14 ms·

AI Art Panic

• nemo44x 4y ago
  Maybe visual art will respond to this like it did after the camera came out. Suddenly artists were free to interpret the world through their own lenses.
• beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  I'm of the position that art needs an artist. > txt2img prompt crafting is a bit of an art in its own right, as getting the model to spit out what you want isn’t always trivial. I don't find the output images from a lot of "AI" art to be artistically interesting because an "AI" made them. The output might be novel, or even kind of surprising, but still just the output of code. Someone might say the code of an "AI" art machine could qualify as art. I often find the txt2img prompts artistic in a way that the output images lack, because they are representative of human imagination, often like surreal poetry, or like musique concrete, cutting and pasting segments around on a tape. This is not to deny that the output of "AI" art is impressive. It is, frankly. But as a matter of machine, computational, output rather than human artistic merit. It comes down to a simple thing: if you showed me two images and you told me a human made one, and "AI" made the other, I will always find the former artistic in a way that I would never find the latter. This is also not to touch on the licensing issues that arise from these tools. That's its own knot to untangle.
  • andybak 4y ago
    There's a spectrum of human agency in art. Where will you draw the line? Where does Warhol fit? Pollock? Bridget Riley, Vasarely or even Malevich? Whatever line you draw will leave several canonical figures on the wrong side of it. Maybe that's OK and you'll draw your line in the sand. Just don't pretend it's a non-controversial consensus.
    • sethrin 4y ago
      "Art is anything you can get away with." — Marshall McLuhan
    • hectorlorenzo 4y ago
      I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool? I find "what is art" discussions impossible to resolve and untangle from prejudices and biases. The least problematic answer I've found comes from John Carey, paraphrasing: "art is whatever someone has decided it to be". In other words, if I decide something is art, then it is. The problem shifts slightly to a more interesting way to pose this question: why some art has more value than some other art (or even "does some art has more value than some other art")? Equally difficult to resolve but more prone to highlight prejudices and biases mentioned above.
      • amazonavocado 4y ago
        >I agree. Also, it's not that stable diffusion spontaneously generates art: someone has thought of a prompt, written it down, iterated, and finally decided that a given image was good enough to publish. Is stable diffusion an "artist" or is it a tool? I'm curious about the possibility of the commissioner role for this situation. From my point of view, the AI is the artist and prompting an AI to produce a specific image is akin to commissioning an artwork. I think we have moved beyond human agency, and creation of art is reduced to the simpler constituents, the roles of artist and (if there is one) commissioner. The request to make an artpiece can also come from a machine.
        • hectorlorenzo 4y ago
          I think the same argument can be made of photography. A photographer does not "paint" or "create" the image. It points a machine to a place and presses a button with a finger. This machine does "the work" for her. Who is the artist? Are photographers just commisioners of images?
          • spookie 4y ago
            Capturing the moment is more than just pointing. Look, I know the argument you're making, and it's certainly something to ponder on. But the whole "writing prompt" thing has a different aim from "human-created" art. Whatever that means. But it's generally a small subset from the latter.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Sure, and if your 4 year old son draws 2 sloppy stick figures representing him holding your hand, that's going to be valuable to you in a way a stranger's precocious 10-year-old child's drawing isn't (no matter how good it is). But does that make it more artistic than something generated by AI which was coaxed out by a human applying their expertise?
  • RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    >I'm of the position that art needs an artist. Would you say the same of general intelligence? IE, general intelligence (artificial or otherwise) requires an agent?
  • harshreality 4y ago
    Art Turing test: If you can't distinguish between human-made art and AI-made art, then there's nothing backing up your emotional bias. It doesn't matter anymore that you emotionally value, or want to emotionally value, human-made art more than AI-made art, if you can't distinguish the two except based on other people's representations of how it was made. Unless you watched a (non-augmented) human make a piece of art, you have no assurance that a human didn't touch up an AI generated art piece or simply curate a collection of fully AI-generated art. ETA: I'm not trying to put down recognizable human-created art that's already been created, especially historically notable works. I'm not sure what all those replies are trying to get at. Of course there can continue to be an art-collecting market for human-made works made before the AI-art era.
    • citizenkeen 4y ago
      I can’t tell if someone is selling me something made locally, or is just pawning something made in China as local, but I still try to support local because I believe the underlying knock on effects are greater. The same holds for AI art.
