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I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings. Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I li

I am a 2d artist and I have similar feelings. Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I think a strategy of creating an image of AI art as cheap and tacky is useful. For how long, I don’t know. If we’re lucky then it’ll turn out that getting these things out of the domain of creepy claw hands is a lot harder than anyone thinks it will be, and there will be a lot of obvious tells for a long time. It may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. The legality of these things is debatable, and so’s where “fair use” should fall - personally I feel like nobody posting work on the internet anticipated their stuff being scraped and fed into a giant neural net designed to take their job. Make this shit a lot pricier by demanding that it be built on art explicitly licensed for machine training. Figuring out where the intersection of “art you like to make” and “art the AI sucks at” lies is worthwhile. If your passion is realistic painterly work then you’re fucked, what do you enjoy doing that isn’t that?

lbarrow 4y ago
What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.
- Wistar 4y ago
  There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
  - etrautmann 4y ago
    why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?
    - someweirdperson 4y ago
      For humans the inspiration can be something else than the medium to use. Watching reality can provide inspiration for creating a video. And I'm pretty sure that's wher most inspiration comes from. It cannot for AI. Of course in a world where everything exists AI doesn't need inspiration from other sources.
      - cma 4y ago
        It can for AI, it is consuming and mixing in training trail cam images, etc. that weren't composed shots.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        That's not at all what the other poster was saying.
        nonima 4y ago
        Then what was it saying? It said that humans can take inspiration from outside art, from the real world. You can do the same thing with AI by training it on pictures from the real world.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Bill Clinton has stated he was inspired to be president after a trip to the white house in his youth. People have been inspired to write about subject matter because of their experiences. AI takes lots of things that currently exist and mixNmatch. It's not nearly the same thing.
        chii 4y ago
        > It's not nearly the same thing. why not? Just because people take in experiences slowly, via senses, doesn't mean that an AI isn't replicating that learning via a fast method.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    That could describe the entirety of art history.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  > What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? What's the difference between writing down a conversation from memory, and recording that conversation? What's the difference between making a nude painting of someone, and taking a nude photograph? What's the difference between going out in public among human beings, and going out in public where there's a facial recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's movements into a centralized database? What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone in the village, vs the social media company that knows everyone in the world? Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes through those limits, those social customs don't work anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes intolerable. "What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was. The question should be, "what would a society someone would want to live in, say about this?"
  - somesortofthing 4y ago
    > What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater. The entire AI art debate is a symptom of the fact that society is structured such that labor-saving technological advancements can harm more people than they help, and it's baffling to see otherwise intelligent and ideologically similar people fixating on this single, relatively minor technology rather than the much more consequential, broader issue of the fact that automation always moves wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  What's the difference between a programmer looking at lots of open source code and github copilot looking at open source code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).
- Jevon23 4y ago
  If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?
  - Poppys 4y ago
    This is three separate arguments: Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is. Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information? Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)? The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.
  - chii 4y ago
    > why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work. But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!
    - iExploder 4y ago
      its actually exactly the same thing, the ai doesnt "synthetize" anything, its following its programming and data based on training sets if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...
