up arbitrary facts changed. We learned to construct Web search engine queries and we learned to evaluate the quality of results. Other library skills are still relevant, but certain kinds of rote memorization become obsolete. Now people are rapidly learning a new "prompt language" which uses English words but combines them in a way which is for now something like computer programming (given an input string, compile it to an output image). Will "prompt languages" for text / image / video generation systems turn into a full-fledged, non-English language that you can learn? What will be the social effects of people learning and using this language to communicate?
- bigcheesegs 4y ago
  I think the much more likely outcome is further research on making the prompts smarter and more human like.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  I think it will be interesting, but not result in total annihilation of the existing field. As a general counterexample, TV did not kill radio despite it having more dimensions for creativity. Radio changed, but it did not die, and was quite comfortable for many decades after. Coallescing on prompt languages is probably unlikely, if only because part of the thing that defines a language is that a community has rules, both opaque and explicit, about what is acceptable in the language and what is not, and there's no effort to standardize inputs.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    sign makers were put out of business en masse at a certain point, and there were quite a few, and it is high-skill, high-commitment work. Some kinds of print arts related to magazines for example, were next. There is a chapter in the Stanford AI Index (2021) that opens with "The rise of AI will inevitable raise questions of how much these technologies will impact business, labor and the economy in general .. " there are winners and losers here, not just interesting questions. In the 1930s America there was mass unemployment among many skilled "workers" .. can't imagine the 1990s ex-Soviet economies.. I dont think these questions are neutral or innocent.
lifthrasiir 4y ago
> Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. In my latest series of tweets [1] I tried to argue that this is not the case in a less technical way, not sure if I was successful though. For anyone not fluent in Korean, my argument was as follows: Stable Diffusion was trained with a data set composed of about 2.32 billion text-image pairs. The model itself by comparison weighs about 4 GB. If the model somehow stored those images (completely disregarding texts) in the compressed form, it would be less than 2 bytes (EDITED) per each image. Whoever downloaded an image from the internet can see this is absurd. In reality 4 GB of data is the juice extracted from the data set, and if you could actually recover an original image from it then the juice must have had a recognizable residue, which would be pretty undesirable. [1] https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1565543214068600832 https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1565543214068600832
- wccrawford 4y ago
  20 bytes? Wouldn't that be about 2 bytes per image?
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    Ah, yes, a sloppy calculation in my part. I probably wanted to say something like 20 bits in the original tweet.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Textual inversion also takes an entire concept (including context, style, and 3D attributes) and fits it into 768 float32s / 4KB.
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    That's a different topic, as you need the entire model to "decompress" that 4 KB data. I'm talking about the model itself.
- Animats 4y ago
  Another discovery that something thought to be uniquely human really isn't that hard.
stolenmerch 4y ago
Same here. Software dev with an MFA in Studio Art. Generative Art was a topic 20 years ago in school and my feeling it was politely tolerated as conceptual, but not aesthetic. The difference now is that the models and algorithms and amount of data actually produce decent results. GPT-3 writing as opposed to the markov chain experimental writing decades ago is profound. Image creation even more so. I see exactly this backlash in most art schools until eveything is so mingled a new generation just doesn't care.
- calibas 4y ago
  Generative art produced "decent results" 20 years ago, it just took a skilled artist instead of typing the right prompt into Midjourney.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
I agree 100% with this. The only thing I would add is that a key property of art is that it must make the audience feel something. It seems very clear that AI-generated art is making people feel something, and I think that what it makes people feel will change over time, as these tools become more accepted in the art world. I also think it's very interesting that these tools enable a near absence of technique. I tend to be one of those who doesn't value technique very much. For instance, I believe I've commented on this site before that while I certainly appreciate the time, effort, and technique that goes into photorealistic painting, I don't think it brings a whole lot to the table beyond what a photograph would. This is strictly a personal assessment, of course -- others are free to, and do disagree with me. I just feel as though photorealistic art leaves less room in it for the viewer than other forms. (Incidentally, I think this also applies to AI art, and may be a part of the reaction to it.)
blacksmith_tb 4y ago
I suppose the 'photocopier' argument is pretty similar to collage - sure, it's recombining existing things, but presumably they'd all agree Max Ernst wasn't just a machine?
deleted 4y ago
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mc32 4y ago
I think art communities should have the ability to set parameters for what they accept. Whether it be something like "only African artists" or "only Holga cameras." If for this one, only generated by people, so be it. If someone wants to set up a community that only accepts AI-generated images, then that's okay too.
- practice9 4y ago
  It's true. It's not like online communities are fighting for physical space. For attention maybe, but that's debatable. The headlines like "AI art banned!!!" just generate more clicks as this thing is fresh new
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
>were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. You make a good point that the trend of automating art is not a recent one. At some point I think a line in the sand must be drawn where the human artist is no longer the primary conceptualizer. Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion.
- klez 4y ago
  > Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion. I read an article[0] on the subject the other day. At some point it said that some art tools are inherently easy to use. Part of the difference between an amateur and an actual artist is in the mastery of such tool. Think of a phone camera for example. It's extremely easy to take more than decent pictures with it. But it takes a good photographer to make art with it. Bringing it back to the topic at hand it means that yes, describing what you want to see to this kind of software is easy on a basic level. But you get a picture that looks like any other. Instead, you need to speak the language of the software to obtain a better materialization of your vision, and that requires some sort of mastery of that tool. That would be the difference between an illustration made with stable diffusion and actual art. [0] https://www.indiscreto.org/non-fa-tutto-il-computer-il-ritorno-di-vecchie-perplessita-nellarte-digitale/ https://www.indiscreto.org/non-fa-tutto-il-computer-il-ritor... (in Italian, sorry)
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    If you used an AI to write a million DALL-E prompts for a million different outputs - are you an artist if you pick the nicest looking output and call it art?
    - green_on_black 4y ago
      Yes.
    - misterprime 4y ago
      I'm still trying to figure out a proper input to get a picture of this scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
kuroguro 4y ago
I like the more eastern idea that art is mastery of skill and art pieces are more of a byproduct we can observe. Photoshopping or making an AI make art still takes skill, so it's still art - just in a different category. Putting a robot in a boxing match or an AI in a human car race wouldn't make much sense, but robot vs robot would.
- vintermann 4y ago
  There is a word for that in the west as well, we just call it craftsmanship. The artist is the one we allow to decide what the purpose of the work is, even if they outsource all the work to apprentices, assistants, or for that matter computers.
  - deleted 4y ago
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superb-owl 4y ago
I totally agree [1]. Once all the panic dies down, I think you'll see these technologies enabling artists more than hurting them. The displacement problem isn't quite there yet. While it's a good replacement for stock photo aggregators, it's not a great replacement for commissioning an actual artist. E.g. if you want a consistent look and feel for each of your images, you'll struggle. It's only the C-listers, who create heaps of bland stock photos in hopes of earning royalties, who have something to worry about. As the technology improves, you'll see a whole new tranche of creators who are able to harness it to create amazing new things. [1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-future-of-art-is-artificial https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-future-of-art-is-artifi...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > Once all the panic dies down, I think you'll see these technologies enabling artists more than hurting them. This has happened in a different (non-AI, but "technology enables") way already with other forms of creativity. While it is true that more people become enabled, its not clear that this is overall a good thing. The benefits of more people empowered and enabled to engage in self-expression has to be traded off against the problems associated with discovery caused by their work becoming a part of the cultural milieu. People making art in private is almost certainly a good thing without limit; people making art and then making it public is not so clear - most of the work people create (even the best) is just not worth being public, but the self-limiting discrimination that this implies is in short supply in most of us. Yes, it's good you made it. No, it shouldn't be online or public, almost all the time.
- asddubs 4y ago
  I think it'll displace a chunk of what artists do. Anything where there don't have to be super precise specifications for the end result, where there's some leeway and you just need something that goes into a general direction. Which is a non insignificant chunk, and maybe kind of unfortunately also the jobs where you can be more creative about what you're doing. Like if I'm making a magic-like card game and I need illustrations for my playing cards, I could use an AI for that. If I want a comic strip or an illustration of a specific object, it's probably a poor fit.
- 4y ago
kodah 4y ago
Anecdotally I dated an artist for a short time who upon entering my home proceeded to ask me how much I paid for my art and why I would pay for something as awful as what I have. My art was made by a friend of mine who works in a union factory in Texas. Art is his real joy and I was able to snag some pieces from when we were in college together. It's easy to write off that the pieces are just sentimental and therefore subject to sentimental value, but really, his work is very abstract and each piece (if you can snag them in order) describes a time in his life. I tried to explain to this person how art to me is the story not told or the story as I see it. More recently I had the opportunity to really appreciate his work when I was on an LSD trip, but that's a story for another time.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  I was reading this and waiting for the point where you say that his pieces sell for 10s of millions of dollars now :)
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  In my experience, artists are completely divorced from economics, and the concept of the market, while striving to be a recipient of it - making the oppressive desperation their whole identity For those formally educated, schools should really focus on the economics more instead of relying on magic The reason to me is that people that buy contemporary art (stuff from living artists) are already going out of their way to do so, knowing that it is divorced from the concept of investment or stores of value. But for other living artists not to really understand the motives or empathize with the customers, going as far to criticize them for any number of reasons (daring to question the stated price, having a taste at all) really undermines the point of bothering with living artists at all.
largepeepee 4y ago
Art is whatever the rich and influential patron who pays for it decides. They can afford to pay off the press, change the narrative and overpay the artist. Be it the de Medici in the Renaissance or CIA and state department backing abstract expressionism.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I disagree. You're describing a very small subset of the world of art.