      • astrange 4y ago
        The made in China one is cheaper and better for society for comparative advantage reasons. Trade is good!
        • onepointsixC 4y ago
          Trade isn't good when its for products made with forced labor.
        • taneq 4y ago
          Supporting local manufacturing helps to build resilience in the supply chain. Outsourcing everything to another country can be great for margins but it adds risk via external dependencies.
    • rmckayfleming 4y ago
  • furyofantares 4y ago
    I have a project that involves publishing an image I generate and publish to an audience everyday. It's not high value art, but the process does often involve me thinking of a concept I want to communicate to my audience and working with the AI to produce something that communicates that concept. When I started doing this, I was uncomfortable thinking of myself as the author of the image in any way. I'm okay with it now. There's some skill I am expressing, even if not much, and I am connecting with an audience.
  • joebob42 4y ago
    I don't think for "art as art" purposes where we take some painting and say it's worth a million dollars and put it in a museum ai can replace humans. But a lot of art is much more utilitarian: art in games, art in movies and tv, in picture books, etc. In those cases I care that it looks how it is meant to and costs as little as possible to make. I feel like the majority of "art" we consume falls in the second category.
  • kens 4y ago
    > I'm of the position that art needs an artist. As a historical note, this argument is over 50 years old. In 1965, an engineer at Bell Labs generated pseudo-random artworks inspired by famous artist Piet Mondrian. He found that a) people couldn't tell if the artwork was generated by Mondrian or the computer, and b) people generally liked the computer's art better. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4437 https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4437
    • ShamelessC 4y ago
      Fascinating! Thanks.
  • hectorlorenzo 4y ago
    This argument could be made 150 years ago about photography. For the sake of an argument: can a selfie be a form of art? To take a selfie, human intervention is minimal: someone decides they want to take a selfie; take dozens of them, pretty much at random; choose one they like; publish it. Similarities with the stable diffusion process are striking. And yet, could you consider a selfie "artistic"? Are all selfies artistic? What if Annie Leibovitz or Marina Abramovic take a selfie? What if Marina Abramovic generates a million images of a rabbit with stable diffusion and papers a whole warehouse with them? Is this art? Edit: syntax.
    • bitwize 4y ago
      It's considered art for the purposes of e.g. copyright law. Recently there was a dispute about whether a selfie taken by a monkey belonged to the owner of the camera, or the monkey. (A judge opined that only humans can have copyrights, and PETA eventually settled out of court.) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823/-animal-rights-advocates-photographer-compromise-over-ownership-of-monkey-selfie https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/12/550417823... But most selfies probably aren't high value art. If Marina Abramovic were to take a bunch of selfies, or generate a bunch of AI images, and exhibit them, that might be considered high value art. A famous artist can literally tape a banana to a wall and it'd be considered high art: https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...
      • spookie 4y ago
        Let's not confuse tax evasion with proper high art, alright?
• adrian17 4y ago
  > Stable Diffusion? Well, that’s free-ish. Problem is, you’ll probably want to run it locally, which requires a really, really beefy graphics card. I was struggling to run it on a Vega56 - a GPU that goes for ~$150 used now - so I went out and got a RTX3090 for about $1,000. If you’re already a gamer with a GPU with 8Gb+ of VRAM you’re probably good, but for most people this is a bit absurd. Nit: 2 weeks ago there was an article about getting SD running on an iPhone. The app isn't very time- or battery-efficient, but it just barely works on my (previous-gen) device: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539192
  • ben_w 4y ago
    I get results in 2 minutes on my iPhone SE. At least, when it doesn't stop execution part way through. When that happens, I have to change the seed, but it happens often enough that it sometimes needs a second change of seed to actually complete. Still, 2 minutes on my phone. I remember Bryce taking half an hour to render lower resolution images back in the late 90s.
  • orbital-decay 4y ago
    Running on an iPhone-grade hardware is what they refer to as "struggling". You need a lot of iterations in any workflow, be it style transfer or text-to-image, so you want as fast generation and as much CUDA cores as possible, and up to 24GB VRAM for higher resolutions. More importantly, most of the power of this stuff is not just in inference, but in finetuning the model on your custom data, which requires 12GB VRAM for SD 1.4 at the very least, and ultimately multiple server-grade GPUs. And even more importantly, you need full control over your own box, not an iPhone app - as it's still a very experimental field which is only going to be more complex and hard to master. That said, you can just rent a GPU instead of buying it right away. It's not very expensive, and can be cheaper overall depending on your usage. It's also the only sane way to experiment with training as you need a lot of attempts. This stuff can really devour any hardware you can possibly throw at it.
