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>It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods

>It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet? I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

ljp_206 4y ago
I am becoming more and more convinced that many techy folks near the AI scene saw that SD et alia can create an image that convincingly (and perhaps even indistinguishably) looks like a very nice digital painting, and based on that data point alone are calling artists obsolete.
- idontpost 4y ago
  I've played around with Dall-E a bit and based on trying to create weird ideas like an army of toddlers in plate armor riding corgis into a medieval battle or a bear riding a bicycle pulling a semi truck, I'm fully convinced that it's over-blown. It can recreate data close to what it has already seen, just like all neural network techniques. It does poorly outside that domain.
moultano 4y ago
Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes. I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN get distorted because you have people sharing their views on art here, even though they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do. Maybe you'd be fine with reading a comic book where everyone has seven melting fingers, but people who take comic books seriously as an artistic medium would not.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    > I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first. Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1]. Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant. Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant. The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration. The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant. > Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes. I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on <$2,000 laptop. That's not 2 years. Do you think hands are going to be a long term roadblock? As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/stable_diffusion_how_to_draw_an_owl_frame/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...
    - simiones 4y ago
      But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB. Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.
      - _aavaa_ 4y ago
        And you are free to search through the whole catalog of google results until you find an owl that looks exactly like you want. Though this is going to get harder as you want something more specific than a simple owl. But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I recently went to stable diffusion for some art for a D&D campaign guide, to make the thing more immersive. While the pictures are impressive, there are a lot of things about the generated art that just don't make sense: In one picture, a tower had a staircase down 1/3rd of the way from the door to the ground, just stopping at that point. Most had issues like this. Several other pictures I wanted were impossible to generate. The field of "art that needs human communication skills" seems to be a lot broader than just scientific illustration.
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    A significant chunk of what you're describing can be solved by a combination of better prompt engineering and repeated inpainting. SD obviously doesn't understand language in the same way we do, so it can be tricky to describe things in a way that will match your expectations. Once you start to understand the tricks here, it gets easier and easier. Inpainting will let you fix a lot of the rest. Staircase stops? Select the area where it stopped, get the AI to generate more. People are already doing this to create very complex artwork where there are issues with faces, hands, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img2img_is_awesome_for_fixing_details_like_hands/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img... is a great example of how you can quickly iterate over a scene. One of the other things people struggle with is consistent characters and settings, but people have found ways to improve this with Midjourney - https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V31w2dMZXTAV9R2aXMB9Yoi-bIMQsRIanMXUO9rDtj5x7cL__hG05bmow-GvP7vcLlAcX/pub?utm_source=docs.google.com&utm_medium=tutorial&utm_campaign=midjourney https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V3... There's more of a learning curve to these tools than most people think, but it's also still miles and miles away from the learning curve required to actually be proficient at the technical aspects of making art.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
I think it’s highly likely that machine translation will still put human translators out of work. We’re probably very close to the point where machine translation is about as good as an average human translator.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  My guess is that something like 90% of translation - e.g product manuals, websites etc are now machine translated. Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.
  - malauxyeux 4y ago
    > Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person. Yes and with luck, at least one language you know how to read will make sense and not be off-the-wall bonkers or simply incomprehensible.
runnerup 4y ago
> machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet? It's not clear if machine language translation may have: - Increased "demand" for translation by reducing the price of "basic" translation. - Increased overall globalization -- I use machine translation to communicate with contract manufacturers in China, whereas without it I might avoid using contract manufacturers in China. - Due to increased globalization, increased demand for occasional "advanced" translation via professional translators or bilingual. So perhaps it does greatly decrease or eliminate the large slice of the pie which reflects translation jobs that would exist at the low end while simultaneously greatly increasing the overall size of the pie.
cerol 4y ago
Just another chapter of the whole automation shtick. > I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first. Any time now.
thematrixturtle 4y ago
Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate struggles with. Of course, there are still some jobs for high-quality/high-importance translation like legal work, simultaneous translation etc, but these are quite niche.
bergenty 4y ago
There would be way, way more translators in a highly globalized society like today if it wasn’t for machine translation. Also translation is an exact science for the most part, art isn’t.