thih9 4y ago
> The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week I haven't found the HN discussion; I have found a 2017 paper [1] that had relevant examples [2]. [1]: https://junyanz.github.io/CycleGAN/ https://junyanz.github.io/CycleGAN/ [2]: https://taesung.me/cyclegan/2017/03/25/monet-to-photo-summary.html https://taesung.me/cyclegan/2017/03/25/monet-to-photo-summar...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
phreack 4y ago
Others have chimed in already but I was inspired by this idea: > Like a music synthesizer times a million. Even now, every once in a while I find people arguing that synths are not "real music". Also DJs, etc. generating songs using pre-made samples. I think it's a very apt comparison, where tools become more and more available and barrier of entry gets lower, I don't believe art will die but rather just change into new forms, and what's now revolutionary will become just a very commonplace tool in the future, just like synths, and "real" artists will keep on existing alongside.
quitit 4y ago
Many of the discussions today sound similar to the ones I read about during the advent of earlier creative leaps – which I think merely serves to highlight the importance of this advancement. However, I do still remember plenty of the discussions around DTP and the computerisation of various creative industries. The themes are similar, while some benefits are lost and many are gained - some people are fixated on what is lost, while forgetting that we're growing the field rather than forcing others to abandon the craft. It is, after all, just another tool. Which brings me to a topic which seems to never go out of fashion: Purism/Conservatism. Like most discussions that are centred in conservatism/purism, there's always a thread of hypocrisy, because this type of person will use themselves as the golden benchmark to what is acceptable. To use an example: a purist painter of earlier times might shun the modern purist painter for the simple act of purchasing pre-made paints. They might bemoan that they didn't make their own pigments and mix up their own paints. So while this online art community might ban AI work, it merely an action that excludes themselves. AI opens the door to many who otherwise wouldn't have the capability of producing beautiful pieces, just as digital painting did, and the number of those people will be larger than current # of digital painters. They should have just made a subcategory on their website for AI and used it to bring new relevance to their platform.
- xani_ 4y ago
  >Like most discussions that are centred in conservatism/purism, there's always a thread of hypocrisy, because this type of person will use themselves as the golden benchmark to what is acceptable. > To use an example: a purist painter of earlier times might shun the modern purist painter for the simple act of purchasing pre-made paints. They might bemoan that they didn't make their own pigments and mix up their own paints. That I think is pretty much why this stupid discussion is still going - people considering their work (or just stuff they enjoy) "art" want other things to not be it to feel better.
yieldcrv 4y ago
aside from showcasing, you have to factor in how the bottom is now out from MANY freelance artists who were already fairly lucky to have clients paying them $5/pop for example, in the last two weeks, promotional flyers for parties in my area have been all AI generated, because Stable Diffusion is free and DALL-E 2 completely fumbled with their limited access and data credit system its kind of game-over for the promo art trade, the transactions that were happening, are not happening
xani_ 4y ago
>Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Of course people practising it would say that it is an art. And of course they would discount stuff that is beneath them as not art. "I'm creative, I don't just copy stuff I see!", just to feel better about themselves. So someone might say code is not an art, it's same as any other engineering. But code can clearly create art pieces, whether directly (say a shader generating pretty picture) or indirectly (AI training and generating pictures based on that). So, what, do we just say "art is any product that you can experience and have feelings about?". Nah, can't discriminate this and that based on that vague expression! We might even accidentally call blacksmith an artist if we go too far! /s
SMAAART 4y ago
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was published in 1935, almost a century ago, and yet not much has changed.
cjohnson318 4y ago
I paint a fair bit. Artists all know how hard it is to innovate, and how difficult it is to faithfully physically represent ideas, images, and emotions that they experience internally. People don't respect works created by algorithms because people feel algorithms (1) do not have a rich internal state, that is (2) challenging to express, (3) will one day die, and (4) never occur again. There's analogues in music. We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares. People just want to hear Miles Davis and Bill Evans do it.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  > We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares. That's definitely not true. In the areas that make money with some semblance of reliability for the artists (low budget film / game scores esp. asset flippers, shitty TV shows, music for ads, etc), people are going to be more than happy with a magic "make music" button without having to pay for a composer. Like, if you thing that anything in this video is out of reach for today's AIs... https://youtu.be/QgU9H9dECt8 https://youtu.be/QgU9H9dECt8
  - cjohnson318 4y ago
    That's a very good point, I hadn't thought of that part of the music industry. Thanks.
Sophistifunk 4y ago
Yes, it really is storing all those images inside it, as well as an evolved NN compression algorithm specific to that dataset.
totetsu 4y ago
I enjoyed this work called 'art is' by poet George Quasha that consists of interviews with artist answering what 'art is'. hundreds of answers over decades and no two the same https://vimeo.com/323912060 https://vimeo.com/323912060
TomSwirly 4y ago
Typing prompts into a program until you get an image you like does not make you an artist. Duchamp was already one of the great painters in the world when he showed the readymades - and there's a lot of evidence that he made them, what a great joke if so.
marktangotango 4y ago
> This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context. I find this is true of a lot of topics, too bad there's not some way to shorten the time between shallow to more useful/informative debate. Your post above does that for this topic, thanks for that.

