10 ms·

Rise of generative AI will be comparable to the rise of CGI in the early 90s

147 points by jger15 4y ago

rapjr9 4y ago
I predict all art on the web will soon include a tag that says "Permission is not granted to use this image to train an AI algorithm". Perhaps something similar also as a general legal notice for all content on all web sites. Stenography will be used to enforce this. If you find your stenographic tag in an AI generated image you sue.
bugfix-66 4y ago
Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. In the end, your "AI" is just huge interpolator, using matrix multiplications and max() or gelu() to interpolate the work of real intelligence: the human artists. Once it's illegal, only criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. I say this as a person who writes GPU BLAS kernels professionally at a company you've heard of. I directly profit from this theft. But I also know it's wrong.
- Jack000 4y ago
  shutterstock, like what openai/dalle-2 is doing? The only impact this kind of legislation will have is to ensure that only big companies get to train large models.
- capybara_2020 4y ago
  Don't large companies already have access to "legal" training data? They can use the images you uploaded. Most ToS have language to allow them to do that.
- nikanj 4y ago
  Where do the human artists get their copyright-free training data? Can a human copy the style of a famous artist and break copyright? Does the legal situation change if instead of a pencil they use photoshop, or if instead of photoshop they use runway?
  - mola 4y ago
    Yes, it changes. Please explain why not.
- chairhairair 4y ago
  Legislation will be too slow.
- dontreact 4y ago
  There’s a lot of data without copyright out there
  - bediger4000 4y ago
    Yes, but it's pretty hard to definitively say that a particular work is not copyrighted, given the life+X years term, and that works don't have to be marked as copyrighted. I believe that's why books have had fewer illustrations these last 20 years: authors can't afford to indemnify publishers against copyright suits over illustrations, and it's really hard to make sure either you have the correct permission or it's out of copyright.
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  I personally believe that both training and generating images through AI is fair use. It's transformative. You're creating completely new ideas. Consider that plus the fact that styles aren't copyrightable. Also keep in mind that, at least in the US, you can't legislate your way out of fair use since it's a constitutional right. (It's the result of the tension that exists between the copyright clause and the first amendment)
  - wwweston 4y ago
    The output is transformative. But in order to use it as an input to a training set, you're effectively making a copy that may or may not be authorized, not to mention at some level the intermediate representation might well present a copyright issue. "Style" isn't the issue. I think on an ethical level we're just going to need the expectation of separate agreements / legal conceptions for having ones work go into a training set. It's novel territory, providing not only work-for-hire but meta-work-for-hire. Might even be that there's no true compensation without equity.
    - parineum 4y ago
      I can only potentially see an issue with that if you're selling the model which is essentially a collection of copyrighted works (organized in a new way). However, the output of that model is the epitome of derivative work. The trained model has to be viewed as an artistic tool used by the artist to create art, imo.
      - didibus 4y ago
        Derivative work isn't permitted under current copyright though, you know that? Like I can't release a sequel to a Star Wars movie without getting a license to do so by Disney, because they own the original work's copyright, I'm not allowed to produce a derivative of it. Similarly this is why there needs to be an explicit open source license that allows you to produce derivative work from it. That's the crux of it, the trained model is a derivative work, literally it's mathematically derived almost deterministically (ignoring SDG being stochastic). The question is, even though it's derivative, is it still fair use to use it without permission?
- ramesh31 4y ago
  “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” We’ve argued this for centuries. Fair use is a fine line, but it exists. And it doesn’t matter whether the generative agent is human or machine. If a sufficiently unique work of art is the result, it’s not stealing.
- HHC-Hunter 4y ago
  > Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this intellectual property theft? The same places as before? What's stopping anyone from training these models? The cat is out of the bag and artists need to learn they will have to cede on these copyright issues. Similar to musicians having to cede on digital reproduction of music.
  - darkerside 4y ago
    DRM never went away. It just became so seamless we never notice it anymore.
    - pshc 4y ago
      It's pretty common for youtubers and streamers to get their content demonetized, muted or pulled for a bogus copyright violation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SkyPuncher 4y ago
  Am I facetious for saying that you'd simply buy it? Artists will become style makers.
  - kodah 4y ago
    That's the trajectory if we stay on this path. Artists would essentially become AI power users. The question upstream of that is, do you think this is a good path? Personally, I think AI has done about as much as crypto, maybe even less. I can't think of a single use of AI that I couldn't do without.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      AI image recognition is widely in use for real products today. I use it pretty regularly to identify plants. Have even used it a few times to identify electrical or mechanical parts.
      - kodah 4y ago
        I use it for that too, I said things I couldn't do without.
        Gigachad 4y ago
        Considering you can move to the middle of the jungle and survive with sticks and stones, that covers essentially everything.
        kodah 4y ago
        Loads of insight from a dude named Gigachad. Colour me surprised.
  - Applejinx 4y ago
    Not at all. I'm no great artist but I did about 440 episodes of a webcomic some years ago. That's hundreds of times what I'd need to train an AI on that style. Now consider if I'd made that, trained the AI, and then DID NOT SHARE IT. Suddenly, I've got an AI thing that other people don't have (not directly, they can eventually have a second-order knockoff of it) made to express an intention that knockoffs won't have. So I'd have both the story to tell (hence the original training set) and the means to automate the creation of it. You've already got artists/technicians making things like Clip Studio brushes, things that transform a stroke into a very different style or dump scatterings of clip art for texture. This is literally the same thing only way more sophisticated. Just because you have a 'foliage brush' doesn't mean you can draw a woodland scene, it just makes the texture rendering trivial. Just because you can type 'woodland scene' doesn't make it a SCENE, it just makes the image rendering trivial. Does it serve a story purpose? What does the imagery do, beyond just existing? The mere existence of 'imagery in X style' is rapidly going to become really boring. Once 'an image can look like anything at all' becomes commonplace, to be impressed by that will be about as sophisticated as being impressed that plastic is shiny. It becomes all about 'what did you do with it?' and that is where artists come in.
- prvc 4y ago
  Would you permit human students of art to view and learn from copyrighted images under these hypothetical laws?
  - rhelsing 4y ago
    The comparison between a ML model and a human is often used but it is not very useful. The problem is in most of these cases is that a powerful entity is profiting off of other people's work without their consent and gives nothing to the exploited members in return. Sure, an individual human learns from copyrighted works and reincorporates to make something slightly new all the time. And then they may also profit from it and not give anything in return to those that came before. The problem here is the scale and the power that enables that scale. This is industrial level mining of non-consenting humans, exploiting their life's work in many cases.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      A powerful entity such as...an open source company like Stable Diffusion?
      - throwaway290 4y ago
        Such as Microsoft with Copilot
        cercatrova 4y ago
        The very nature of AI is that anyone can make their own model with enough training. There are already open versions of Copilot available, such as Fauxpilot, or GPT Neo for GPT-3, so I never understand the "only rich and powerful will have AI." I mean, sure, some will, but just like programming, the effort will eventually be distributed to open source versions.
        throwaway290 4y ago
        As an OSS contributor you can nicely ask people building some OSS equivalent of Copilot to not use your work as training data, and they would comply because this is culture. Good luck doing the same with a megacorp
- abetusk 4y ago