      - ihuman 4y ago
        There's already an AI that does that: https://github.com/features/copilot https://github.com/features/copilot
tengbretson 4y ago
This really resonates with me. I used to enjoy working as a 35mm film projectionist. Now that everything is digital the opportunities for making money doing it have basically disappeared. Am I supposed to be excited that now I can just push a button and focus more of my attention on selling popcorn? Fortunately I enjoy writing code.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to be excited about your job.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Perhaps not, but it certainly makes life a lot more enjoyable.
  - yoyohello13 4y ago
    Why not?
    - aeze 4y ago
      It's ideal to be excited about it, but I don't think it's the expectation.
- galdosdi 4y ago
  Hey, I did that too in high school and college! I think I must have been one of the very last ones (late aughts). What a cool and fascinating piece of machinery the "modern" (now obsolete) three platter tree and "brain" system is, isn't it? I still remember splicing together There Will Be Blood and enjoying looking at some of the beatiful still frames. My boss at the time spliced together Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse, and somehow fucked up and spliced an entire reel out of order... and nobody ever noticed (because Grindhouse was full of intentional fake projectionist mistakes, being an homage to an old era). He ended up noticing on his own on the second day of showings and fixing it overnight!
alliao 4y ago
this reads a lot like what some painters said when photography hit, and they weren't interested in "painting with the light" as so many photographer would love calling it nowadays. Technology disrupts and it is neutral to taste. Seems like those who knew the way should probably try and instil better taste for the future generation; otherwise we'd be reinventing wheels with different tools for the foreseeable future.
kranke155 4y ago
It’s ridiculous. There will be no integration - my job is just going to become less profitable and diverse. It’s beyond nonsense. I make 100k a year in London making CG. I don’t see how that will be available to me doing AÍ prompt work.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  If that's how you feel, then I assume you won't be adapting at all (as evidenced by your other comment [0]), so your 100k job will go too to the ones who do adapt. I'm not saying this to be mean, you asked the question, people answered and it seems you don't like the answer. What are we supposed to do about how you feel? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703
  - kranke155 4y ago
    It’s not about how I feel - it’s about the potential obliteration of my way of life. The people who will make money out of this transition will be AÍ engineers, not image makers. I will bet you 1 ETH and place it under a smart contract bet if you’d like.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      Then perhaps you'll have to do what the vast, vast majority of humanity has done for thousands of years, work jobs they don't like to put food on the table. Working in art is a luxury reserved for only the highest echelon of people, like Michaelangelo or Leonardo. The rest of us are not so lucky.
      - yrgulation 4y ago
        I beg to differ. Art isnt just fancy paintings for pseudo intellectuals to show off. Art is a good looking app, a nice looking car, a cozy feeing house design or kitchen furniture, an ad that communicates vision, and so on. Art is emotion which ai cant create. Sure it can randomise visuals within the constraints of what it has “learned” but it definitely cant create human emotion. No amount of micro-dosing can convince the world it is going to completely replace artists or indeed programmers.
HellDunkel 4y ago
I work in CGI/design. We have had machine learning denoisers for some time but other than that ai has not changed cgi much. VR another hype, merely a distraction- the serious work is not VR. Now things like stable diffusion- lots of people toying around- serious tool for artists- not really. Do not worry. Develop your artistic skills and enjoy the journey.
exolymph 4y ago
> I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I'm not sure how to say this in a non-dickish way, but most of us have to do stuff we don't particularly enjoy in order to make a living. I get that it sucks from your vantage point, but like... I'm sure there were stablehands who loved horses and had no interest in becoming mechanics. Shit happens. I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement, but so it goes. Maybe I'll end up curating and editing GPT7 output instead of drafting everything myself — I can live with that. It's not like my paid work was written for fun in the first place. The art I make for my own satisfaction, I expect to continue crafting word by word, and I think people will continue to appreciate that painstaking expression of the human spirit. Just not in a commercial context.
- 0x20cowboy 4y ago
  > I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement Don’t forget about musicians and junior software engineer work…very soon.
- shakabrah 4y ago