by gdubs 4y ago

zasdffaa 4y ago

This is the kind of comment about art that is measured, constructive, non-absolutist, and too rare on HN in posts about art (and urban dictionary has an entry for 'reverse monet' cos I wondered, but I'd skip that one if I were you).

gdubs 4y ago
Ha! Oh dear. Here's the SFW link to what I was referencing: https://twitter.com/matthen2/status/1566424523125276672?s=20&t=1Z_TmHokUmcfL_VdjxnNdw https://twitter.com/matthen2/status/1566424523125276672?s=20... (And thanks :)

zackmorris 4y ago

I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died. That sounds a bit negative I guess, but techniques like stable diffusion will be applied to other problem domains, so all other art forms like music and creative writing will be automated within the next 5-10 years. And if computers can do that, they can do anything. Because that's how our brains work. Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides. Although science will only have recipes for creating consciousness, it will never be able to explain meaning, because it has nothing to say about it. That's the domain of personal experience, faith, the study of magic, etc. The big question for me is: if a liberal arts degree is worth even less than it is today, what will people do for work? We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution. This was predicted decades ago (see Asimov, Kurzweil, etc), but we're not prepared for what's coming. I just don't see us switching to UBI before we're subjugated beneath the yoke of corporate AI that gradually changes out human workers for machines. We're in the endgame now. I still hold out some small hope that kids today will run with this and do creative stuff we can't even imagine. Or will we just merge with AI when the Singularity arrives around 2040? Who knows.