  It will be a hellscape if copyright law is extended to include artistic style. Copyright is already overreaching and broad. To extend it further would be disastrous for the public and for the small to mid tier artist. I could imagine that if copyright law were to be extended in this way, artists would either be small enough to fall under the radar or select for popular enough artists that they could sub-license the 'copyrighted style' in question. Regardless, only large corporations and a select few 'superstar' artists would benefit at the expense of the vast majority of artists and the public. If this were to pass (and I very much doubt there's a good chance of it happening), all is not lost because there is a wealth of public domain imagery that we can still train on. This could then snowball into providing richer datasets to train on. I don't like the framing of a lot of these arguments. I'm paying taxes to provide a state apparatus that provides copyright legal protection for artists. I'm happy to do this, up to a point, as it's essentially a contract that provides incentives to innovation by rewarding artists, with the understanding that, eventually, the artists works get to be used by the public (that is, given to the public domain/commons). Copyright law, at least in the US, specifically forbids ideas and "styles" to focus on specific realizations. I understand we're in a shifting landscape where technology is changing this narrative and that copyright law was created with different technology in mind but copyright law exists, presumably, as a compromise to incentivize artistic creation while serving the public good. Copyright law is not meant to be corporate welfare nor is it meant to protect the artist at the expense of the public, in perpetuity. It would be nice to have a more reasoned argument instead of this knee-jerk reaction of theft.
  - pradn 4y ago
    We don't have to even get to the point of extending copyright to artistic style. If using copyrighted art to train a model is found to not be fair use, the technology will no longer be above board. Companies in countries with these rules won't be able to ignore them. What could happen if this interpretation of fair use comes to pass? Model trainers may have to license images from companies like Getty. In a sense, it should be cheaper than using an image individually. In some countries, music organizations deal with licensing large sets of songs, no need to negotiate with each label or artist individually. That sort of arrangement could come to pass. Perhaps there'll be a simple option on image upload sites to select the license for the image - allow or disallow model training. Or perhaps everyone will simply use below-the-board models surreptitiously.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  You underestimate people’s willingness to sacrifice other people’s work for the benefit of a few corporations and their cult like leadership. Already some argue passionately that ai stealing data is just like humans learning from other humans. Let alone that once a new trend starts ai will have to catchup - meaning that for a while it will lag so sufficient data is available for it to steal again. Also if we completely push artists out due to ever lower costs there will be little progress in original content.
  - merely-unlikely 4y ago
    There will still be a market for human artists. Humans like the works created by other humans.
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      Yes but smaller. There is a lot of content outside acclaimed paintings that we will not benefit from, and most important, people wont get to practice. And art is all about practice. For every 10k mediocre artists we replace with ai we will miss that one great artist that was taken out of the pool because they couldnt practice because the job no longer exists. I see the benefits of the technology, but the price we will pay will be too large. Same could be said about photoshop but photoshop is a tool. Ai is a mind.
      - est31 4y ago
        There is one star trek episode (think it was TNG but not sure) where the local civilization is totally dependent on some benevolent AI that their anchestors built. It broke but due to their reliance on it, they lost all expertise to repair it.
        yrgulation 4y ago
        Great, now i have to watch the whole series again just to find that episode. On a serious note i am now confused. Because at the same time i see ai generated art as a tool for creating new art, a facilitator. Still i dont agree people’s ip should be used without their consent. Oh boy progress is confusing sometimes.
- nobodyandproud 4y ago
  > Once it's illegal, only the criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. Disney is a first world company and it does exactly that: https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hundreds-130008971.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hu... Getty images is another: https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-misusing-47000-photos/ https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-m... In the US, the approach is to see what you can get away with, and you can get away with a lot with a pile of money and an army of lawyers.
  - aiappreciator 4y ago
    This can also be trivially circumvented: Step 1. Hire some outsourced artist in the rest of the world, where people don't care about AI art regulation. Step 2. Watch as those outsourced artists outproduce the domestic artists, since they have the twin advantage of lower costs AND better quality due to being able to use insanely powerful AIs. Step 3. Watch as the domestic art industry gets wiped out, just like manufacturing did. Politicians can understand this 1.2.3, therefore they'll never ban art AI.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  The only outcome of this would be that all commercial image/video AI creation tools are Chinese, but illegal to directly use in the West, so everyone wanting to do this legally has to pay contractors in China instead that semi-unofficially use these tools, but pretend not to. There's no putting the genie back into the bottle.
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  As only a shitty C developer, I do have a question regarding the possible uses of this kind of technology. Could you use the same theory to model 3d drawings (parts ?) in STL for manufacturing. Ie, is the ai limited that way ?
  - nineteen999 4y ago
    Probably, with some more training and more work. https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ Regards, another shitty C programmer
    - worthless-trash 4y ago
      I had googled this, but i didn't get much on my first few terms. Thanks mate.
- jackblemming 4y ago
  You know piracy (actual theft, not just pure unsubstantiated hypotheticals) exists and yet the game, music, and entertainment industries seem to be doing just fine. I think artists will be OK. I would love to change my position if there's any evidence. Perhaps it could start with a single example of any non-trivial job position being removed due to these image generation models.
  - didibus 4y ago
    I've already seen it happen a little. There's a few games, albeit often indie, where they used generative music makers for their soundtrack, saving them having to hire a music producer. I mean, if you've used or tried any of those models, you know that very soon it will allow an artist to be way more productive, what needed 50 artists might only need 30 now. I'd really be surprised if this didn't cost jobs. The only possibility it doesn't is that the projects get even bigger in scope, so increase productivity would go into more am ambitious projects instead of job cuts.
- smohare 4y ago
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Powerful interests of media giants got copyright law where it is now, they mostly decide where it goes. If training models on illegally scraped indie artist imagery allows the likes of Disney to save money then there is no one to lobby for copyright law to be strictly applied in this case.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  The 2030's will be dominated by a resurgence of 17th century styles, in the public domain and therefore available for genetics modeling...
- stuntkite 4y ago
  I think you underestimate the exponential scale of what's happening and how the training data can make and dictate digital worlds to then use to train itself again to then be directed and prompted by humans again and then rinse repeat except we also train an AI to be the human who directs and prompts but throw in a random seed but also still take in some human interaction and use that to build whole visual worlds. Flat or in Unreal Nanite 3D. Characters and places. Normal light and light we haven't seen... Train again. Use the previous human AI but now the human prompts create a set of human AIs to feed back into that and then that is put out into a space to make a set of paintings as controls that are painted by robots and those are scanned in intense detail by cameras that also pick up near IR and UV and those are used as a training set to seed the new environments which is then told to make me an episode of Duckman from a half remembered drunk memory voice memo and the output is better than the original show probably ever was. Then turn that AI loose and let the internet use it to make Duckman episodes but people figure out how to tweak the prompts to make Toy Story at scale but also use it to train their own AIs. We have reliable secure GPU multi tenancy now. Next year we'll start seeing AI designed silicon photonics creeping in. All this GPU training is now pretty accessible to be passed all over the internet and back securely and streaming. No one has any clue what's coming in a very short few months. Well, we have a few ideas... but it's going to be surprising. These systems build systems to build more systems there and back again. The only constraint being energy availability and attention. The powers that be captured all of human experience for a couple decades to seed this project. So off we go I guess! This moves so much faster than copyright law. This is our new world. The compression of information contained inside of models is something that existing bureaucratic systems cannot hope to regulate. I'm pretty sure no one that can is even slightly interested in regulating it anyway. Our new way of life is gonna be pretty weird. I think some fun new media will come out of it though. Which is pretty cool. Also you know... Utopia or Oblivion.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Wait till you find out how brains work. Will you be mandating copyright enforcement chips in the frontal lobe? Your position is untenable and will be destroyed thoroughly, if not in places where Disney and co. are entrenched then everywhere else first and eventually in Disneylands too.
  - trention 4y ago