  The problem with your example is that it assumes there is a place for him to go to. Stable hands becoming mechanics. That is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it is a zero sum game.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Lump of labor fallacy. Automation is not a zero sum game because it creates new jobs.
    - shakabrah 4y ago
      These are some bold claims. Id like to see some evidence.
      - dragontamer 4y ago
jemmyw 4y ago
I've been using these ai tools to help imagine some paintings. Previously I'd use image search. If you are drawing completely new images then I'm not sure how competitive these tools are. They're just serving a mash up of existing works. Sure they can produce something interesting, sometimes stunning, but usually not much better than what you could just find already. As for producing a physical painting, that has its own constraints of material and ability.
- drpyser22 4y ago
  I guess the issue is that for lot of commercial work, "good enough, cheaper" is more attractive than "better than most, at the right price". Of course that's not a rule always, everywhere, but at scale it tends to be.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    I agree there'll be a market for the ai stuff. It'll have to improve though. For example, say you get an illustration done and you say "yeah it's good but can you just modify it a bit and then I want 5 variations doing different actions with the same characters". The AI tools can't do that, they'll come up with completely different images for very minor prompt changes. And if the input set doesn't contain the desired action then they cannot generate it at all. For now I think it'll only replace some low level commercial stuff and perhaps add images where there were none before.
unity1001 4y ago
Could building up on what AI creates not work? For each technological advancement we had in the past 200 years had made it easier to do things at a certain level. Which enabled people to do more things and more complex things. Which just pushed up the average level of what we create higher. Can't AI be used to handle what the artists had to spent more effort to create before, therefore enabling artists to create more complex works of art and therefore push the creative level up?
- egypturnash 4y ago
  From my original reply: Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Then you will continue to be disrupted. The cold hard truth is adapt or perish.
_yasmeen 4y ago
>Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I wish it were that simple. As a person who genuinely enjoys being a data scientist, and practices all those skills in a project I create on my own: the industry says otherwise. Integrating a technology into your practice that takes nuance out of it, just really means that managers and c-suites are going to expect you to give more nuance to your choices (which they deadlocked you out of). ML DevOps for the last two years are just me integrating more services.
pornel 4y ago
Questioning legality of the A.I. models won't save you, and is likely to backfire (I'm not saying this is good or fair, but rather prepare to be screwed either way.) In the worst case corporations will just rebuild the A.I. models from data licensed from stock photo sites, getty, etc. All you can get from this is a one-time bulk-discount payment, and then you will be paying them for use of the model in the next Photoshop. Plus there are copyright-abusing corporations that jump on any excuse to kill off fair use and scraping, so any attempt to legislate scraping may instead end up creating more Disney copyright and link-tax laws.
sircastor 4y ago
> It may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. I understand your livelihood is being threatened, and that’s very scary. Can we please avoid using the legal system to kill nascent competitors? Surely there are better responses than this.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Sure, I’ll just politely roll over rather than use the legal system. I don’t need to put food on my table anyway, it’s just a luxury, I have infinite time and money available to go learn to do something that pays more and makes me absolutely miserable. I’m not already constantly fighting the way all the social media sites have stolen the ability to serve ads alongside my work by building systems that suppress any post with an outgoing link, as well as posts with words like “commission” or “Patreon”. I can just bend over and take it a little harder when all these image generators based on megacorps scraping the entire internet for a use nobody thought of when defining “free use” make it harder for me to earn a living, and more importantly when they make it a lot harder for a beginner artist to get to that happy place where they get to spend the majority of their workday drawing, and enjoying the feedback loop of getting a little better and faster at drawing a thing every time they do it. Burn it all down.
  - Wolfbeta 4y ago
    Who is supposed to feel sympathy for you not getting to stay in your flow state while making 100k?
anothernewdude 4y ago
Frankly, it's because copyright has been so draconian, that I think this the rise of AI is so good. Finally people will get culture back. We won't have to appeal to corporate giants to have access to movies, images and music.