aortega 4y ago
>I'll always remember 2022 as the year that creativity died. It's like saying that computers killed artists. AI is just a tool, it still need a human in control and guiding it, can't generate anything on his own (yet). If anything, this can help creativity.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then an AI is a mind for the mind. Admittedly, my acquired lack of creativity after a lifetime of struggle is the very thing preventing me from seeing beyond this horizon. Too old to begin the training and all that! Ironically, I find the not-knowing to be somewhat comforting.
  - aortega 4y ago

mherdeg 4y ago

As a non-artist whose compensation is, so far, unaffected by ML-generated images, I'm more interested in the effects the technology has on people. Over the past 150 years it became possible to compute cube roots in milliseconds, instead of minutes. Slide rules became obsolete, and the things we learn to do do arithmetic changed. Over the past 20 years, the way we look up arbitrary facts changed. We learned to construct Web search engine queries and we learned to evaluate the quality of results. Other library skills are still relevant, but certain kinds of rote memorization become obsolete. Now people are rapidly learning a new "prompt language" which uses English words but combines them in a way which is for now something like computer programming (given an input string, compile it to an output image). Will "prompt languages" for text / image / video generation systems turn into a full-fledged, non-English language that you can learn? What will be the social effects of people learning and using this language to communicate?

bigcheesegs 4y ago
I think the much more likely outcome is further research on making the prompts smarter and more human like.
bobthepanda 4y ago
I think it will be interesting, but not result in total annihilation of the existing field. As a general counterexample, TV did not kill radio despite it having more dimensions for creativity. Radio changed, but it did not die, and was quite comfortable for many decades after. Coallescing on prompt languages is probably unlikely, if only because part of the thing that defines a language is that a community has rules, both opaque and explicit, about what is acceptable in the language and what is not, and there's no effort to standardize inputs.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  sign makers were put out of business en masse at a certain point, and there were quite a few, and it is high-skill, high-commitment work. Some kinds of print arts related to magazines for example, were next. There is a chapter in the Stanford AI Index (2021) that opens with "The rise of AI will inevitable raise questions of how much these technologies will impact business, labor and the economy in general .. " there are winners and losers here, not just interesting questions. In the 1930s America there was mass unemployment among many skilled "workers" .. can't imagine the 1990s ex-Soviet economies.. I dont think these questions are neutral or innocent.

lifthrasiir 4y ago

> Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. In my latest series of tweets [1] I tried to argue that this is not the case in a less technical way, not sure if I was successful though. For anyone not fluent in Korean, my argument was as follows: Stable Diffusion was trained with a data set composed of about 2.32 billion text-image pairs. The model itself by comparison weighs about 4 GB. If the model somehow stored those images (completely disregarding texts) in the compressed form, it would be less than 2 bytes (EDITED) per each image. Whoever downloaded an image from the internet can see this is absurd. In reality 4 GB of data is the juice extracted from the data set, and if you could actually recover an original image from it then the juice must have had a recognizable residue, which would be pretty undesirable. [1] https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1565543214068600832 https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1565543214068600832

wccrawford 4y ago
20 bytes? Wouldn't that be about 2 bytes per image?
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  Ah, yes, a sloppy calculation in my part. I probably wanted to say something like 20 bits in the original tweet.
minimaxir 4y ago
Textual inversion also takes an entire concept (including context, style, and 3D attributes) and fits it into 768 float32s / 4KB.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  That's a different topic, as you need the entire model to "decompress" that 4 KB data. I'm talking about the model itself.
Animats 4y ago
Another discovery that something thought to be uniquely human really isn't that hard.

stolenmerch 4y ago

Same here. Software dev with an MFA in Studio Art. Generative Art was a topic 20 years ago in school and my feeling it was politely tolerated as conceptual, but not aesthetic. The difference now is that the models and algorithms and amount of data actually produce decent results. GPT-3 writing as opposed to the markov chain experimental writing decades ago is profound. Image creation even more so. I see exactly this backlash in most art schools until eveything is so mingled a new generation just doesn't care.