    • version_five 4y ago
      > you can just rent a GPU instead of buying it right away I agree, this is an underrated option and I'm not sure why it doesn't get more attention. I've been using stable diffusion on a cloud machine, and, say $20 will get you very far - probably thousands of images generated and a few sessions of fine tuning. It's way more affordable that its apparent popularity would suggest
• WhitneyLand 4y ago
  It’s a good write up, worth a read if you’re want to understand how AI art is being used by artists and by newcomers.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  This tech is currently barely usable for any real work outside of concepts, but it is easy to envision the development of new powerful tools built on top of refined iterations of the same models and algorithms, with finer controls and better integration. Artists should rejoice, in my opinion, mastering this type of tool could dramatically increase their productivity, and thus their salaries.
  • andybak 4y ago
    I'm not sure it works like that. There's not an unlimited market for "things that look like original paintings". Demand won't scale with supply and "and thus their salaries" seems to ignore a couple of iron laws of economics. However - I do wonder if this will increase the value of non-digital arts and crafts. They can't easily be substituted for - which is probably one of the key factors in establishing value in the art market.
  • snek_case 4y ago
    > This tech is currently barely usable for any real work outside of concepts I take it you haven't been keeping up. Stable Diffusion 2 and Midjourney are getting really, really impressive. Probably a 10x increase in quality over the original DALL-E already. Take a look at Jodorowsky's Tron (Tron in the style of Jodorowsky's Dune): https://www.djfood.org/fantasy-jodorowsky-tron-visualisations-by-johnny-darrell/ https://www.djfood.org/fantasy-jodorowsky-tron-visualisation...
    • chrstphrknwtn 4y ago
      This is seriously impressive. I don't quite know what to think of it.
      • krapp 4y ago
        Now wait a few (years?) until this technology can generate 3d models, environments, lighting, animation, etc. You won't even need animators, just feed the script in and get rendered scenes with virtual acting, dialogue, score, everything out. Everyone who's dismissing this because it imitates the style of another artist (as if that was a hard technical limitation rather than a specific prompt) or lacks the je nais se quoi of "real" art is missing the point. No one would ever hire a concept artist capable of doing this when they can hire someone for a fraction of the salary to write prompts that return acceptable results in a fraction of the time.
• Tossrock 4y ago
  "you’re probably not going to be using any of the AI art tools to make a reference sheet for a character, nor be able to get it to generate images that consistently have the appearance of a custom character" This was true maybe a month ago, but DreamBooth makes this possible
  • vegadw 4y ago
    OP here. This was a big struggle in writing this. Things changed so quickly that it's hard to keep up with what's possible.
    • drawingthesun 4y ago
      Another recent development: Midjourney v4 has much better "image prompt" abilities allowing you to feed in various images of a character you have made to allow further scenes to maintain the characters likeness throughout. I've read people making comics and generate many different scenes say v4 now allows consistent character design.
  • metalcrow 4y ago
    Can anyone with access to it test it out on the specific example in the post (fursona ref sheets), and show examples? If it is actually able to generate those with high accuracy that would seem to be a unbelievable improvement.
    • Filligree 4y ago
      Haven't tested it on that, but I did try it with an anime character who might be somewhat similar: Yoshida Yuuko, aka. Shamiko. Given that she's a very specific sort of demon girl, it was completely impossible to get anywhere close to her appearance with any pre-existing model. I took ten high-quality pictures off Pixiv, spent five minutes cropping them, and ran Dreambooth overnight on a 3090 — this turned out to be enormous overkill, the final model was massively overtrained. Intermediate ones were fine. The output is perfect; even higher quality than what the input model was already good at. This remains true even if I wander well outside the scope of the input pictures, e.g. different art styles, or Shamiko in a spacesuit wandering Mars, or... https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/w300/l9rBbcFo https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/w300/l9rBbcFo Trust me when I say that 'magical girl shamiko' is not usually a thing. The technology works. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/807260261747785759/1045897667806498856/abc3d95b-48b9-4b9b-af83-81d0e8a7c19e_1.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/807260261747785759/10... How about Shamiko on a highly improbable forest run? A completely different art style / "medium", in a completely different pose from any of the input images. Mind you, it's lower quality; that's mostly because I didn't do any cleanup or img2img work. It's still not as good as the real thing. She's missing her tail in both of these pictures — though she had it in others — but even if I filtered for that, it's missing the expressivity it usually has. Shamiko's an emotional girl, and a lot of that shows in tail behaviour... I doubt I need to tell you that there is no way to say "Jealous Shamiko, with tail curled protectively around Momo". Not yet, at any rate.
