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Anyone else getting bored of generating images? I used Stable Diffusion even before the public release (there was a guide on 4chan with leaked weights) and I'd

Anyone else getting bored of generating images? I used Stable Diffusion even before the public release (there was a guide on 4chan with leaked weights) and I'd been using it for a few weeks. I just feel like I've generated all the images I want to for now, and I just don't have any more interesting concepts I want to explore anymore. When you have so much variety in images, I got acclimatized to them and they all became the same and uninteresting after a while. It's like a hedonic treadmill but for AI image generation. I assume this will have the most usage as a once in a while tool for artists to get inspired from, and also a tool for commercial usage such as in a Photoshop or Figma plugin for designers. The lay person who wants to generate images will get bored after a while.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
No particular reason to think this is suddenly going to make you want to be an artist
illubots 4y ago
The first human who discovered that they could draw something on a wall probably also got bored after a while. And thought "I assume this will have the most usage as a once in a while tool to decorate my cave with funny animals". But then drawing animals turned into writing. Turned into printing. Turned into emails and the web and the web 2.0 and now here we are, sending our thoughts across the world with the speed of light. Using software that we wrote to tell computers how to do this for us. It might be similar with AI driven image generation. That it evolves in ways that are currently hard to foresee. Maybe one day, our thoughts are translated in realtime into images and send across the galaxy with the speed of light. Or faster?
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  How cool will it be when we can tell a program, "I want a fantasy story that continues on Lord of the Rings and details Pippin and Merry's second great and wonderful adventure after Frodo left middle earth" and get a 300 page story that is well-written and inventive and fun to read. I know the requirements for something like that are extraordinarily high, but I could see it in 30-40 years being viable.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    By current progress, I wouldn't be surprised in ten years if that were viable.
Applejinx 4y ago
Depends who you are, I think. I'm watching this space like a hawk. Though I code for a living it's too different from this work and I can't personally do the stuff I need with it, but that stuff is continually happening (if I wasn't based on M1 Mac I might be a little farther along, but I think I'd still be running into obstacles based on how technical all this is) I've put out an album, pretty recently, based on my collaboration with a modular synthesizer running systems that let it aleatorically generate chords, key changes etc. and you probably would not know the 'machine' wrote the chords for the whole album. The place where Stable Diffusion becomes interesting for me is when I can feed my own styles and objects into it. Right now, I don't think that's facilitated for me on my M1 Mac in my relatively nontechnical world: I can run DiffusionBee, and explore the ranges of the dataset's collective visual unconscious. I'm learning how to do much more interesting things than 'trending on Artstation, 8k, etc etc etc'. I have curated collections of images to which I can apply my own language cues, and a 440 episode webcomic that I could annotate the hell out of (my OWN art, not currently even on the internet), and the ability to feed not just 4-5 images but dozens, hundreds of images into the machine. At that point, it's a private visual imagination that becomes ME diffusion, and I don't have to tell it 'trending on artstation' anymore. Hell, I could teach my copy a whole set of associations based on just feeding its own output back into it, using my own intuition to associate not-generally-useful concepts like 'cold' or 'loud' or 'disappointed' considered as visual abstractions. If I can reliably associate 'anticipatory' with visual stimuli, I can begin using it as direction for my own use of SD, telling it that I want this panel more 'anticipatory' or less. If I can feed in a language of panels and borders that has variety and I'm able to associate it with language, I can use SD to generate comic panels with the associations 'unsettling' or 'normal' or 'dramatic' and composite them into final output. Bear in mind that engaging in this behavior means ME feeding in the associations that are relevant to ME as an artist, effectively making an auxiliary visual subconscious much like I made a modular synth into an auxiliary musical composition subconscious. No, I'm not bored. If you're bored, maybe you're not an artist? Or maybe you don't have a firm intention and motivation towards which to direct your art? These things should be like a violin. You can give one to any shmoe off the street, but ability to perform on the thing does not come along with just picking it up and plunking at it. I'm convinced that in order to make visual AI a tool you absolutely must let the artist feed in their own associations, concepts, objects etc. and then direct the output towards their own ends.
tablespoon 4y ago
> When you have so much variety in images, I got acclimatized to them and they all became the same and uninteresting after a while. IMHO, the results of these image generators also tend to be pretty mediocre. Not terrible, but like those Beeple NFT images: something made by someone of middling talent without inspiration, mainly as an excuse to use tools. Also, when I played with stable diffusion specifically, the stuff it generated frequently had a horror-show quality, because it has no idea about stuff like how many legs people have. I wonder if these generators will plateau, because the "throw more training data at it" technique will be undermined by mediocre-to-poor AI generated images.
diydsp 4y ago
Congratulations, you have identified the gap which relates art to content production: Meaning.
- twiceaday 4y ago
  You pigeonhole stable diffusion into art and art into meaningful art.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

