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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 p

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
    >AI is a mind for the mind. Exactly, think of it as a symbiosis, a man is slow, but a man in a bycicle is fast. Now a man in a rocket, can go to other planets. But it is still a man, a rocket is just an inert pile of metal and fuel. Same with AI, AI is the rocket, it propels and accelerate creativity to inhuman levels, but there is still a man controlling it. AI is just an extension of our minds like a rocket is an extension of our feet.
yunwal 4y ago
There's a few artists currently doing creative things with stable diffusion that aren't just "put in a prompt and let SD crap out an image". I think this music video from Holly Herndon shows the promise of this stuff. I do think ultimately once people have been exposed to enough AI art they're going to demand more creativity. Right now there's a lot of exploration going on and people need to get more familiar with AI tools before they start doing amazing things with them. https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status/1567694502382518274?s=20&t=Qhy5pbQgcgSNCASdjZHkIQ https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status/1567694502382518274?...
fizx 4y ago
People were saying this stuff when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Chess is perhaps thriving more than ever.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Yes, but that's because you know when deep blue is playing chess. The recent accusations that are rocking the chess world are that one of the champions may be cheating. If we get to a point where cheating can't be detected, that may do quite a lot of damage to the game.
- Jataman606 4y ago
  Yes, and just like in communities described in this article, AI is banned from human competition. You can use it to practice, but you can't go to the tournament with your own chess engine and say that you deserve that win, because you programmed this chess engine.
cardanome 4y ago
As a hobbyist game developer, 2022 is the year my creativity can finally fully unleashed. Prototyping games is getting so much better, this will really help indies game studies quite a bit. Will those AI generated assets replace hand crafted ones? Heck no! Have you ever tried doing AI art? What gets posted on social media are the few successful experiments. Most AI generated stuff is absolute crap. Getting anything useful out of it requires lot's of trial an error and magical incantations. Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard. Here is how to make concept art with stable-diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS2kNvbIL5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS2kNvbIL5Q Look how many iteration that requires. How it requires finding the proper real word assets for img2img techniques. How is still requires some serious Photoshop skill to put everything together. AI helps us build more higher level tools for creating art but the idea that it is anywhere close to creating art itself is silly. We have not made any progress in creating general artificial intelligence at all. The main progress we see is that AI-tech is that it is becoming available for the masses, which is awesome.
- cerol 4y ago
  > Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard. The demos look amazing because there is no acceptance criteria. Anything gets hailed as "groundbreaking" because is process is novel. Which is a completely different scenario from what you expect from someone actually being paid for making art.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Off topic to an extent, but I would be grateful if you could share any processes for reliably producing game assets with stable diffusion.
  - cardanome 4y ago
    The same person that I linked earlier has also a video on how to make game assets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blXnuyVgA_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blXnuyVgA_Y I am still figuring that out myself. My current project is a fantasy-themed visual novel for which creating backgrounds is super easy. You just pick a certain style, for example "by Greg Rutkowski" and put that in any prompt. Normally you want to reuse your backgrounds as much as possible to not blow the budget but thanks to AI I can be much freer with my writing. Of course the important backgrounds should be remade by hand at some point but for prototyping they are great. Character art does not really work beyond concept art as you normally need different poses for a character and you are very specific about what you want, again not a strength of AI. My advise would be to play to its strength, if you can: Horror works really well. Outdoor scenes work better than indoor.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think things will categorically change about how we define art in the next little while. We may see an increase of parasocial-style livestream art drawing, so the illustrator isn't just an illustrator but specifically a personality attached (an exaggeration of the current artist-art relationship commonly known today). We may also determine AI-generated art is simply in another category, like photography, CGI, digital, and traditional portraits are all considered different categories. I can imagine human-generated novels and AI-generated novels are neatly separated, with associated scandals if a human attempts to pass an AI-generated novel as their own creation (scandals already currently exists for humans who eg. a romance writer recently got in trouble for lifting paragraphs from fanfic they didn't write into their original fiction). There's nothing to say that creativity will die. We invented typewriters, but calligraphy is still an art whose pens and inks are beloved interests. We invented the digital screen and the paper machines, but handmade paper and hand-stitched book binding is still an artist's pursuit.
immigrantheart 4y ago
UBI doesn’t solve this
npteljes 4y ago
I dunno. Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking. Fast food is a huge problem, but many go to restaurants and many still cook at home. We're in no endgame at all. If it worked this way, artists from poorer economies would have drowned out all other art. But for some reason, it just doesn't work that way.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking. True, but fast food has seriously damaged and reduced both real restaurants and home cooking.
haskellandchill 4y ago
> Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides gibberish > 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. misguided conjecture > We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution hilariously misinformed extrapolation AI is nowhere closer to cracking the meaning problem. Until we have meaningful AI generated art there's no point for this baseless speculation.
itronitron 4y ago
I wouldn't worry too much about AI stamping out creativity, all the results I have seen just look like the type of art you see in hotel rooms and hallways. It's supremely ignorable stuff, possibly exactly because the models are built from billions of samples and by definition most of those samples will be average and below.
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
I will never understand you AI optimists. AI will never create remarkable or even widely popular music. Well, never say never. But 5 to 10 years? Not a snowballs chance in hell.