• jalino23 4y ago
  what a nice looking blog, the font are so easy to read, the dark theme so easy on the eyes and the images are colorful
  • vegadw 4y ago
    This just made my night. Thank you so much!
    • arcturus17 4y ago
      I thought the same, love the style - kudos.
    • jonas-w 4y ago
      This is exactly how i like the internet
• wokwokwok 4y ago
  > but the act of training a neural network on datasets like this has already been decided to be legal ? Has it? Look, you can argue about whether it’s morally right or not to use models that are fine tuned explicitly to copy the style of someone else, trained on their art without their consent, to make a model that can generate images very similar to the training images. You can argue about technically of that’s copying, or if lossy compression is copying. …but legal and moral are different things, and right now, as far as I’m aware: - it’s only legal because there are no laws specifically making it illegal currently. - there are active (eg. Copilot) cases challenging this to set a precedent. - it’s sufficiently ambiguous having a model that anyone can type “a naked picture of a 12 year old” in and get exactly that as output, that stability has nerfed the most recent mode release they’ve done. - there is a reasonably obvious similarity to other fields where a thing is itself not illegal or bad, but it can enable people to do illegal or bad things, and therefore access, ownership and usage of said things (eg. Hand guns) is heavily legislated. I think “this has already been decided to be legal” is a blatantly false assumption.
  • jabits 4y ago
    it’s only legal because there are no laws specifically making it illegal currently. This is case with anything…anything not illegal is legal, at least in the US…
    • vorpalhex 4y ago
      That is not quite correct. The question is undecided. It could be illegal and have been illegal this entire time.
      • BobbyJo 4y ago
        Which makes it legal. When the courts interpret law it addresses a case and informs going forward. I don't believe, for instance, people can be retroactively tried for abortions during the period Roe V. Wade stood.
        • 4y ago
• nbzso 4y ago
  >For most hobbies/professions, there are barriers to entry. For some it’s expensive equipment, for others it’s training and hard work to acquire a skill. Barriers to entry? Training and hard work are barriers to entry? So the next time when you go to the dentist, tell him that you can fix your tooth with a text prompt.
  • arcturus17 4y ago
    > Training and hard work are barriers to entry? Yes, assuming there is no substitute.
• dmarchuk 4y ago
  > Stable Diffusion? Well, that’s free-ish. Problem is, you’ll probably want to run it locally, which requires a really, really beefy graphics card. I was struggling to run it on a Vega56 - a GPU that goes for ~$150 used now - so I went out and got a RTX3090 for about $1,000. If you’re already a gamer with a GPU with 8Gb+ of VRAM you’re probably good, but for most people this is a bit absurd. I agree with the problem, on platforms like AWS you'll even need to send a manual request so they would let you use instances which can run SD. On the other hand there's already something like replicate.com, which allows you to run the SD like an API. I hope there will be more services like this. https://replicate.com/blog/run-stable-diffusion-with-an-api https://replicate.com/blog/run-stable-diffusion-with-an-api
• kepano 4y ago
  A couple of years ago I wrote the script for a graphic novel. I would have liked to illustrate it myself (I went to art school after all), but I was too busy running a startup at the time, so I pitched it as a collaboration to about 30 different artists that I thought could do a great job with it. I could not get a single person to bite. In my pitch I proposed generous royalties and cash compensation to the artists. All of them essentially said that they weren't taking commissions. I'm sure this is in part due to the fact that I have never been involved in the graphic novel world, so they'd be taking a chance on someone new. Still, it seemed there was no amount I could pay to get someone to work with me. Now I am reviving this graphic novel idea and still looking for someone I can pay to help me work on the project. However, the more synthography advances as a technology the more it seems like I should explore it as a path for this project. It would help me develop the book much faster than I can on my own. At minimum it could help me get the story board in place. Maybe some day synthography can help artists scale up their output, in the same way Michelangelo developed a workshop of apprentices. I would be more than happy to pay an artist's AI apprentice if I can't work directly with the human.