No particular reason to think this is suddenly going to make you want to be an artist

illubots 4y ago

The first human who discovered that they could draw something on a wall probably also got bored after a while. And thought "I assume this will have the most usage as a once in a while tool to decorate my cave with funny animals". But then drawing animals turned into writing. Turned into printing. Turned into emails and the web and the web 2.0 and now here we are, sending our thoughts across the world with the speed of light. Using software that we wrote to tell computers how to do this for us. It might be similar with AI driven image generation. That it evolves in ways that are currently hard to foresee. Maybe one day, our thoughts are translated in realtime into images and send across the galaxy with the speed of light. Or faster?

BizarroLand 4y ago
How cool will it be when we can tell a program, "I want a fantasy story that continues on Lord of the Rings and details Pippin and Merry's second great and wonderful adventure after Frodo left middle earth" and get a 300 page story that is well-written and inventive and fun to read. I know the requirements for something like that are extraordinarily high, but I could see it in 30-40 years being viable.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  By current progress, I wouldn't be surprised in ten years if that were viable.

Applejinx 4y ago

Depends who you are, I think. I'm watching this space like a hawk. Though I code for a living it's too different from this work and I can't personally do the stuff I need with it, but that stuff is continually happening (if I wasn't based on M1 Mac I might be a little farther along, but I think I'd still be running into obstacles based on how technical all this is) I've put out an album, pretty recently, based on my collaboration with a modular synthesizer running systems that let it aleatorically generate chords, key changes etc. and you probably would not know the 'machine' wrote the chords for the whole album. The place where Stable Diffusion becomes interesting for me is when I can feed my own styles and objects into it. Right now, I don't think that's facilitated for me on my M1 Mac in my relatively nontechnical world: I can run DiffusionBee, and explore the ranges of the dataset's collective visual unconscious. I'm learning how to do much more interesting things than 'trending on Artstation, 8k, etc etc etc'. I have curated collections of images to which I can apply my own language cues, and a 440 episode webcomic that I could annotate the hell out of (my OWN art, not currently even on the internet), and the ability to feed not just 4-5 images but dozens, hundreds of images into the machine. At that point, it's a private visual imagination that becomes ME diffusion, and I don't have to tell it 'trending on artstation' anymore. Hell, I could teach my copy a whole set of associations based on just feeding its own output back into it, using my own intuition to associate not-generally-useful concepts like 'cold' or 'loud' or 'disappointed' considered as visual abstractions. If I can reliably associate 'anticipatory' with visual stimuli, I can begin using it as direction for my own use of SD, telling it that I want this panel more 'anticipatory' or less. If I can feed in a language of panels and borders that has variety and I'm able to associate it with language, I can use SD to generate comic panels with the associations 'unsettling' or 'normal' or 'dramatic' and composite them into final output. Bear in mind that engaging in this behavior means ME feeding in the associations that are relevant to ME as an artist, effectively making an auxiliary visual subconscious much like I made a modular synth into an auxiliary musical composition subconscious. No, I'm not bored. If you're bored, maybe you're not an artist? Or maybe you don't have a firm intention and motivation towards which to direct your art? These things should be like a violin. You can give one to any shmoe off the street, but ability to perform on the thing does not come along with just picking it up and plunking at it. I'm convinced that in order to make visual AI a tool you absolutely must let the artist feed in their own associations, concepts, objects etc. and then direct the output towards their own ends.

tablespoon 4y ago

> When you have so much variety in images, I got acclimatized to them and they all became the same and uninteresting after a while. IMHO, the results of these image generators also tend to be pretty mediocre. Not terrible, but like those Beeple NFT images: something made by someone of middling talent without inspiration, mainly as an excuse to use tools. Also, when I played with stable diffusion specifically, the stuff it generated frequently had a horror-show quality, because it has no idea about stuff like how many legs people have. I wonder if these generators will plateau, because the "throw more training data at it" technique will be undermined by mediocre-to-poor AI generated images.

diydsp 4y ago

Congratulations, you have identified the gap which relates art to content production: Meaning.

twiceaday 4y ago
You pigeonhole stable diffusion into art and art into meaningful art.