    There is no reason to legally treat humans and algorithms the same way. Only insane, moronic singularitarians claim otherwise.
- esjeon 4y ago
  An exception should be recognized: open models - free of charge, with no strings attached. I think this is the best approach because: (1) Models are public, so everyone can benefit from them. (2) Such models can be trained on public data for improvements. (No complexity involved over paying for data, no copyright risks regarding data, etc) (3) Companies can sell services. (model-as-a-service, customization, apps/tools, education, etc) (4) Companies may lose competitive edges, but they can enjoy the bigger market. (I'm looking at Matlab and Mathematica. They are really good, but Python took the market eventually.) It feels like many of FOSS pros/cons can be plugged in here as-is.
- visarga 4y ago
  > Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. Copyright only concerns with expression, not ideas. You can still learn the concepts from copyrighted content without violating copyright. There is a limit to what can be protected from AI with copyrights. When they trained Stable Diffusion they used 5B image-text pairs, but the final model fits in 5GB. So they didn't actually take too much, about 1 byte per input example, which is in line with the idea of learning general concepts rather than copying. An interesting parallel - the human DNA is about the same size, 3.2B nucleotides. The SD model is like a cultural DNA, and like DNA is compact, easy to replicate and powerful. At this level copyright is an anti-pattern, genes and memes like to travel and evolve.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? For me, countries that don't enforce that or old models from before the ban. Then again, I'm a nerd who wouldn't release my creations commercially—they'd be AI-generated shitposts or images done for the joy of exploring what my new tools can do.
- wdutch 4y ago
  > No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists If the future of copyright law in the west moves to outlaw use in training data then the west will lose out to companies from China, Vietnam and anywhere else that doesn't care at all about western copyright. I think it will give them a competitive edge.
aiappreciator 4y ago
I don't think its comparable. Generative AI is a far far greater leap than CGI is. CGI is a mere evolutionary/sustaining innovation, movies/shows pre and post-CGI are largely made by the same studios. CGI just lowered costs compared to physical sets, and slightly expanded what was possible to film. Generative AI, on the other hand, lowers costs so radically, that it will spur entire business models. Within a few years, we can expect feature length animations/TV shows to be created by teams of less than 5 people. Live action shows, requiring photorealism, will be a bit harder, so maybe 5-10 years. This will in turn change the business model radically, with indie creations competing against big budget productions, it'll turn Netflix in the direction of youtube, etc etc. It will be very similar to how livestreaming and youtube affected TV-talk shows, as large production staff are no longer needed. This is no exaggeration, I've seen animation created with diffusion models, that would have taken a traditional animator a year to animate by hand, now doable by a single person, within a week. It's been less than a 1 month since the model's release (novelai), imagine what would happen in a year.
- tartoran 4y ago
  In theory sure, but it seems to me that if the cost and effort to create become lower so will the content. There will always be better and worse, and just like CGI, the content would be good or bad depending on what humans are behind it and the amount of effort they put on. Im thinking generative AI will indeed make animations ubiquitos to the point we’d ingest so much content to the point of becoming ‘alergic’ to it or seek something other kind of entertainment.
  - aiappreciator 4y ago
    There a huge demand for animation, that is currently being unsatisfied. Youtube used to have a large genre of short-animations. They all died out, because their production costs are way higher than what weekly-ad-revenues can sustain, compared to the incredibly cheap costs of talking heads, which can update daily. Not everyone will like animation, but there'll probably at least 50x animation on youtube in 2 years than today. There's also the quality issue. Animation scales very linearly with budget. With low budget, the best you can do is flash animation, which limits the formats of story you can tell very heavily (99+% comedy) With AI, individuals can match the quality of professional animation teams, which drastically expands the range of ideas they can explore. So that eliminates a lot of the boredom. Note this wouldn't displace existing animation studios, it'll just allow them to push their production values way way higher. For hand-drawn animation, even top-budget films, still have moments where they cheap out. In the future, the standard is going to get pushed insanely high, where every frame will be screenshot worthy, because they are literally AI illustrations. Aka, instead of one Mona-Lisa, expect 1000 Mona Lisa paintings, formed into an animation of Mona-Lisa going through her day in renaissance Italy. The actual threatened jobs, aren't in animation, but in live action. Because its far harder to make perfect photo-realistic images than stylized images. This gives animation an advantage that live action doesn't have. For example, the recent Rings of Power cost 1 billion, but an AI animation would both look better, and cost far far less. Sci-Fi and fantasy shows are especially vulnerable to competition from animation.
colesantiago 4y ago
From what I see, It seems the general theme of generative AI on HN and on the web is this: Using an AI writer generator (GPT-3): "Looks great, I can make a great SEO blog and a storybook SaaS out of this now, I don't need a writer anymore. Writers adapt or die." Using an AI artist generator (DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney): "Looks brilliant, this IS the future. it's inevitable, I don't need an artist anymore. Artists must adapt or die, sorry." Using an AI code generator (programmers) (Copilot, Replit Ghostwriter): "No thank you, Bad. legislation now, why are you violating my copyright / open source licence?" Why does it seem OK to obsolete complete industries by outright violating copyright laws, stealing work (even generating with a shutterstock watermark!), often without attribution and hail this as a new dawn for AI? Or is this mainly VCs finding out that this is now a new way to 'provide shareholder value' despite all the costs that come with it. So just throw cash at any startup that can generate a hot dog image in any style or generate a hot dog detector with copyrighted code, writing hotdog story no matter how bad the story is.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  as with anything, reasoning is motivated by class interests. reasoning flows out of class interests. thinking exists in the first place to satisfy needs. by the way, you forgot hypothetical fleets of self-driving trucks putting truckers out of work, and so on.
- capitalsigma 4y ago
  HN is pretty pro-Copilot in most threads I've seen. Honestly I think I have seen this comment -- "you programmers sure like generative models when it impacts other industries but you get awfully defensive when it comes to your own!" -- much more often than I have seen anyone actually push back against Copilot. Frankly I think it's projection from non-SWEs who don't understand that automating your work away is the core mission of software development. There are good reasons to worry about how Copilot might impact the quality of software, especially if it's being used by someone who doesn't understand the generated code, but "what about my job safety??" is nowhere on the list.
  - colesantiago 4y ago
howlin 4y ago
In theory it could empower amateur storytellers to punch above their weight by creating semi-professional animated films. Though to be fair, there was a similar realization when it was clear the Quake engine could be used for filming custom narratives rather than just recording gameplay. Not too much came out of that era. Professional artists still better understand what media humans want to consume.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Not only that but it may turn out story tellers would still want to use words and the listeners to prefer using their imagination sometimes too. Not that I have something against CGI or animations but when somehing becomes too much humans get bored.
  - aiappreciator 4y ago
    Light novels (From Japan) already balance these two demands. Illustrations depict the core characters, and images are far better than words in depicting appearances. Words do the rest. AI will just mean most fiction start following this same model. Where characters and key environments get detailed designs and images, but the rest remain in words.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Sounds like the Unreal engine is living the Quake engine film dream: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/solutions/film-television https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/solutions/film-television Of course, it’s professionals using it rather than amateurs. I expect generative AI would largely turn out the same way.
  - stuntkite 4y ago
    Remember Blahbalicious? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCGqcXzLak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCGqcXzLak
- Teever 4y ago
  > Not too much came out of that era. Are you sure it isn't the complete opposite? I'm pretty sure that the amateur kids who played around with Machima in the age of Quake went on to become the professionals in the video game industry.
intrasight 4y ago
Generative AI is CGI. But I think it's going to be a much more profound shift than was CGI. I don't think anyone really yet knows what it'll mean. I'll also claim that it won't really mean anything until it's combined with 3D ray tracing. So what's going to be "generated"? A 3D model, right? All the current AI CGI stuff that I've seen is 2D.