calibas 4y ago
Generative art produced "decent results" 20 years ago, it just took a skilled artist instead of typing the right prompt into Midjourney.

actually_a_dog 4y ago

I agree 100% with this. The only thing I would add is that a key property of art is that it must make the audience feel something. It seems very clear that AI-generated art is making people feel something, and I think that what it makes people feel will change over time, as these tools become more accepted in the art world. I also think it's very interesting that these tools enable a near absence of technique. I tend to be one of those who doesn't value technique very much. For instance, I believe I've commented on this site before that while I certainly appreciate the time, effort, and technique that goes into photorealistic painting, I don't think it brings a whole lot to the table beyond what a photograph would. This is strictly a personal assessment, of course -- others are free to, and do disagree with me. I just feel as though photorealistic art leaves less room in it for the viewer than other forms. (Incidentally, I think this also applies to AI art, and may be a part of the reaction to it.)

blacksmith_tb 4y ago

I suppose the 'photocopier' argument is pretty similar to collage - sure, it's recombining existing things, but presumably they'd all agree Max Ernst wasn't just a machine?

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mc32 4y ago

I think art communities should have the ability to set parameters for what they accept. Whether it be something like "only African artists" or "only Holga cameras." If for this one, only generated by people, so be it. If someone wants to set up a community that only accepts AI-generated images, then that's okay too.

practice9 4y ago
It's true. It's not like online communities are fighting for physical space. For attention maybe, but that's debatable. The headlines like "AI art banned!!!" just generate more clicks as this thing is fresh new

JacobThreeThree 4y ago

>were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. You make a good point that the trend of automating art is not a recent one. At some point I think a line in the sand must be drawn where the human artist is no longer the primary conceptualizer. Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion.

klez 4y ago
> Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion. I read an article[0] on the subject the other day. At some point it said that some art tools are inherently easy to use. Part of the difference between an amateur and an actual artist is in the mastery of such tool. Think of a phone camera for example. It's extremely easy to take more than decent pictures with it. But it takes a good photographer to make art with it. Bringing it back to the topic at hand it means that yes, describing what you want to see to this kind of software is easy on a basic level. But you get a picture that looks like any other. Instead, you need to speak the language of the software to obtain a better materialization of your vision, and that requires some sort of mastery of that tool. That would be the difference between an illustration made with stable diffusion and actual art. [0] https://www.indiscreto.org/non-fa-tutto-il-computer-il-ritorno-di-vecchie-perplessita-nellarte-digitale/ https://www.indiscreto.org/non-fa-tutto-il-computer-il-ritor... (in Italian, sorry)
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  If you used an AI to write a million DALL-E prompts for a million different outputs - are you an artist if you pick the nicest looking output and call it art?
  - green_on_black 4y ago
    Yes.
  - misterprime 4y ago
    I'm still trying to figure out a proper input to get a picture of this scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

kuroguro 4y ago

I like the more eastern idea that art is mastery of skill and art pieces are more of a byproduct we can observe. Photoshopping or making an AI make art still takes skill, so it's still art - just in a different category. Putting a robot in a boxing match or an AI in a human car race wouldn't make much sense, but robot vs robot would.

vintermann 4y ago
There is a word for that in the west as well, we just call it craftsmanship. The artist is the one we allow to decide what the purpose of the work is, even if they outsource all the work to apprentices, assistants, or for that matter computers.
- deleted 4y ago
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superb-owl 4y ago

I totally agree [1]. Once all the panic dies down, I think you'll see these technologies enabling artists more than hurting them. The displacement problem isn't quite there yet. While it's a good replacement for stock photo aggregators, it's not a great replacement for commissioning an actual artist. E.g. if you want a consistent look and feel for each of your images, you'll struggle. It's only the C-listers, who create heaps of bland stock photos in hopes of earning royalties, who have something to worry about. As the technology improves, you'll see a whole new tranche of creators who are able to harness it to create amazing new things. [1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-future-of-art-is-artificial https://superbowl.substack.com/p/the-future-of-art-is-artifi...