ljp_206 4y ago

I am becoming more and more convinced that many techy folks near the AI scene saw that SD et alia can create an image that convincingly (and perhaps even indistinguishably) looks like a very nice digital painting, and based on that data point alone are calling artists obsolete.

idontpost 4y ago
I've played around with Dall-E a bit and based on trying to create weird ideas like an army of toddlers in plate armor riding corgis into a medieval battle or a bear riding a bicycle pulling a semi truck, I'm fully convinced that it's over-blown. It can recreate data close to what it has already seen, just like all neural network techniques. It does poorly outside that domain.

moultano 4y ago

Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.

Jevon23 4y ago
Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes. I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN get distorted because you have people sharing their views on art here, even though they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do. Maybe you'd be fine with reading a comic book where everyone has seven melting fingers, but people who take comic books seriously as an artistic medium would not.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  > I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first. Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1]. Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant. Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant. The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration. The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant. > Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes. I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on <$2,000 laptop. That's not 2 years. Do you think hands are going to be a long term roadblock? As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/stable_diffusion_how_to_draw_an_owl_frame/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...
  - simiones 4y ago
    But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB. Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      And you are free to search through the whole catalog of google results until you find an owl that looks exactly like you want. Though this is going to get harder as you want something more specific than a simple owl. But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I recently went to stable diffusion for some art for a D&D campaign guide, to make the thing more immersive. While the pictures are impressive, there are a lot of things about the generated art that just don't make sense: In one picture, a tower had a staircase down 1/3rd of the way from the door to the ground, just stopping at that point. Most had issues like this. Several other pictures I wanted were impossible to generate. The field of "art that needs human communication skills" seems to be a lot broader than just scientific illustration.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  A significant chunk of what you're describing can be solved by a combination of better prompt engineering and repeated inpainting. SD obviously doesn't understand language in the same way we do, so it can be tricky to describe things in a way that will match your expectations. Once you start to understand the tricks here, it gets easier and easier. Inpainting will let you fix a lot of the rest. Staircase stops? Select the area where it stopped, get the AI to generate more. People are already doing this to create very complex artwork where there are issues with faces, hands, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img2img_is_awesome_for_fixing_details_like_hands/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img... is a great example of how you can quickly iterate over a scene. One of the other things people struggle with is consistent characters and settings, but people have found ways to improve this with Midjourney - https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V31w2dMZXTAV9R2aXMB9Yoi-bIMQsRIanMXUO9rDtj5x7cL__hG05bmow-GvP7vcLlAcX/pub?utm_source=docs.google.com&utm_medium=tutorial&utm_campaign=midjourney https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V3... There's more of a learning curve to these tools than most people think, but it's also still miles and miles away from the learning curve required to actually be proficient at the technical aspects of making art.

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

I think it’s highly likely that machine translation will still put human translators out of work. We’re probably very close to the point where machine translation is about as good as an average human translator.

umeshunni 4y ago
My guess is that something like 90% of translation - e.g product manuals, websites etc are now machine translated. Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.
- malauxyeux 4y ago
  > Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person. Yes and with luck, at least one language you know how to read will make sense and not be off-the-wall bonkers or simply incomprehensible.

runnerup 4y ago

> machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet? It's not clear if machine language translation may have: - Increased "demand" for translation by reducing the price of "basic" translation. - Increased overall globalization -- I use machine translation to communicate with contract manufacturers in China, whereas without it I might avoid using contract manufacturers in China. - Due to increased globalization, increased demand for occasional "advanced" translation via professional translators or bilingual. So perhaps it does greatly decrease or eliminate the large slice of the pie which reflects translation jobs that would exist at the low end while simultaneously greatly increasing the overall size of the pie.

cerol 4y ago

Just another chapter of the whole automation shtick. > I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first. Any time now.

thematrixturtle 4y ago

Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate struggles with. Of course, there are still some jobs for high-quality/high-importance translation like legal work, simultaneous translation etc, but these are quite niche.

bergenty 4y ago

There would be way, way more translators in a highly globalized society like today if it wasn’t for machine translation. Also translation is an exact science for the most part, art isn’t.