- oifjsidjf 4y ago
  There is already 3D model AI generation, though it still needs some work. But as they say "2 more papers down the line..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqIXRB_Uw5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqIXRB_Uw5s https://mixed-news.com/en/nvidias-latest-open-source-ai-generates-3d-models-from-a-single-2d-image/ https://mixed-news.com/en/nvidias-latest-open-source-ai-gene...
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  It's quite literally Computer Generated Imagery as what we traditionally think of as CGI actually requires an artist.
- plutonorm 4y ago
  I agree, this far more profound than CGI. Ultimately I think this tech will be seen as allowing the exploration of all possible worlds. When the AI can generate convincing representations of anything we can think of and things we could never dream of - then what we are really looking at is a kind of inter-dimensional craft that can take us between realities.
  - wnkrshm 4y ago
    I think with endless escapism being a reality, people will get bored and focus on the real world again.
    - intrasight 4y ago
      We will have the best of both worlds ;)
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Makes sense, rise of CGI in the 90s killed movies I like.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
https://archive.ph/qk0v3 https://archive.ph/qk0v3
unity1001 4y ago
Im looking forward to AI helping generate game art and assets so that developing games will be more practical for smaller teams and larger organizations will be able to make grand games. The situation is so bad that even the latest Elder Scrolls games reuse assets from games from way back to speed up the process.
- trinovantes 4y ago
  I'm pretty happy with AI art for some of my game's textures I just wish there's more progress in AI-generated voices that sound more natural, especially for dialog in action sequences like yelling/screaming
schoen 4y ago
I read this whole interview and dozens of comments here before realizing that the intended reference was most likely Computer-Generated Imagery and not Common Gateway Interface. (I was imagining that the interviewee mentioned the latter as an example of a technology that somewhat unexpectedly ignited a whole industry -- in that case, web development.)
- nikanj 4y ago
  If someone says ”the movie had CGI”, do you really think of Common Gateway Interfaces?
  - schoen 4y ago
    Nope! But with something like "as important as CGI", I do.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I am afraid that rise of generative AI will result in a lot of junk being released and advertised as quality. It shouldn't be like so, I think generative AI can yield great results if there is enough human supervision, I think it can be great if used to augmenting creative work. But I think many will chose the shortest path towards money and they will put in the least amount of work possible. Imagine tens of thousands of movies spitted by AI based on sub mediocre screenplays, imagine millions of songs generated by AI based on sub mediocre lyrics. Somewhere, in that ocean of junk, there is something valuable. Good luck finding it. If we use CGI analogy I can say that all pre CGI Tom and Jerry cartoons are works of art but many of the cartoons released after aren't so great, while some are. And CGI still requires some effort, so not everyone is be able to release movies. Generative AI will require far less effort and knowledge.
- plutonorm 4y ago
  Until the AI is smarter than us and then all but the best human films we be viewed as junk.
- sarsway 4y ago
  sure people will flood YouTube with their creations, that no-one will ever watch, but isn't that already happening kinda? Early with Stable Diffusion every creation was just "wow", now it's hard to even get someone to look at your image. The quality bar will be raised, but if you want an audience, you will still need to produce something that stands above the rest. And the way to do that is the same as today, put in more effort than the others. Make something that's better, that's worth peoples time.
  - visarga 4y ago
    > Early with Stable Diffusion every creation was just "wow", now it's hard to even get someone to look at your image. Eventually we will only generate art for personal, one time use, or for small groups sharing an interest.
- HellDunkel 4y ago
  Sooner or later platforms will filter purely AI generated content as it collides with IP rules or bore the hell out of people.
jasfi 4y ago
Just like CGI, the early use of generative AI experience isn't always there, which can lead to frustration. I'm working on a platform to help with this, can't give details just yet: https://inventai.xyz https://inventai.xyz.
iso1631 4y ago
So loads of buggy perl scripts? My mind still sees "CGI" and thinks common gateway interface, not computer generated imaging.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
No it will not. It will be much bigger, because: - it can be automated. CGI still required a lot of human work. - AI generated content requires way less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at CGI. We already see people getting Stable-Diffusion-proficient in a few hours. - in the 90, CGI was introduced gently, through selected medias. AI content has access to the full internet right out of the box. - producing CGI required a lot of hardware, but with SaaS, AI will be available to anybody. - CGI was first exposed to professionals, who produced for the public. AI is already been used by hobbyists, and soon the public, directly. - CGI was mostly about visual techs, but AI generated content can be applied to text, sound, molecules, basically any structured data. In summary, the very nature and context in which AI generated content is taking form means the impact will be larger, stronger, and way more intense. People are hardly capable at dealing with CGI intelligently, even after 20 years. They trust photos and videos a lot, and react strongly to them. Even when they know they are fake, like in a movie, some emotions will forge they judgement like if it were real. AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind. I was underwhelmed by the last decade of AI dev, but 2022 is for AI what 2000 was for the dotcom revolution. Question is, what the equivalent of domain name for AI, something cheap you can buy to sale later?
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I think it's still comparable if you view it as "Generative AI is to CGI what CGI was to practical effects". - CGI can be automated, practical effects required a lot of human work - CGI content requires less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at sculpting / painting / makeup / carpentry / stunts / whatever to become good at practical effects. We already see people getting $MODELLING_PROGRAM proficient in a few weeks. - producing practical effects required a lot of hardware, material and tools but with CGI you just need a powerful computer. CGI will soon be available to anybody as computers become cheaper Your last two points are probably only true for AI generated content but there are still some barriers to people setting up their own AI models (technical know how, hardware) and there are certainly limitations on what type of content can be produced (you need a big and reliable dataset of examples). Overall I think this will have a similar impact but probably more widely distributed in both terms of access and impact.
fassssst 4y ago
Generative AI is sucking the soul out of everything. Why are people rushing to build it? Just to get rich and powerful?
poulpy123 4y ago
I'm wondering if we are going to see the same pattern than with AI driving: a lot of enthousiasm at first because what is done if very impressive but after the initial phase the interest slow down a lot because at the end AI is still "stupid"
macrolime 4y ago
Generative AI is much more than "generative". It doesn't just make it orders of magnitude cheaper to create things, but enables vast new areas of applications. Calling Stable Diffusion etc AI art generators is kinda like saying our visual cortex is an AI art generator because it can render pictures for our consciousness. It's perhaps not much more than this at the moment, but it will be, soon.
bondarchuk 4y ago
Comparing image generation to earlier technological breakthroughs has been very helpful for me in two ways. Photography is my go-to comparison. First, it helps quell the extreme ends of anti-AI paranoid fear I sometimes feel, to think that yes, it could change the world significantly and make some things disappear or reduce to irrelevance (e.g. realist art) and make new things appear and rise to relevance (e.g. mass media), yet throughout all this the more fundamental aspects of humanity and human society and culture have endured and adapted just fine. Second, it gives me more empathy for those people who were/are afraid of or simply opposed to other technological developments which I take for granted (again photography, TV, the internet, trains, nuclear power..), which various fears/oppositions are often an object of derision and ridicule. I feel this (AI, starting roughly at ~alphago) is the first significant breakthrough that I'm consciously living through myself, and this does a lot to one's worldview I think.
Geee 4y ago
The biggest shift that generative AI enables is that content becomes personal. Everyone will create and consume their own content. It's not just that the content will be AI-generated, but it is generated for each person individually, which is the 'big' thing. Already with Stable Diffusion it's way more rewarding to play with it yourself than look at generations made by others. It's more like a game or a dream that is a personal experience, than 'art' to be shared with others.
swayvil 4y ago
Handmade, by a human, is the most powerful. Those of us who can see well enough to tell the difference all know this. What these mechanical approaches offer is speed, convenience and clever tricks. But not art-power. So here we are puzzling over various flavors of flimsy and how to make a better fast-food taco.

