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Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going a

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"
      - simiones 4y ago
        Changing the prompt until it generates what I want is not that different from changing my search terms until the result I want is closer to the top. Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.
        _aavaa_ 4y ago
        But searching on google doesn't "generate" anything, If your image isn't on the web, there's nothing to bring "closer to the top".
        simiones 4y ago
        Sure, but chances are, it is already on the web. And of course, it's also possible that the image I want can't be generated by SD/DALL-E/etc.
    - 4y ago
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  > 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. This seems to be purely an issue of the size of the network. Parti (https://parti.research.google/ https://parti.research.google/) demonstrates that as the number of parameters increases, with no change to the underlying architecture, a lot of these problems simply go away. Basically just throw more compute and memory at the problem and everything gets fixed.
  - Jevon23 4y ago
    Well, we’ll see how it performs, if it’s ever made public. The 20B images don’t look that much more impressive than what SD is already doing (aside from the ability to render text), and in some cases they look worse. It’s hard to tell because the resolution is so small, but even in the 20B “astronaut riding a horse through a pond” image, it looks like his hands are still nonsensical.
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      This nitpick about hands sounds desperate. Here we are, with a tech so powerful that it overshadows the default hype it's surrounded by (no small feat, most technologies fail to live up to the hype as you know) ... and the critics merely move the goalpost a tiny bit further, even if the tech scales so well as to make their new goalpost irrelevant in a year.
      - clankyclanker 4y ago
        Sure, but eventually we’re going to hit on environmental and cost-effective power limits of training, and it’s not worth the cost to train the model. AFAIUI, that’s part of the point that Gebru was trying to make before she was fired.
        visarga 4y ago
        Gebru doesn't have anything good to say about AI, it's only downsides. She's biased being an activist and all.
- throwaway1851 4y ago
  > 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. I would extend this lack of nuance and understanding to the deep learning implementation side also. A lot of people seem to have some very foundational misconceptions about what deep learning is and what it does. In the case of generative art: these models are “simply” sampling from the frozen statistical structure they have learned from web images and their captions. They don’t understand the relationship between objects in space, they have no ideas or feelings to express, and they communicate nothing. That’s why the even the best output of these models tends to have a perceptible hollowness: you can detect the lack of a coherent authorial intent in it.
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.

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"
    - simiones 4y ago
      Changing the prompt until it generates what I want is not that different from changing my search terms until the result I want is closer to the top. Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.
      - _aavaa_ 4y ago
        But searching on google doesn't "generate" anything, If your image isn't on the web, there's nothing to bring "closer to the top".
        simiones 4y ago
        Sure, but chances are, it is already on the web. And of course, it's also possible that the image I want can't be generated by SD/DALL-E/etc.
  - 4y ago
dwohnitmok 4y ago
> 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. This seems to be purely an issue of the size of the network. Parti (https://parti.research.google/ https://parti.research.google/) demonstrates that as the number of parameters increases, with no change to the underlying architecture, a lot of these problems simply go away. Basically just throw more compute and memory at the problem and everything gets fixed.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  Well, we’ll see how it performs, if it’s ever made public. The 20B images don’t look that much more impressive than what SD is already doing (aside from the ability to render text), and in some cases they look worse. It’s hard to tell because the resolution is so small, but even in the 20B “astronaut riding a horse through a pond” image, it looks like his hands are still nonsensical.
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    This nitpick about hands sounds desperate. Here we are, with a tech so powerful that it overshadows the default hype it's surrounded by (no small feat, most technologies fail to live up to the hype as you know) ... and the critics merely move the goalpost a tiny bit further, even if the tech scales so well as to make their new goalpost irrelevant in a year.
    - clankyclanker 4y ago
      Sure, but eventually we’re going to hit on environmental and cost-effective power limits of training, and it’s not worth the cost to train the model. AFAIUI, that’s part of the point that Gebru was trying to make before she was fired.
      - visarga 4y ago
        Gebru doesn't have anything good to say about AI, it's only downsides. She's biased being an activist and all.
throwaway1851 4y ago
> 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. I would extend this lack of nuance and understanding to the deep learning implementation side also. A lot of people seem to have some very foundational misconceptions about what deep learning is and what it does. In the case of generative art: these models are “simply” sampling from the frozen statistical structure they have learned from web images and their captions. They don’t understand the relationship between objects in space, they have no ideas or feelings to express, and they communicate nothing. That’s why the even the best output of these models tends to have a perceptible hollowness: you can detect the lack of a coherent authorial intent in it.

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.