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> Once all the panic dies down, I think you'll see these technologies enabling artists more than hurting them. This has happened in a different (non-AI, but "technology enables") way already with other forms of creativity. While it is true that more people become enabled, its not clear that this is overall a good thing. The benefits of more people empowered and enabled to engage in self-expression has to be traded off against the problems associated with discovery caused by their work becoming a part of the cultural milieu. People making art in private is almost certainly a good thing without limit; people making art and then making it public is not so clear - most of the work people create (even the best) is just not worth being public, but the self-limiting discrimination that this implies is in short supply in most of us. Yes, it's good you made it. No, it shouldn't be online or public, almost all the time.
asddubs 4y ago
I think it'll displace a chunk of what artists do. Anything where there don't have to be super precise specifications for the end result, where there's some leeway and you just need something that goes into a general direction. Which is a non insignificant chunk, and maybe kind of unfortunately also the jobs where you can be more creative about what you're doing. Like if I'm making a magic-like card game and I need illustrations for my playing cards, I could use an AI for that. If I want a comic strip or an illustration of a specific object, it's probably a poor fit.
4y ago

kodah 4y ago

Anecdotally I dated an artist for a short time who upon entering my home proceeded to ask me how much I paid for my art and why I would pay for something as awful as what I have. My art was made by a friend of mine who works in a union factory in Texas. Art is his real joy and I was able to snag some pieces from when we were in college together. It's easy to write off that the pieces are just sentimental and therefore subject to sentimental value, but really, his work is very abstract and each piece (if you can snag them in order) describes a time in his life. I tried to explain to this person how art to me is the story not told or the story as I see it. More recently I had the opportunity to really appreciate his work when I was on an LSD trip, but that's a story for another time.

jupp0r 4y ago
I was reading this and waiting for the point where you say that his pieces sell for 10s of millions of dollars now :)
yieldcrv 4y ago
In my experience, artists are completely divorced from economics, and the concept of the market, while striving to be a recipient of it - making the oppressive desperation their whole identity For those formally educated, schools should really focus on the economics more instead of relying on magic The reason to me is that people that buy contemporary art (stuff from living artists) are already going out of their way to do so, knowing that it is divorced from the concept of investment or stores of value. But for other living artists not to really understand the motives or empathize with the customers, going as far to criticize them for any number of reasons (daring to question the stated price, having a taste at all) really undermines the point of bothering with living artists at all.

largepeepee 4y ago

Art is whatever the rich and influential patron who pays for it decides. They can afford to pay off the press, change the narrative and overpay the artist. Be it the de Medici in the Renaissance or CIA and state department backing abstract expressionism.

JohnFen 4y ago
I disagree. You're describing a very small subset of the world of art.

thih9 4y ago

> The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week I haven't found the HN discussion; I have found a 2017 paper [1] that had relevant examples [2]. [1]: https://junyanz.github.io/CycleGAN/ https://junyanz.github.io/CycleGAN/ [2]: https://taesung.me/cyclegan/2017/03/25/monet-to-photo-summary.html https://taesung.me/cyclegan/2017/03/25/monet-to-photo-summar...

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phreack 4y ago

Others have chimed in already but I was inspired by this idea: > Like a music synthesizer times a million. Even now, every once in a while I find people arguing that synths are not "real music". Also DJs, etc. generating songs using pre-made samples. I think it's a very apt comparison, where tools become more and more available and barrier of entry gets lower, I don't believe art will die but rather just change into new forms, and what's now revolutionary will become just a very commonplace tool in the future, just like synths, and "real" artists will keep on existing alongside.