147 points by jger15 4y ago

I predict all art on the web will soon include a tag that says "Permission is not granted to use this image to train an AI algorithm". Perhaps something similar also as a general legal notice for all content on all web sites. Stenography will be used to enforce this. If you find your stenographic tag in an AI generated image you sue.

bugfix-66 4y ago

Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. In the end, your "AI" is just huge interpolator, using matrix multiplications and max() or gelu() to interpolate the work of real intelligence: the human artists. Once it's illegal, only criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. I say this as a person who writes GPU BLAS kernels professionally at a company you've heard of. I directly profit from this theft. But I also know it's wrong.

Jack000 4y ago
shutterstock, like what openai/dalle-2 is doing? The only impact this kind of legislation will have is to ensure that only big companies get to train large models.
capybara_2020 4y ago
Don't large companies already have access to "legal" training data? They can use the images you uploaded. Most ToS have language to allow them to do that.
nikanj 4y ago
Where do the human artists get their copyright-free training data? Can a human copy the style of a famous artist and break copyright? Does the legal situation change if instead of a pencil they use photoshop, or if instead of photoshop they use runway?
- mola 4y ago
  Yes, it changes. Please explain why not.
chairhairair 4y ago
Legislation will be too slow.
dontreact 4y ago
There’s a lot of data without copyright out there
- bediger4000 4y ago
  Yes, but it's pretty hard to definitively say that a particular work is not copyrighted, given the life+X years term, and that works don't have to be marked as copyrighted. I believe that's why books have had fewer illustrations these last 20 years: authors can't afford to indemnify publishers against copyright suits over illustrations, and it's really hard to make sure either you have the correct permission or it's out of copyright.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
I personally believe that both training and generating images through AI is fair use. It's transformative. You're creating completely new ideas. Consider that plus the fact that styles aren't copyrightable. Also keep in mind that, at least in the US, you can't legislate your way out of fair use since it's a constitutional right. (It's the result of the tension that exists between the copyright clause and the first amendment)
- wwweston 4y ago
  The output is transformative. But in order to use it as an input to a training set, you're effectively making a copy that may or may not be authorized, not to mention at some level the intermediate representation might well present a copyright issue. "Style" isn't the issue. I think on an ethical level we're just going to need the expectation of separate agreements / legal conceptions for having ones work go into a training set. It's novel territory, providing not only work-for-hire but meta-work-for-hire. Might even be that there's no true compensation without equity.
  - parineum 4y ago
    I can only potentially see an issue with that if you're selling the model which is essentially a collection of copyrighted works (organized in a new way). However, the output of that model is the epitome of derivative work. The trained model has to be viewed as an artistic tool used by the artist to create art, imo.
    - didibus 4y ago
      Derivative work isn't permitted under current copyright though, you know that? Like I can't release a sequel to a Star Wars movie without getting a license to do so by Disney, because they own the original work's copyright, I'm not allowed to produce a derivative of it. Similarly this is why there needs to be an explicit open source license that allows you to produce derivative work from it. That's the crux of it, the trained model is a derivative work, literally it's mathematically derived almost deterministically (ignoring SDG being stochastic). The question is, even though it's derivative, is it still fair use to use it without permission?
ramesh31 4y ago
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” We’ve argued this for centuries. Fair use is a fine line, but it exists. And it doesn’t matter whether the generative agent is human or machine. If a sufficiently unique work of art is the result, it’s not stealing.
HHC-Hunter 4y ago
> Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this intellectual property theft? The same places as before? What's stopping anyone from training these models? The cat is out of the bag and artists need to learn they will have to cede on these copyright issues. Similar to musicians having to cede on digital reproduction of music.
- darkerside 4y ago
  DRM never went away. It just became so seamless we never notice it anymore.
  - pshc 4y ago
    It's pretty common for youtubers and streamers to get their content demonetized, muted or pulled for a bogus copyright violation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SkyPuncher 4y ago
Am I facetious for saying that you'd simply buy it? Artists will become style makers.
- kodah 4y ago
  That's the trajectory if we stay on this path. Artists would essentially become AI power users. The question upstream of that is, do you think this is a good path? Personally, I think AI has done about as much as crypto, maybe even less. I can't think of a single use of AI that I couldn't do without.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    AI image recognition is widely in use for real products today. I use it pretty regularly to identify plants. Have even used it a few times to identify electrical or mechanical parts.
    - kodah 4y ago
      I use it for that too, I said things I couldn't do without.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        Considering you can move to the middle of the jungle and survive with sticks and stones, that covers essentially everything.
        kodah 4y ago
        Loads of insight from a dude named Gigachad. Colour me surprised.
- Applejinx 4y ago
  Not at all. I'm no great artist but I did about 440 episodes of a webcomic some years ago. That's hundreds of times what I'd need to train an AI on that style. Now consider if I'd made that, trained the AI, and then DID NOT SHARE IT. Suddenly, I've got an AI thing that other people don't have (not directly, they can eventually have a second-order knockoff of it) made to express an intention that knockoffs won't have. So I'd have both the story to tell (hence the original training set) and the means to automate the creation of it. You've already got artists/technicians making things like Clip Studio brushes, things that transform a stroke into a very different style or dump scatterings of clip art for texture. This is literally the same thing only way more sophisticated. Just because you have a 'foliage brush' doesn't mean you can draw a woodland scene, it just makes the texture rendering trivial. Just because you can type 'woodland scene' doesn't make it a SCENE, it just makes the image rendering trivial. Does it serve a story purpose? What does the imagery do, beyond just existing? The mere existence of 'imagery in X style' is rapidly going to become really boring. Once 'an image can look like anything at all' becomes commonplace, to be impressed by that will be about as sophisticated as being impressed that plastic is shiny. It becomes all about 'what did you do with it?' and that is where artists come in.
prvc 4y ago
Would you permit human students of art to view and learn from copyrighted images under these hypothetical laws?
- rhelsing 4y ago
  The comparison between a ML model and a human is often used but it is not very useful. The problem is in most of these cases is that a powerful entity is profiting off of other people's work without their consent and gives nothing to the exploited members in return. Sure, an individual human learns from copyrighted works and reincorporates to make something slightly new all the time. And then they may also profit from it and not give anything in return to those that came before. The problem here is the scale and the power that enables that scale. This is industrial level mining of non-consenting humans, exploiting their life's work in many cases.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    A powerful entity such as...an open source company like Stable Diffusion?
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      Such as Microsoft with Copilot
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        The very nature of AI is that anyone can make their own model with enough training. There are already open versions of Copilot available, such as Fauxpilot, or GPT Neo for GPT-3, so I never understand the "only rich and powerful will have AI." I mean, sure, some will, but just like programming, the effort will eventually be distributed to open source versions.
        throwaway290 4y ago
        As an OSS contributor you can nicely ask people building some OSS equivalent of Copilot to not use your work as training data, and they would comply because this is culture. Good luck doing the same with a megacorp
abetusk 4y ago
It will be a hellscape if copyright law is extended to include artistic style. Copyright is already overreaching and broad. To extend it further would be disastrous for the public and for the small to mid tier artist. I could imagine that if copyright law were to be extended in this way, artists would either be small enough to fall under the radar or select for popular enough artists that they could sub-license the 'copyrighted style' in question. Regardless, only large corporations and a select few 'superstar' artists would benefit at the expense of the vast majority of artists and the public. If this were to pass (and I very much doubt there's a good chance of it happening), all is not lost because there is a wealth of public domain imagery that we can still train on. This could then snowball into providing richer datasets to train on. I don't like the framing of a lot of these arguments. I'm paying taxes to provide a state apparatus that provides copyright legal protection for artists. I'm happy to do this, up to a point, as it's essentially a contract that provides incentives to innovation by rewarding artists, with the understanding that, eventually, the artists works get to be used by the public (that is, given to the public domain/commons). Copyright law, at least in the US, specifically forbids ideas and "styles" to focus on specific realizations. I understand we're in a shifting landscape where technology is changing this narrative and that copyright law was created with different technology in mind but copyright law exists, presumably, as a compromise to incentivize artistic creation while serving the public good. Copyright law is not meant to be corporate welfare nor is it meant to protect the artist at the expense of the public, in perpetuity. It would be nice to have a more reasoned argument instead of this knee-jerk reaction of theft.
- pradn 4y ago