lbarrow 4y ago

What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? I am not a lawyer but I don't really see the "it's not fair use" argument.

Wistar 4y ago
There's a whole lot of unapologetic artistic theft of others’ work that has contributed to the creation of new art.
- etrautmann 4y ago
  why do we even call it theft or pretend that any artist arrived at ideas without inspiration?
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    For humans the inspiration can be something else than the medium to use. Watching reality can provide inspiration for creating a video. And I'm pretty sure that's wher most inspiration comes from. It cannot for AI. Of course in a world where everything exists AI doesn't need inspiration from other sources.
    - cma 4y ago
      It can for AI, it is consuming and mixing in training trail cam images, etc. that weren't composed shots.
      - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        That's not at all what the other poster was saying.
        nonima 4y ago
        Then what was it saying? It said that humans can take inspiration from outside art, from the real world. You can do the same thing with AI by training it on pictures from the real world.
        P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Bill Clinton has stated he was inspired to be president after a trip to the white house in his youth. People have been inspired to write about subject matter because of their experiences. AI takes lots of things that currently exist and mixNmatch. It's not nearly the same thing.
        chii 4y ago
        > It's not nearly the same thing. why not? Just because people take in experiences slowly, via senses, doesn't mean that an AI isn't replicating that learning via a fast method.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  That could describe the entirety of art history.
_dain_ 4y ago
> What's the difference between a human artist walking around in the world, seeing images and videos (many of which are under copyright) and then using those images as inspiration, versus an AI being fed millions of images and videos as part of a large training set? What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? What's the difference between writing down a conversation from memory, and recording that conversation? What's the difference between making a nude painting of someone, and taking a nude photograph? What's the difference between going out in public among human beings, and going out in public where there's a facial recognition camera on every corner feeding everyone's movements into a centralized database? What's the difference between the grandma who knows everyone in the village, vs the social media company that knows everyone in the world? Social customs evolved in a context of fundamental, sharp limits to human cognition and skill. When technology smashes through those limits, those social customs don't work anymore. Copyright law didn't exist in a world where you couldn't copy things mechanically. If you apply the old rules naively, you end up with a nasty world that nobody wants. So we have to invent new rules to limit how people use the new technology, otherwise people get exploited and life becomes intolerable. "What does copyright law say about this" doesn't even make sense as a question. Copyright was invented before AI was. The question should be, "what would a society someone would want to live in, say about this?"
- somesortofthing 4y ago
  > What's the difference between retelling someone's story orally, and using a printing press to make an exact replica? But that's not what's happening. You can't "crack open" a model to find the bitmap of a piece of training data. It's not there any more than a painting you've seen is "in" your brain. A model sometimes creates things that look similar to existing pieces if it got a ton of copies of the same image, for the same reason that most people's artistic rendition of a tree is going to be more accurate than their rendition of an anteater. The entire AI art debate is a symptom of the fact that society is structured such that labor-saving technological advancements can harm more people than they help, and it's baffling to see otherwise intelligent and ideologically similar people fixating on this single, relatively minor technology rather than the much more consequential, broader issue of the fact that automation always moves wealth into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.
_gabe_ 4y ago
What's the difference between a programmer looking at lots of open source code and github copilot looking at open source code? (And I'm talking MIT licensed code here).
Jevon23 4y ago
If I can take copyrighted images and feed them into an AI, why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? How do you justify the existence of something like the GPL?
- Poppys 4y ago
  This is three separate arguments: Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is. Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information? Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)? The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.
- chii 4y ago
  > why can’t I take any code I find online and ignore the license terms and feed it into a compiler? a compiler is not transformative. You translating a book into another language doesn't make it a new work. But an AI that takes billions of images, and uses it to synthesize something different and new, is fairly transformative under my eyes, and deserves new copyright. Unless the AI generated image is largely composed of a small number of works, i don't see why anyone should have copyright ownership of such an output!
  - iExploder 4y ago
    its actually exactly the same thing, the ai doesnt "synthetize" anything, its following its programming and data based on training sets if anything I would argue that human taking code from multiple places and making it compile into something more useful is much more synthetiz-ing than AI...
    - ihuman 4y ago
      There's already an AI that does that: https://github.com/features/copilot https://github.com/features/copilot

tengbretson 4y ago

This really resonates with me. I used to enjoy working as a 35mm film projectionist. Now that everything is digital the opportunities for making money doing it have basically disappeared. Am I supposed to be excited that now I can just push a button and focus more of my attention on selling popcorn? Fortunately I enjoy writing code.

