5 ms·

Because you’re not a creative professional you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Here’s the truth about creative work - most of is trash. You make a lot t

Because you’re not a creative professional you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Here’s the truth about creative work - most of is trash. You make a lot trash. Unimaginative, boring trash. You use that to pay your bills. The creative stuff that people love and share on Instagram is 10% of the work. The stuff you don’t share nor do you talk about is 90% of your income. The problem in this forum is people dont have experience with creative work nor do they understand the economics of the industry. Not their fault they don’t have to. But here’s the reality - the stuff you love so much and consider creative work is the 5% that those artists made the right decisions and were allowed to make them and everything went fine. A lot of the work is drudge work. Like an illustrator starting out will make cheap card illustrations or whatever. And then in his 5% of time he will make the amazing personal stuff he posts on artstation. You love and share the stuff on artstation - but his income is mostly coming from shitty card illustrations that will never be on his portfolio. Due to HN being clearly unaware of the economics this is being repeated here a lot - just do super high super creative stuff and you’ll be fine. The problem is there isn’t enough of that work to begin with! If you’re working for a good company you know you can place the final work on your portfolio because the creative brief will be good and executed well - Nike, Apple, Squarespace - some people (including myself) will actually reduce our day rate because we know it’s great fun to work on it plus it will be a value add on your portfolio. That’s how competitive it is to GET high end high credit work. The idea that we can all migrate to that is a wild fantasy.

navane 4y ago
> 90% of the work is sludge, trash, unimaginative, boring trash. This pays the bill for the 5% you're proud of. So; learn prompt engineering to do the trash job, which will free up a lot of time to put in the 5% you're proud of.
- chii 4y ago
  The OP's argument is that prompt engineering to produce the trash won't pay the same, and so they will suffer an economic decline.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    The idea that prompting images will pay the same as taking 2-3 days to produce an image through a skillset that takes half a decade to a decade to build up… seems pretty much incredible to me. There is an upper limit to how many images in still or moving form the world needs. We’re operating at that limit already - entry level jobs in the arts are often not paid or extremely poorly paid, signifying that demand for the jobs outstrips supply. Basically there are always more aspiring film directors in the world than there are actual film directors - meaning the field is ultra competitive. Same with YouTube creators and other artists. The idea that making it easier to produce images will somehow make more work - it won’t since we already exist in an visual content oversaturated environment (there is now more content than anyone will ever watch). What it will do is collapse the incomes of artists.
    - orbital-decay 4y ago
      Almost everyone who perpetuates this panic seems to be talking about prompting. Typically, that's how you spot people who either: - didn't spend much time around those ML-powered tools - aren't artists Or both. That's why I encourage everyone to do the actual study of what's available with those tools, and get some intuition of what works and what doesn't, to realize that text to image (or text to video) isn't going to change anything. You won't be a "film director" until we have something that can pass for AGI, and probably even then. When trying to do it with text only, you'll end up writing and tweaking a weird essay, wasting a lot of time and not getting what you want. Content generation from text is always going to suck compared to combined compositing and ML techniques by someone with actual hard skill in arts. "Prompt engineering" is a gimmick. That's not because those tools currently suck at understanding the natural language, although they do and will for years to come unless there will be several major breakthroughs in NLP, or the hardware will be a couple orders of magnitude more capable (as Google Parti demonstrates on their landing page), at which point it'll be much more transforming than just leaving artists without jobs. And it's not because the tools are limited by the dataset in what they can do (any concept not seen during training is guesswork, and it's very poor at it; for example SD sucks at dynamic posing). That's because text is just a poor medium to explain your intention and to control the result, even if you have a human on the other side. For still pictures, smart photobashing with style and concept transfer (finetuning the model on your own visual language) is where it's at, and for that you need actual understanding of visual arts - dynamic posing, anatomy, color theory, and generally artistic studies of how the world works. The AI tools will be developing in that direction. Sure, a digital painter will replace a brush with something smarter, becoming more of a technical artist, but what's wrong with that? It already happened with 3D CG imagery 30-40 years ago, the doomsayers were also there, except we didn't have social media to amplify the panic. But the reality is it's always been an insanely complex and skill-demanding field. ML image generation is just another, higher order tool. >There is an upper limit to how many images in still or moving form the world needs. We’re operating at that limit already - entry level jobs in the arts are often not paid or extremely poorly paid, signifying that demand for the jobs outstrips supply. Currently, most visual entertainment is very much limited not by demand, but by the amount of work required. Japanese animation turned into a huge industry (and calcified into a more or less uniform visual language, compared to 90's) because it was cheaper to produce and dominated the world with tons of content, not because it's visually appealing more than other styles. Low resolution pseudo-pixelart dominates indie gaming because it's cheaper to produce with limited manpower, not because everyone buys the lo-fi/retro aesthetics. The ML-powered tools have a great potential to break these limits. As an example, consider the particular niche which is believed to be disrupted immediately by Stable Diffusion - commission artists making custom character portraits for roleplaying sessions. SD can readily make passable fantasy portraits for this purpose (save for precision), but it needs a lot of work for that, and people still end up paying artists to do this work. This is not going to change for many years, at least. Moreover, the demand is also shifting to other styles, views, and poses with some thought put into it by a human, or potentially to animation/interactivity. The expectations are rising. Visual entertainment is mostly driven by novelty.