  • 88stacks 4y ago
    what exactly are you looking for in someone to help you?
    • kepano 4y ago
      It’s a sci-fi graphic novel. I have the story written and I’m looking for an artist to collaborate with.
  • synapticpaint 4y ago
    Hi, I run http://synapticpaint.com/ http://synapticpaint.com/ and using AI image generation for graphic novels/comics is one of the directions I'm exploring. If you're interested in collaborating to make your graphic novel a reality (I'll provide the tooling in return for product feedback), please email me at the email address in my profile! (I poked around on your site but couldn't find an email address.) Thanks!
  • 4y ago
• midnitewarrior 4y ago
  I see human-curated, AI-generated images online, but none of it is art, as art is a form of human expression, and AI algorithms are not human.
  • nonima 4y ago
    AI algorithms are human expression.
• threads2 4y ago
  clicked for art found weird animal people
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    Furries are tragically underserved by human artists.
• mc32 4y ago
  It seems there are a few distinct things we have to consider: How is art defined? How is it defined by artists and how is it defined by consumers. Some artists may want to define it such that it's made by people. Much fewer consumers would make that a requirement (aside from some art collectors). Consumers will care much less of how some art was generated and they will dictate demand.
• justinator 4y ago
  Making GIFS No artist could reasonably do this. This is effectively a new art form. So they're taking about "animation"? This and image-to-image generation (more in a moment) A reader will see there's more writing, you don't need the parenthetical.
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    > So they're taking about "animation"? I found this funny as well, but on reflection I think the author is talking about the specific effect of changing the seed but not the prompt. To me it highlights a weakness of AI imagery — no intent, no progression, no story.
    • justinator 4y ago
      no intent, no progression, no story. Eh, yet. I can see where the prompt just gets extended to, "in a hilarious series events in the style of buster keaton" and all of a sudden your vampire-toothed anime furry in cyberpunk clothes is flying down the side of a building, being saved at the very end by a sunshade they flop into. But I don't know if I'm going to live long enough where AI makes new Buster Keaton shorts using commonplace elements around them in new and exciting ways. Like would AI know that you can hang from the hands of a clock, which move over the course of a day? to me that's some creativity that was years ahead of its time. Now that I've attempted to predict the far-from-now future, I'm sure we'll see this in 6 months.
• r0s 4y ago
  I'm curious what market is supposed to be in danger of being disrupted? Digital artists doing commissioned work in the style of some other more famous artist? Bespoke stock photographers? It seems these jobs will simply use the new tools, and sell a more manual version when needed.
• 71a54xd 4y ago
  If artists can't adapt they'll just be left behind - not much value to be lost if they could be replaced with Stable Diffusion. Low hanging fruit, too bad their etsy store won't bring in $8k a year anymore
  • astrange 4y ago
    Artists provide different products from image generation models, especially artists making physical objects, so they probably won’t be replaced at all.
    • 71a54xd 4y ago
      At best their work is used to launder money for the rich and elite.
• 88stacks 4y ago
  good guide, I've been working on stable diffusion a lot as well and ran into many of the same problems with extra body parts and have developed a few techniques that remove a lot of the extra body parts, but still refining it. He is also right about stable diffusion not being free as it is a PITA to get the GPUs running and software stack setup. I'm using the body cleanup techniques and other algorithms to improve output at https://88stacks.com https://88stacks.com which is a free stable diffusion custom model generator api. its running on my research cluster to train models. Please check it out and give me feedback :)
• CharlesW 4y ago
  I can understand the author's feelings on this. It's fun, and it's exciting that with no knowledge of a domain the author can get interesting results. It can "feel like" creativity, even though literally anyone can get good results. Similarly, AI-remixed¹ music is getting better and better. I want to know how the author will feel when their music² is used to build a model that allows anyone to create infinite music in their style and beyond, much of which will be enjoyed far more widely (because it will be free or royalty-free) than the source material ever will. ¹ It doesn't seem fair to call it "generated" or "created" when it'd be useless without an enormous corpus of source material powering the thing. ² https://vegadeftwing.bandcamp.com/ https://vegadeftwing.bandcamp.com/
  • mojoe 4y ago
    like the enormous corpus of source material powering every adult human brain?