  We don't have to even get to the point of extending copyright to artistic style. If using copyrighted art to train a model is found to not be fair use, the technology will no longer be above board. Companies in countries with these rules won't be able to ignore them. What could happen if this interpretation of fair use comes to pass? Model trainers may have to license images from companies like Getty. In a sense, it should be cheaper than using an image individually. In some countries, music organizations deal with licensing large sets of songs, no need to negotiate with each label or artist individually. That sort of arrangement could come to pass. Perhaps there'll be a simple option on image upload sites to select the license for the image - allow or disallow model training. Or perhaps everyone will simply use below-the-board models surreptitiously.
yrgulation 4y ago
You underestimate people’s willingness to sacrifice other people’s work for the benefit of a few corporations and their cult like leadership. Already some argue passionately that ai stealing data is just like humans learning from other humans. Let alone that once a new trend starts ai will have to catchup - meaning that for a while it will lag so sufficient data is available for it to steal again. Also if we completely push artists out due to ever lower costs there will be little progress in original content.
- merely-unlikely 4y ago
  There will still be a market for human artists. Humans like the works created by other humans.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    Yes but smaller. There is a lot of content outside acclaimed paintings that we will not benefit from, and most important, people wont get to practice. And art is all about practice. For every 10k mediocre artists we replace with ai we will miss that one great artist that was taken out of the pool because they couldnt practice because the job no longer exists. I see the benefits of the technology, but the price we will pay will be too large. Same could be said about photoshop but photoshop is a tool. Ai is a mind.
    - est31 4y ago
      There is one star trek episode (think it was TNG but not sure) where the local civilization is totally dependent on some benevolent AI that their anchestors built. It broke but due to their reliance on it, they lost all expertise to repair it.
      - yrgulation 4y ago
        Great, now i have to watch the whole series again just to find that episode. On a serious note i am now confused. Because at the same time i see ai generated art as a tool for creating new art, a facilitator. Still i dont agree people’s ip should be used without their consent. Oh boy progress is confusing sometimes.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
> Once it's illegal, only the criminals will use it. No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists. You think anyone who matters will secretly use a neural net trained in violation of copyright? Think again. Disney is a first world company and it does exactly that: https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hundreds-130008971.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/column-disney-allegedly-cheated-hu... Getty images is another: https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-misusing-47000-photos/ https://petapixel.com/2016/08/04/getty-images-sued-accused-m... In the US, the approach is to see what you can get away with, and you can get away with a lot with a pile of money and an army of lawyers.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  This can also be trivially circumvented: Step 1. Hire some outsourced artist in the rest of the world, where people don't care about AI art regulation. Step 2. Watch as those outsourced artists outproduce the domestic artists, since they have the twin advantage of lower costs AND better quality due to being able to use insanely powerful AIs. Step 3. Watch as the domestic art industry gets wiped out, just like manufacturing did. Politicians can understand this 1.2.3, therefore they'll never ban art AI.
nootropicat 4y ago
The only outcome of this would be that all commercial image/video AI creation tools are Chinese, but illegal to directly use in the West, so everyone wanting to do this legally has to pay contractors in China instead that semi-unofficially use these tools, but pretend not to. There's no putting the genie back into the bottle.
worthless-trash 4y ago
As only a shitty C developer, I do have a question regarding the possible uses of this kind of technology. Could you use the same theory to model 3d drawings (parts ?) in STL for manufacturing. Ie, is the ai limited that way ?
- nineteen999 4y ago
  Probably, with some more training and more work. https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/ Regards, another shitty C programmer
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    I had googled this, but i didn't get much on my first few terms. Thanks mate.
jackblemming 4y ago
You know piracy (actual theft, not just pure unsubstantiated hypotheticals) exists and yet the game, music, and entertainment industries seem to be doing just fine. I think artists will be OK. I would love to change my position if there's any evidence. Perhaps it could start with a single example of any non-trivial job position being removed due to these image generation models.
- didibus 4y ago
  I've already seen it happen a little. There's a few games, albeit often indie, where they used generative music makers for their soundtrack, saving them having to hire a music producer. I mean, if you've used or tried any of those models, you know that very soon it will allow an artist to be way more productive, what needed 50 artists might only need 30 now. I'd really be surprised if this didn't cost jobs. The only possibility it doesn't is that the projects get even bigger in scope, so increase productivity would go into more am ambitious projects instead of job cuts.
smohare 4y ago
throwaway290 4y ago
Powerful interests of media giants got copyright law where it is now, they mostly decide where it goes. If training models on illegally scraped indie artist imagery allows the likes of Disney to save money then there is no one to lobby for copyright law to be strictly applied in this case.
sdenton4 4y ago
The 2030's will be dominated by a resurgence of 17th century styles, in the public domain and therefore available for genetics modeling...
stuntkite 4y ago
I think you underestimate the exponential scale of what's happening and how the training data can make and dictate digital worlds to then use to train itself again to then be directed and prompted by humans again and then rinse repeat except we also train an AI to be the human who directs and prompts but throw in a random seed but also still take in some human interaction and use that to build whole visual worlds. Flat or in Unreal Nanite 3D. Characters and places. Normal light and light we haven't seen... Train again. Use the previous human AI but now the human prompts create a set of human AIs to feed back into that and then that is put out into a space to make a set of paintings as controls that are painted by robots and those are scanned in intense detail by cameras that also pick up near IR and UV and those are used as a training set to seed the new environments which is then told to make me an episode of Duckman from a half remembered drunk memory voice memo and the output is better than the original show probably ever was. Then turn that AI loose and let the internet use it to make Duckman episodes but people figure out how to tweak the prompts to make Toy Story at scale but also use it to train their own AIs. We have reliable secure GPU multi tenancy now. Next year we'll start seeing AI designed silicon photonics creeping in. All this GPU training is now pretty accessible to be passed all over the internet and back securely and streaming. No one has any clue what's coming in a very short few months. Well, we have a few ideas... but it's going to be surprising. These systems build systems to build more systems there and back again. The only constraint being energy availability and attention. The powers that be captured all of human experience for a couple decades to seed this project. So off we go I guess! This moves so much faster than copyright law. This is our new world. The compression of information contained inside of models is something that existing bureaucratic systems cannot hope to regulate. I'm pretty sure no one that can is even slightly interested in regulating it anyway. Our new way of life is gonna be pretty weird. I think some fun new media will come out of it though. Which is pretty cool. Also you know... Utopia or Oblivion.
hoseja 4y ago
Wait till you find out how brains work. Will you be mandating copyright enforcement chips in the frontal lobe? Your position is untenable and will be destroyed thoroughly, if not in places where Disney and co. are entrenched then everywhere else first and eventually in Disneylands too.
- trention 4y ago
  There is no reason to legally treat humans and algorithms the same way. Only insane, moronic singularitarians claim otherwise.
esjeon 4y ago
An exception should be recognized: open models - free of charge, with no strings attached. I think this is the best approach because: (1) Models are public, so everyone can benefit from them. (2) Such models can be trained on public data for improvements. (No complexity involved over paying for data, no copyright risks regarding data, etc) (3) Companies can sell services. (model-as-a-service, customization, apps/tools, education, etc) (4) Companies may lose competitive edges, but they can enjoy the bigger market. (I'm looking at Matlab and Mathematica. They are really good, but Python took the market eventually.) It feels like many of FOSS pros/cons can be plugged in here as-is.
visarga 4y ago
> Without enormous training data from human victims, your "Artificial Intelligence" doesn't exist. Copyright only concerns with expression, not ideas. You can still learn the concepts from copyrighted content without violating copyright. There is a limit to what can be protected from AI with copyrights. When they trained Stable Diffusion they used 5B image-text pairs, but the final model fits in 5GB. So they didn't actually take too much, about 1 byte per input example, which is in line with the idea of learning general concepts rather than copying. An interesting parallel - the human DNA is about the same size, 3.2B nucleotides. The SD model is like a cultural DNA, and like DNA is compact, easy to replicate and powerful. At this level copyright is an anti-pattern, genes and memes like to travel and evolve.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> Where are you going to get the training data, once copyright law is amended to protect artists from this new kind of intellectual property theft? For me, countries that don't enforce that or old models from before the ban. Then again, I'm a nerd who wouldn't release my creations commercially—they'd be AI-generated shitposts or images done for the joy of exploring what my new tools can do.
wdutch 4y ago
> No first-world company will break the law to save money on artists If the future of copyright law in the west moves to outlaw use in training data then the west will lose out to companies from China, Vietnam and anywhere else that doesn't care at all about western copyright. I think it will give them a competitive edge.