navane 4y ago

> 90% of the work is sludge, trash, unimaginative, boring trash. This pays the bill for the 5% you're proud of. So; learn prompt engineering to do the trash job, which will free up a lot of time to put in the 5% you're proud of.

chii 4y ago
The OP's argument is that prompt engineering to produce the trash won't pay the same, and so they will suffer an economic decline.
- kranke155 4y ago
  The idea that prompting images will pay the same as taking 2-3 days to produce an image through a skillset that takes half a decade to a decade to build up… seems pretty much incredible to me. There is an upper limit to how many images in still or moving form the world needs. We’re operating at that limit already - entry level jobs in the arts are often not paid or extremely poorly paid, signifying that demand for the jobs outstrips supply. Basically there are always more aspiring film directors in the world than there are actual film directors - meaning the field is ultra competitive. Same with YouTube creators and other artists. The idea that making it easier to produce images will somehow make more work - it won’t since we already exist in an visual content oversaturated environment (there is now more content than anyone will ever watch). What it will do is collapse the incomes of artists.
  - orbital-decay 4y ago
    Almost everyone who perpetuates this panic seems to be talking about prompting. Typically, that's how you spot people who either: - didn't spend much time around those ML-powered tools - aren't artists Or both. That's why I encourage everyone to do the actual study of what's available with those tools, and get some intuition of what works and what doesn't, to realize that text to image (or text to video) isn't going to change anything. You won't be a "film director" until we have something that can pass for AGI, and probably even then. When trying to do it with text only, you'll end up writing and tweaking a weird essay, wasting a lot of time and not getting what you want. Content generation from text is always going to suck compared to combined compositing and ML techniques by someone with actual hard skill in arts. "Prompt engineering" is a gimmick. That's not because those tools currently suck at understanding the natural language, although they do and will for years to come unless there will be several major breakthroughs in NLP, or the hardware will be a couple orders of magnitude more capable (as Google Parti demonstrates on their landing page), at which point it'll be much more transforming than just leaving artists without jobs. And it's not because the tools are limited by the dataset in what they can do (any concept not seen during training is guesswork, and it's very poor at it; for example SD sucks at dynamic posing). That's because text is just a poor medium to explain your intention and to control the result, even if you have a human on the other side. For still pictures, smart photobashing with style and concept transfer (finetuning the model on your own visual language) is where it's at, and for that you need actual understanding of visual arts - dynamic posing, anatomy, color theory, and generally artistic studies of how the world works. The AI tools will be developing in that direction. Sure, a digital painter will replace a brush with something smarter, becoming more of a technical artist, but what's wrong with that? It already happened with 3D CG imagery 30-40 years ago, the doomsayers were also there, except we didn't have social media to amplify the panic. But the reality is it's always been an insanely complex and skill-demanding field. ML image generation is just another, higher order tool. >There is an upper limit to how many images in still or moving form the world needs. We’re operating at that limit already - entry level jobs in the arts are often not paid or extremely poorly paid, signifying that demand for the jobs outstrips supply. Currently, most visual entertainment is very much limited not by demand, but by the amount of work required. Japanese animation turned into a huge industry (and calcified into a more or less uniform visual language, compared to 90's) because it was cheaper to produce and dominated the world with tons of content, not because it's visually appealing more than other styles. Low resolution pseudo-pixelart dominates indie gaming because it's cheaper to produce with limited manpower, not because everyone buys the lo-fi/retro aesthetics. The ML-powered tools have a great potential to break these limits. As an example, consider the particular niche which is believed to be disrupted immediately by Stable Diffusion - commission artists making custom character portraits for roleplaying sessions. SD can readily make passable fantasy portraits for this purpose (save for precision), but it needs a lot of work for that, and people still end up paying artists to do this work. This is not going to change for many years, at least. Moreover, the demand is also shifting to other styles, views, and poses with some thought put into it by a human, or potentially to animation/interactivity. The expectations are rising. Visual entertainment is mostly driven by novelty.