  • vegadw 4y ago
    I'd be fine with it being used to train models. The music world is already extremely derivative and trendy. In western music anyway, we have 12 notes to go around and often only use a subset per song. Additionally, much of a song's structure is formulaic, even with music as experimental as my own. I've used AI tools for composition (though I've always had to modify their outputs), pretty much all musicians use samples, etc. If anything, I see the use of AI as a step towards having less reuse in music because of the ability for generes to bleed together.
    • CharlesW 4y ago
      > I'd be fine with it being used to train models. Right now, your music requires attribution and can't be used for commercial purposes. Should visual artists have the same ability to choose the rights they reserve?
      • vegadw 4y ago
        > Right now, your music requires attribution and can't be used for commercial purposes. Sure, but fair use still exists. If someone takes just a single drum hit, reverses it, and coats it in distortion and reverb, but some how I find out they did it, I can sue them. But I can sue over anything, that doesn't mean I'd win. I'm pretty confident they would, and would agree they should because it's fair use. I think training an AI model is fair use as well. > Should visual artists have the same ability to choose the rights they reserve? Yes, and within the bounds of fair use as musicians that I've stated above. If I photoshop out a single eye, let's call it 50x100 pixels of a 5000x5000 image, and use it to make a neat mash up art, I think that is transformative enough to be fair use. Similarly, I think the AI model is transformative enough. In either case, there are limits. If someone makes a model fine tuned on my specific music, that's wrong. Similarly, if someone makes a model fine tuned on an artists specific work without their permission, that's wrong. Using an artist name (music or drawing) in a prompt is gray, but I personally think leans on being acceptable, especially if that artist is dead.
• aperrien 4y ago
  I'm impressed. this is the first critique I've seen that actually engages with the topic in a fair way. As of now, there's been just way too much noise to get to the detail of what exactly is wrong with AI art. As for me, I just feel that it should be looked at the same way that photography is looked at; that it's a new medium all to itself. You wouldn't enter a photograph in an oil painting competition, so you shouldn't enter AI art into a drawing/sketch art competition either. It would also be useful if there was an acknowledgement that AI was used in some elements of the art, but like as not there will always need to be a human agent that makes corrections in what is created.
• flandish 4y ago
  I am an oil painter. AI art is, imho, art just the same. The more art the better.
• JadoJodo 4y ago
  I have to say, I also find it fairly disturbing the waste of generating images over and over and over, hoping to find the right one.
  • toxicFork 4y ago
    That's what a lot of artists do, too.
  • mdorazio 4y ago
    Wait until you hear about this thing called Photography.
    • JadoJodo 4y ago
      I guess the difference that I see is that with photography I’m not generating a completely random image every time I push the shutter button. I think the corollary might be if I pointed my camera at some trees and pushed the shutter button resulting in my camera then picking a random picture that someone else has taken of trees anywhere in the world and I now have to hit the button many times to find the “right” one. I understand that photography generates waste images. I just don’t feel like it’s the same.