aiappreciator 4y ago

I don't think its comparable. Generative AI is a far far greater leap than CGI is. CGI is a mere evolutionary/sustaining innovation, movies/shows pre and post-CGI are largely made by the same studios. CGI just lowered costs compared to physical sets, and slightly expanded what was possible to film. Generative AI, on the other hand, lowers costs so radically, that it will spur entire business models. Within a few years, we can expect feature length animations/TV shows to be created by teams of less than 5 people. Live action shows, requiring photorealism, will be a bit harder, so maybe 5-10 years. This will in turn change the business model radically, with indie creations competing against big budget productions, it'll turn Netflix in the direction of youtube, etc etc. It will be very similar to how livestreaming and youtube affected TV-talk shows, as large production staff are no longer needed. This is no exaggeration, I've seen animation created with diffusion models, that would have taken a traditional animator a year to animate by hand, now doable by a single person, within a week. It's been less than a 1 month since the model's release (novelai), imagine what would happen in a year.

tartoran 4y ago
In theory sure, but it seems to me that if the cost and effort to create become lower so will the content. There will always be better and worse, and just like CGI, the content would be good or bad depending on what humans are behind it and the amount of effort they put on. Im thinking generative AI will indeed make animations ubiquitos to the point we’d ingest so much content to the point of becoming ‘alergic’ to it or seek something other kind of entertainment.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  There a huge demand for animation, that is currently being unsatisfied. Youtube used to have a large genre of short-animations. They all died out, because their production costs are way higher than what weekly-ad-revenues can sustain, compared to the incredibly cheap costs of talking heads, which can update daily. Not everyone will like animation, but there'll probably at least 50x animation on youtube in 2 years than today. There's also the quality issue. Animation scales very linearly with budget. With low budget, the best you can do is flash animation, which limits the formats of story you can tell very heavily (99+% comedy) With AI, individuals can match the quality of professional animation teams, which drastically expands the range of ideas they can explore. So that eliminates a lot of the boredom. Note this wouldn't displace existing animation studios, it'll just allow them to push their production values way way higher. For hand-drawn animation, even top-budget films, still have moments where they cheap out. In the future, the standard is going to get pushed insanely high, where every frame will be screenshot worthy, because they are literally AI illustrations. Aka, instead of one Mona-Lisa, expect 1000 Mona Lisa paintings, formed into an animation of Mona-Lisa going through her day in renaissance Italy. The actual threatened jobs, aren't in animation, but in live action. Because its far harder to make perfect photo-realistic images than stylized images. This gives animation an advantage that live action doesn't have. For example, the recent Rings of Power cost 1 billion, but an AI animation would both look better, and cost far far less. Sci-Fi and fantasy shows are especially vulnerable to competition from animation.

colesantiago 4y ago

From what I see, It seems the general theme of generative AI on HN and on the web is this: Using an AI writer generator (GPT-3): "Looks great, I can make a great SEO blog and a storybook SaaS out of this now, I don't need a writer anymore. Writers adapt or die." Using an AI artist generator (DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney): "Looks brilliant, this IS the future. it's inevitable, I don't need an artist anymore. Artists must adapt or die, sorry." Using an AI code generator (programmers) (Copilot, Replit Ghostwriter): "No thank you, Bad. legislation now, why are you violating my copyright / open source licence?" Why does it seem OK to obsolete complete industries by outright violating copyright laws, stealing work (even generating with a shutterstock watermark!), often without attribution and hail this as a new dawn for AI? Or is this mainly VCs finding out that this is now a new way to 'provide shareholder value' despite all the costs that come with it. So just throw cash at any startup that can generate a hot dog image in any style or generate a hot dog detector with copyrighted code, writing hotdog story no matter how bad the story is.

pasquinelli 4y ago
as with anything, reasoning is motivated by class interests. reasoning flows out of class interests. thinking exists in the first place to satisfy needs. by the way, you forgot hypothetical fleets of self-driving trucks putting truckers out of work, and so on.
capitalsigma 4y ago
HN is pretty pro-Copilot in most threads I've seen. Honestly I think I have seen this comment -- "you programmers sure like generative models when it impacts other industries but you get awfully defensive when it comes to your own!" -- much more often than I have seen anyone actually push back against Copilot. Frankly I think it's projection from non-SWEs who don't understand that automating your work away is the core mission of software development. There are good reasons to worry about how Copilot might impact the quality of software, especially if it's being used by someone who doesn't understand the generated code, but "what about my job safety??" is nowhere on the list.
- colesantiago 4y ago

howlin 4y ago

In theory it could empower amateur storytellers to punch above their weight by creating semi-professional animated films. Though to be fair, there was a similar realization when it was clear the Quake engine could be used for filming custom narratives rather than just recording gameplay. Not too much came out of that era. Professional artists still better understand what media humans want to consume.

tartoran 4y ago
Not only that but it may turn out story tellers would still want to use words and the listeners to prefer using their imagination sometimes too. Not that I have something against CGI or animations but when somehing becomes too much humans get bored.
- aiappreciator 4y ago
  Light novels (From Japan) already balance these two demands. Illustrations depict the core characters, and images are far better than words in depicting appearances. Words do the rest. AI will just mean most fiction start following this same model. Where characters and key environments get detailed designs and images, but the rest remain in words.
D13Fd 4y ago
Sounds like the Unreal engine is living the Quake engine film dream: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/solutions/film-television https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/solutions/film-television Of course, it’s professionals using it rather than amateurs. I expect generative AI would largely turn out the same way.
- stuntkite 4y ago
  Remember Blahbalicious? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCGqcXzLak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCGqcXzLak
Teever 4y ago
> Not too much came out of that era. Are you sure it isn't the complete opposite? I'm pretty sure that the amateur kids who played around with Machima in the age of Quake went on to become the professionals in the video game industry.

intrasight 4y ago

Generative AI is CGI. But I think it's going to be a much more profound shift than was CGI. I don't think anyone really yet knows what it'll mean. I'll also claim that it won't really mean anything until it's combined with 3D ray tracing. So what's going to be "generated"? A 3D model, right? All the current AI CGI stuff that I've seen is 2D.