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
  >AI is a mind for the mind. Exactly, think of it as a symbiosis, a man is slow, but a man in a bycicle is fast. Now a man in a rocket, can go to other planets. But it is still a man, a rocket is just an inert pile of metal and fuel. Same with AI, AI is the rocket, it propels and accelerate creativity to inhuman levels, but there is still a man controlling it. AI is just an extension of our minds like a rocket is an extension of our feet.

yunwal 4y ago

There's a few artists currently doing creative things with stable diffusion that aren't just "put in a prompt and let SD crap out an image". I think this music video from Holly Herndon shows the promise of this stuff. I do think ultimately once people have been exposed to enough AI art they're going to demand more creativity. Right now there's a lot of exploration going on and people need to get more familiar with AI tools before they start doing amazing things with them. https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status/1567694502382518274?s=20&t=Qhy5pbQgcgSNCASdjZHkIQ https://twitter.com/hollyherndon/status/1567694502382518274?...

fizx 4y ago

People were saying this stuff when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Chess is perhaps thriving more than ever.

jjeaff 4y ago
Yes, but that's because you know when deep blue is playing chess. The recent accusations that are rocking the chess world are that one of the champions may be cheating. If we get to a point where cheating can't be detected, that may do quite a lot of damage to the game.
Jataman606 4y ago
Yes, and just like in communities described in this article, AI is banned from human competition. You can use it to practice, but you can't go to the tournament with your own chess engine and say that you deserve that win, because you programmed this chess engine.

cardanome 4y ago

As a hobbyist game developer, 2022 is the year my creativity can finally fully unleashed. Prototyping games is getting so much better, this will really help indies game studies quite a bit. Will those AI generated assets replace hand crafted ones? Heck no! Have you ever tried doing AI art? What gets posted on social media are the few successful experiments. Most AI generated stuff is absolute crap. Getting anything useful out of it requires lot's of trial an error and magical incantations. Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard. Here is how to make concept art with stable-diffusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS2kNvbIL5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS2kNvbIL5Q Look how many iteration that requires. How it requires finding the proper real word assets for img2img techniques. How is still requires some serious Photoshop skill to put everything together. AI helps us build more higher level tools for creating art but the idea that it is anywhere close to creating art itself is silly. We have not made any progress in creating general artificial intelligence at all. The main progress we see is that AI-tech is that it is becoming available for the masses, which is awesome.

cerol 4y ago
> Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard. The demos look amazing because there is no acceptance criteria. Anything gets hailed as "groundbreaking" because is process is novel. Which is a completely different scenario from what you expect from someone actually being paid for making art.
ShamelessC 4y ago
Off topic to an extent, but I would be grateful if you could share any processes for reliably producing game assets with stable diffusion.
- cardanome 4y ago
  The same person that I linked earlier has also a video on how to make game assets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blXnuyVgA_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blXnuyVgA_Y I am still figuring that out myself. My current project is a fantasy-themed visual novel for which creating backgrounds is super easy. You just pick a certain style, for example "by Greg Rutkowski" and put that in any prompt. Normally you want to reuse your backgrounds as much as possible to not blow the budget but thanks to AI I can be much freer with my writing. Of course the important backgrounds should be remade by hand at some point but for prototyping they are great. Character art does not really work beyond concept art as you normally need different poses for a character and you are very specific about what you want, again not a strength of AI. My advise would be to play to its strength, if you can: Horror works really well. Outdoor scenes work better than indoor.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

I think things will categorically change about how we define art in the next little while. We may see an increase of parasocial-style livestream art drawing, so the illustrator isn't just an illustrator but specifically a personality attached (an exaggeration of the current artist-art relationship commonly known today). We may also determine AI-generated art is simply in another category, like photography, CGI, digital, and traditional portraits are all considered different categories. I can imagine human-generated novels and AI-generated novels are neatly separated, with associated scandals if a human attempts to pass an AI-generated novel as their own creation (scandals already currently exists for humans who eg. a romance writer recently got in trouble for lifting paragraphs from fanfic they didn't write into their original fiction). There's nothing to say that creativity will die. We invented typewriters, but calligraphy is still an art whose pens and inks are beloved interests. We invented the digital screen and the paper machines, but handmade paper and hand-stitched book binding is still an artist's pursuit.

immigrantheart 4y ago

UBI doesn’t solve this

npteljes 4y ago

I dunno. Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking. Fast food is a huge problem, but many go to restaurants and many still cook at home. We're in no endgame at all. If it worked this way, artists from poorer economies would have drowned out all other art. But for some reason, it just doesn't work that way.

JohnFen 4y ago
> Fast food haven't killed restaurants, and restaurants haven't killed home cooking. True, but fast food has seriously damaged and reduced both real restaurants and home cooking.

haskellandchill 4y ago

> Our neurons are microscopic filters magnifying patterns in the long tail of quantum randomness where source consciousness probably resides gibberish > 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. misguided conjecture > We're looking at not just the death of creativity, but the death of all human contribution hilariously misinformed extrapolation AI is nowhere closer to cracking the meaning problem. Until we have meaningful AI generated art there's no point for this baseless speculation.

itronitron 4y ago

I wouldn't worry too much about AI stamping out creativity, all the results I have seen just look like the type of art you see in hotel rooms and hallways. It's supremely ignorable stuff, possibly exactly because the models are built from billions of samples and by definition most of those samples will be average and below.

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

I will never understand you AI optimists. AI will never create remarkable or even widely popular music. Well, never say never. But 5 to 10 years? Not a snowballs chance in hell.