colinmhayes 4y ago
I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to be excited about your job.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  Perhaps not, but it certainly makes life a lot more enjoyable.
- yoyohello13 4y ago
  Why not?
  - aeze 4y ago
    It's ideal to be excited about it, but I don't think it's the expectation.
galdosdi 4y ago
Hey, I did that too in high school and college! I think I must have been one of the very last ones (late aughts). What a cool and fascinating piece of machinery the "modern" (now obsolete) three platter tree and "brain" system is, isn't it? I still remember splicing together There Will Be Blood and enjoying looking at some of the beatiful still frames. My boss at the time spliced together Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse, and somehow fucked up and spliced an entire reel out of order... and nobody ever noticed (because Grindhouse was full of intentional fake projectionist mistakes, being an homage to an old era). He ended up noticing on his own on the second day of showings and fixing it overnight!

alliao 4y ago

this reads a lot like what some painters said when photography hit, and they weren't interested in "painting with the light" as so many photographer would love calling it nowadays. Technology disrupts and it is neutral to taste. Seems like those who knew the way should probably try and instil better taste for the future generation; otherwise we'd be reinventing wheels with different tools for the foreseeable future.

kranke155 4y ago

It’s ridiculous. There will be no integration - my job is just going to become less profitable and diverse. It’s beyond nonsense. I make 100k a year in London making CG. I don’t see how that will be available to me doing AÍ prompt work.

cercatrova 4y ago
If that's how you feel, then I assume you won't be adapting at all (as evidenced by your other comment [0]), so your 100k job will go too to the ones who do adapt. I'm not saying this to be mean, you asked the question, people answered and it seems you don't like the answer. What are we supposed to do about how you feel? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099182#33100703
- kranke155 4y ago
  It’s not about how I feel - it’s about the potential obliteration of my way of life. The people who will make money out of this transition will be AÍ engineers, not image makers. I will bet you 1 ETH and place it under a smart contract bet if you’d like.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Then perhaps you'll have to do what the vast, vast majority of humanity has done for thousands of years, work jobs they don't like to put food on the table. Working in art is a luxury reserved for only the highest echelon of people, like Michaelangelo or Leonardo. The rest of us are not so lucky.
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      I beg to differ. Art isnt just fancy paintings for pseudo intellectuals to show off. Art is a good looking app, a nice looking car, a cozy feeing house design or kitchen furniture, an ad that communicates vision, and so on. Art is emotion which ai cant create. Sure it can randomise visuals within the constraints of what it has “learned” but it definitely cant create human emotion. No amount of micro-dosing can convince the world it is going to completely replace artists or indeed programmers.

HellDunkel 4y ago

I work in CGI/design. We have had machine learning denoisers for some time but other than that ai has not changed cgi much. VR another hype, merely a distraction- the serious work is not VR. Now things like stable diffusion- lots of people toying around- serious tool for artists- not really. Do not worry. Develop your artistic skills and enjoy the journey.

exolymph 4y ago

> I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I'm not sure how to say this in a non-dickish way, but most of us have to do stuff we don't particularly enjoy in order to make a living. I get that it sucks from your vantage point, but like... I'm sure there were stablehands who loved horses and had no interest in becoming mechanics. Shit happens. I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement, but so it goes. Maybe I'll end up curating and editing GPT7 output instead of drafting everything myself — I can live with that. It's not like my paid work was written for fun in the first place. The art I make for my own satisfaction, I expect to continue crafting word by word, and I think people will continue to appreciate that painstaking expression of the human spirit. Just not in a commercial context.