oifjsidjf 4y ago
There is already 3D model AI generation, though it still needs some work. But as they say "2 more papers down the line..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqIXRB_Uw5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqIXRB_Uw5s https://mixed-news.com/en/nvidias-latest-open-source-ai-generates-3d-models-from-a-single-2d-image/ https://mixed-news.com/en/nvidias-latest-open-source-ai-gene...
anshumankmr 4y ago
It's quite literally Computer Generated Imagery as what we traditionally think of as CGI actually requires an artist.
plutonorm 4y ago
I agree, this far more profound than CGI. Ultimately I think this tech will be seen as allowing the exploration of all possible worlds. When the AI can generate convincing representations of anything we can think of and things we could never dream of - then what we are really looking at is a kind of inter-dimensional craft that can take us between realities.
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  I think with endless escapism being a reality, people will get bored and focus on the real world again.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    We will have the best of both worlds ;)

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

Makes sense, rise of CGI in the 90s killed movies I like.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

https://archive.ph/qk0v3 https://archive.ph/qk0v3

unity1001 4y ago

Im looking forward to AI helping generate game art and assets so that developing games will be more practical for smaller teams and larger organizations will be able to make grand games. The situation is so bad that even the latest Elder Scrolls games reuse assets from games from way back to speed up the process.

trinovantes 4y ago
I'm pretty happy with AI art for some of my game's textures I just wish there's more progress in AI-generated voices that sound more natural, especially for dialog in action sequences like yelling/screaming

schoen 4y ago

I read this whole interview and dozens of comments here before realizing that the intended reference was most likely Computer-Generated Imagery and not Common Gateway Interface. (I was imagining that the interviewee mentioned the latter as an example of a technology that somewhat unexpectedly ignited a whole industry -- in that case, web development.)

nikanj 4y ago
If someone says ”the movie had CGI”, do you really think of Common Gateway Interfaces?
- schoen 4y ago
  Nope! But with something like "as important as CGI", I do.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I am afraid that rise of generative AI will result in a lot of junk being released and advertised as quality. It shouldn't be like so, I think generative AI can yield great results if there is enough human supervision, I think it can be great if used to augmenting creative work. But I think many will chose the shortest path towards money and they will put in the least amount of work possible. Imagine tens of thousands of movies spitted by AI based on sub mediocre screenplays, imagine millions of songs generated by AI based on sub mediocre lyrics. Somewhere, in that ocean of junk, there is something valuable. Good luck finding it. If we use CGI analogy I can say that all pre CGI Tom and Jerry cartoons are works of art but many of the cartoons released after aren't so great, while some are. And CGI still requires some effort, so not everyone is be able to release movies. Generative AI will require far less effort and knowledge.

plutonorm 4y ago
Until the AI is smarter than us and then all but the best human films we be viewed as junk.
sarsway 4y ago
sure people will flood YouTube with their creations, that no-one will ever watch, but isn't that already happening kinda? Early with Stable Diffusion every creation was just "wow", now it's hard to even get someone to look at your image. The quality bar will be raised, but if you want an audience, you will still need to produce something that stands above the rest. And the way to do that is the same as today, put in more effort than the others. Make something that's better, that's worth peoples time.
- visarga 4y ago
  > Early with Stable Diffusion every creation was just "wow", now it's hard to even get someone to look at your image. Eventually we will only generate art for personal, one time use, or for small groups sharing an interest.
HellDunkel 4y ago
Sooner or later platforms will filter purely AI generated content as it collides with IP rules or bore the hell out of people.

jasfi 4y ago

Just like CGI, the early use of generative AI experience isn't always there, which can lead to frustration. I'm working on a platform to help with this, can't give details just yet: https://inventai.xyz https://inventai.xyz.

iso1631 4y ago

So loads of buggy perl scripts? My mind still sees "CGI" and thinks common gateway interface, not computer generated imaging.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

No it will not. It will be much bigger, because: - it can be automated. CGI still required a lot of human work. - AI generated content requires way less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at CGI. We already see people getting Stable-Diffusion-proficient in a few hours. - in the 90, CGI was introduced gently, through selected medias. AI content has access to the full internet right out of the box. - producing CGI required a lot of hardware, but with SaaS, AI will be available to anybody. - CGI was first exposed to professionals, who produced for the public. AI is already been used by hobbyists, and soon the public, directly. - CGI was mostly about visual techs, but AI generated content can be applied to text, sound, molecules, basically any structured data. In summary, the very nature and context in which AI generated content is taking form means the impact will be larger, stronger, and way more intense. People are hardly capable at dealing with CGI intelligently, even after 20 years. They trust photos and videos a lot, and react strongly to them. Even when they know they are fake, like in a movie, some emotions will forge they judgement like if it were real. AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind. I was underwhelmed by the last decade of AI dev, but 2022 is for AI what 2000 was for the dotcom revolution. Question is, what the equivalent of domain name for AI, something cheap you can buy to sale later?

dr-detroit 4y ago
throwaway4aday 4y ago
I think it's still comparable if you view it as "Generative AI is to CGI what CGI was to practical effects". - CGI can be automated, practical effects required a lot of human work - CGI content requires less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at sculpting / painting / makeup / carpentry / stunts / whatever to become good at practical effects. We already see people getting $MODELLING_PROGRAM proficient in a few weeks. - producing practical effects required a lot of hardware, material and tools but with CGI you just need a powerful computer. CGI will soon be available to anybody as computers become cheaper Your last two points are probably only true for AI generated content but there are still some barriers to people setting up their own AI models (technical know how, hardware) and there are certainly limitations on what type of content can be produced (you need a big and reliable dataset of examples). Overall I think this will have a similar impact but probably more widely distributed in both terms of access and impact.

fassssst 4y ago

Generative AI is sucking the soul out of everything. Why are people rushing to build it? Just to get rich and powerful?

poulpy123 4y ago

I'm wondering if we are going to see the same pattern than with AI driving: a lot of enthousiasm at first because what is done if very impressive but after the initial phase the interest slow down a lot because at the end AI is still "stupid"

macrolime 4y ago

Generative AI is much more than "generative". It doesn't just make it orders of magnitude cheaper to create things, but enables vast new areas of applications. Calling Stable Diffusion etc AI art generators is kinda like saying our visual cortex is an AI art generator because it can render pictures for our consciousness. It's perhaps not much more than this at the moment, but it will be, soon.

bondarchuk 4y ago

Comparing image generation to earlier technological breakthroughs has been very helpful for me in two ways. Photography is my go-to comparison. First, it helps quell the extreme ends of anti-AI paranoid fear I sometimes feel, to think that yes, it could change the world significantly and make some things disappear or reduce to irrelevance (e.g. realist art) and make new things appear and rise to relevance (e.g. mass media), yet throughout all this the more fundamental aspects of humanity and human society and culture have endured and adapted just fine. Second, it gives me more empathy for those people who were/are afraid of or simply opposed to other technological developments which I take for granted (again photography, TV, the internet, trains, nuclear power..), which various fears/oppositions are often an object of derision and ridicule. I feel this (AI, starting roughly at ~alphago) is the first significant breakthrough that I'm consciously living through myself, and this does a lot to one's worldview I think.

Geee 4y ago

The biggest shift that generative AI enables is that content becomes personal. Everyone will create and consume their own content. It's not just that the content will be AI-generated, but it is generated for each person individually, which is the 'big' thing. Already with Stable Diffusion it's way more rewarding to play with it yourself than look at generations made by others. It's more like a game or a dream that is a personal experience, than 'art' to be shared with others.

swayvil 4y ago

Handmade, by a human, is the most powerful. Those of us who can see well enough to tell the difference all know this. What these mechanical approaches offer is speed, convenience and clever tricks. But not art-power. So here we are puzzling over various flavors of flimsy and how to make a better fast-food taco.