quitit 4y ago

Many of the discussions today sound similar to the ones I read about during the advent of earlier creative leaps – which I think merely serves to highlight the importance of this advancement. However, I do still remember plenty of the discussions around DTP and the computerisation of various creative industries. The themes are similar, while some benefits are lost and many are gained - some people are fixated on what is lost, while forgetting that we're growing the field rather than forcing others to abandon the craft. It is, after all, just another tool. Which brings me to a topic which seems to never go out of fashion: Purism/Conservatism. Like most discussions that are centred in conservatism/purism, there's always a thread of hypocrisy, because this type of person will use themselves as the golden benchmark to what is acceptable. To use an example: a purist painter of earlier times might shun the modern purist painter for the simple act of purchasing pre-made paints. They might bemoan that they didn't make their own pigments and mix up their own paints. So while this online art community might ban AI work, it merely an action that excludes themselves. AI opens the door to many who otherwise wouldn't have the capability of producing beautiful pieces, just as digital painting did, and the number of those people will be larger than current # of digital painters. They should have just made a subcategory on their website for AI and used it to bring new relevance to their platform.

xani_ 4y ago
>Like most discussions that are centred in conservatism/purism, there's always a thread of hypocrisy, because this type of person will use themselves as the golden benchmark to what is acceptable. > To use an example: a purist painter of earlier times might shun the modern purist painter for the simple act of purchasing pre-made paints. They might bemoan that they didn't make their own pigments and mix up their own paints. That I think is pretty much why this stupid discussion is still going - people considering their work (or just stuff they enjoy) "art" want other things to not be it to feel better.

yieldcrv 4y ago

aside from showcasing, you have to factor in how the bottom is now out from MANY freelance artists who were already fairly lucky to have clients paying them $5/pop for example, in the last two weeks, promotional flyers for parties in my area have been all AI generated, because Stable Diffusion is free and DALL-E 2 completely fumbled with their limited access and data credit system its kind of game-over for the promo art trade, the transactions that were happening, are not happening

xani_ 4y ago

>Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Of course people practising it would say that it is an art. And of course they would discount stuff that is beneath them as not art. "I'm creative, I don't just copy stuff I see!", just to feel better about themselves. So someone might say code is not an art, it's same as any other engineering. But code can clearly create art pieces, whether directly (say a shader generating pretty picture) or indirectly (AI training and generating pictures based on that). So, what, do we just say "art is any product that you can experience and have feelings about?". Nah, can't discriminate this and that based on that vague expression! We might even accidentally call blacksmith an artist if we go too far! /s

SMAAART 4y ago

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was published in 1935, almost a century ago, and yet not much has changed.

cjohnson318 4y ago

I paint a fair bit. Artists all know how hard it is to innovate, and how difficult it is to faithfully physically represent ideas, images, and emotions that they experience internally. People don't respect works created by algorithms because people feel algorithms (1) do not have a rich internal state, that is (2) challenging to express, (3) will one day die, and (4) never occur again. There's analogues in music. We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares. People just want to hear Miles Davis and Bill Evans do it.

jcelerier 4y ago
> We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares. That's definitely not true. In the areas that make money with some semblance of reliability for the artists (low budget film / game scores esp. asset flippers, shitty TV shows, music for ads, etc), people are going to be more than happy with a magic "make music" button without having to pay for a composer. Like, if you thing that anything in this video is out of reach for today's AIs... https://youtu.be/QgU9H9dECt8 https://youtu.be/QgU9H9dECt8
- cjohnson318 4y ago
  That's a very good point, I hadn't thought of that part of the music industry. Thanks.

Sophistifunk 4y ago

Yes, it really is storing all those images inside it, as well as an evolved NN compression algorithm specific to that dataset.

totetsu 4y ago

I enjoyed this work called 'art is' by poet George Quasha that consists of interviews with artist answering what 'art is'. hundreds of answers over decades and no two the same https://vimeo.com/323912060 https://vimeo.com/323912060

TomSwirly 4y ago

Typing prompts into a program until you get an image you like does not make you an artist. Duchamp was already one of the great painters in the world when he showed the readymades - and there's a lot of evidence that he made them, what a great joke if so.

marktangotango 4y ago

> This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context. I find this is true of a lot of topics, too bad there's not some way to shorten the time between shallow to more useful/informative debate. Your post above does that for this topic, thanks for that.