0x20cowboy 4y ago
> I'm a writer and equally in danger of automated replacement Don’t forget about musicians and junior software engineer work…very soon.
shakabrah 4y ago
The problem with your example is that it assumes there is a place for him to go to. Stable hands becoming mechanics. That is the key concern with automation replacing jobs is that it is a zero sum game.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Lump of labor fallacy. Automation is not a zero sum game because it creates new jobs.
  - shakabrah 4y ago
    These are some bold claims. Id like to see some evidence.
    - dragontamer 4y ago

jemmyw 4y ago

I've been using these ai tools to help imagine some paintings. Previously I'd use image search. If you are drawing completely new images then I'm not sure how competitive these tools are. They're just serving a mash up of existing works. Sure they can produce something interesting, sometimes stunning, but usually not much better than what you could just find already. As for producing a physical painting, that has its own constraints of material and ability.

drpyser22 4y ago
I guess the issue is that for lot of commercial work, "good enough, cheaper" is more attractive than "better than most, at the right price". Of course that's not a rule always, everywhere, but at scale it tends to be.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  I agree there'll be a market for the ai stuff. It'll have to improve though. For example, say you get an illustration done and you say "yeah it's good but can you just modify it a bit and then I want 5 variations doing different actions with the same characters". The AI tools can't do that, they'll come up with completely different images for very minor prompt changes. And if the input set doesn't contain the desired action then they cannot generate it at all. For now I think it'll only replace some low level commercial stuff and perhaps add images where there were none before.

unity1001 4y ago

Could building up on what AI creates not work? For each technological advancement we had in the past 200 years had made it easier to do things at a certain level. Which enabled people to do more things and more complex things. Which just pushed up the average level of what we create higher. Can't AI be used to handle what the artists had to spent more effort to create before, therefore enabling artists to create more complex works of art and therefore push the creative level up?

egypturnash 4y ago
From my original reply: Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Then you will continue to be disrupted. The cold hard truth is adapt or perish.

_yasmeen 4y ago

>Are you as full of loathing for all the HN people saying “just integrate the AI into your practice” as I am? I like drawing stuff and I love that this pays my bills and I really have zero interest in becoming a “prompt engineer” instead. I wish it were that simple. As a person who genuinely enjoys being a data scientist, and practices all those skills in a project I create on my own: the industry says otherwise. Integrating a technology into your practice that takes nuance out of it, just really means that managers and c-suites are going to expect you to give more nuance to your choices (which they deadlocked you out of). ML DevOps for the last two years are just me integrating more services.

pornel 4y ago

Questioning legality of the A.I. models won't save you, and is likely to backfire (I'm not saying this is good or fair, but rather prepare to be screwed either way.) In the worst case corporations will just rebuild the A.I. models from data licensed from stock photo sites, getty, etc. All you can get from this is a one-time bulk-discount payment, and then you will be paying them for use of the model in the next Photoshop. Plus there are copyright-abusing corporations that jump on any excuse to kill off fair use and scraping, so any attempt to legislate scraping may instead end up creating more Disney copyright and link-tax laws.

sircastor 4y ago

> It may also be useful to try and get your professional associations to bring some suits against these things for playing fast and loose with “fair use”. I understand your livelihood is being threatened, and that’s very scary. Can we please avoid using the legal system to kill nascent competitors? Surely there are better responses than this.

egypturnash 4y ago
Sure, I’ll just politely roll over rather than use the legal system. I don’t need to put food on my table anyway, it’s just a luxury, I have infinite time and money available to go learn to do something that pays more and makes me absolutely miserable. I’m not already constantly fighting the way all the social media sites have stolen the ability to serve ads alongside my work by building systems that suppress any post with an outgoing link, as well as posts with words like “commission” or “Patreon”. I can just bend over and take it a little harder when all these image generators based on megacorps scraping the entire internet for a use nobody thought of when defining “free use” make it harder for me to earn a living, and more importantly when they make it a lot harder for a beginner artist to get to that happy place where they get to spend the majority of their workday drawing, and enjoying the feedback loop of getting a little better and faster at drawing a thing every time they do it. Burn it all down.
- Wolfbeta 4y ago
  Who is supposed to feel sympathy for you not getting to stay in your flow state while making 100k?

anothernewdude 4y ago

Frankly, it's because copyright has been so draconian, that I think this the rise of AI is so good. Finally people will get culture back. We won't have to appeal to corporate giants to have access to movies, images and music.