• nonbirithm 4y ago
  Personally, I don't consider myself an artist and don't believe I have an understanding of what it means to be one, which will bias my thoughts on the subject. Still, I'm having some reservations about the ability to endlessly churn out AI-generated content. In my view, in the past it was believed that to be an artist and produce the output you admire, you had to learn things. You had to be patient, and spend thousands of hours learning a skill. But I don't think it starts and ends with just 10,000 hours of brushstrokes. All that time and effort likely causes other neurological changes owing to the situations that being a traditional artist forced you into, like being exposed to other people and communicating with an audience. The ability to generate art with prompts bypasses all that time and effort. Using Stable Diffusion, I have made incredible pictures (that I don't consider art), but at the end of the day I still feel like just another person chasing yet another rush of dopamine, the same as it's always been. It's an enabling device. I have never been able to summon the will to practice drawing or painting for enough time to see results, and that hasn't changed. The only difference is that I have the end results, which is mostly what I wanted in the first place, and it's pretty much all I'll ever get with this setup. But it is often repeated that "focusing on the end results" when trying to learn a creative skill results in bad outcomes. It is a character flaw that someone has to overcome to get better. Now I feel that 70% of the road to "the end result" can be bypassed without the need to work towards that additional knowledge and virtue. When artists speak of AI damaging the integrity of their profession, I think this is part of what they mean. For the first time in human history, it is now possible to be a better "artist" without growing into a better person, or developing a wider-scale notion of what existence or the world outside is. The folk assumption that growing up as an artist changes you in fundamental ways (by forcing you to study the craft and observe the world for what it is) has been violated. The people who treat art as a profession or hobby to work at over thousands of hours, for example, will probably share a lot of significant interactions and bondmaking as their skill gradually improves over the years; not so with a person that can generate pseudo-masterpieces within minutes. I'm going to guess that the long-term downsides of AI art are going to be baked into cultural norms instead of the limits of silicon. There has already been significant backlash from art circles when tech-oriented people outside of the scene train models in the style of people like Kim Jung Gi, who had just recently passed away. Many people's rules about "art" have gone unwritten for so long because this current situation was unthinkable only a decade ago. Regardless of intent, being seen as plagiarizing the style of someone who is no longer alive isn't a good look. Still, what I always want to keep buried in my subconscious about how AI art is used and treated is that my insatiable interest in the subject is fueled by my lack of (ability/drive/bravery) to express myself through my own actions, whereas my embarrassment is spared by delegating to a machine to do the work for me and guess what the inner workings of my imagination look like. If this is something I need to overcome, it's only going to get harder for me to do so as the state of the field advances further. The word that keeps coming to mind when I look over the things I generated is "intent". It doesn't feel like I "made" the things I did, but that I "found" them. There's not a lot of insight to be gleaned except the keywords that each subset of popular culture finds the most useful or interesting in regards to prompt engineering during a particular timeframe. My preoccupation when generating pictures is to find a result that looks nice, not something that carries intentional meaning or context that's greater than the sum of its parts.
• unixhero 4y ago
  Someone likes uhhh furries a lot.
• lxe 4y ago
  If diving into discussions of AI art, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" by Andre Bazin is always a relevant read that can help you draw helpful parallels: https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Photographic_Image/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Phot...
• boredemployee 4y ago
  unless using rhetoric, we still dont know how to deal with copyright/piracy/digital art in 2022
• Dove 4y ago
  When I was in school studying computer science, as we learned about code reuse and libraries and whatnot, one student expressed a concern that all the software the world ever needed would be written, and we would be out of a job. The professor smiled at the concern, and said that it seemed to turn out in practice, no matter how many problems were solved in reusable ways, that there were always new things to do. This development seems parallel to me: AI does not seem to be inventing, even in the limited sense of closely customizing for a purpose. It is remixing the well established. If machines can help with remixing and reapplying the old, that's all to the good. Humans still own the new.
  • williamcotton 4y ago
    Real-time heads up display Keeps the danger away But only for the things that already ruined your day
• 48cfu 4y ago
  [dead]
• cageface 4y ago
  One of the most important things that distinguishes great artists is that they have a distinctive, recognizable style. And it takes a lot of hard work to achieve this. I think what makes me uneasy about these AI art generators is that they can trivially assimilate a new style like this and commoditize it. That's why so many of the most successful prompts are "X in the style of ${artist}".
  • musingsole 4y ago
    This just implies style will mutate as it has in chess.
    • cageface 4y ago
      Chess style and art style don’t seem similar enough to me for this analogy to work. Computers are strictly better than humans at chess in every respect.
      • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
        False. In freeform chess tournaments, computer+human teams win over computers alone. Similarily, computer+artist will always produce more compelling work than computers alone.
        • optimalsolver 4y ago
          >In freeform chess tournaments, computer+human teams win over computers alone That has not been true for several years now.
          • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
            I admit to not being in the know around the chess scene, but I find references to Gary Kasparov being confident as recently as 2017 that human+computer outperforms computer alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess#In_future_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess#In_future_studi... Has this changed in the past 5 years? I'm having trouble finding actual tournament results.
• cloudking 4y ago
  I think there should be a fair use license that allows creators to decide whether or not their original work can be used in AI training data sets. Just because you can scrape someone's work from the internet, shouldn't automatically give you permission to use it. Maybe this is something Creative Commons should consider. https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/
  • gedy 4y ago
    I struggle to see how this is different from another artist eyeing then aping their style. The choice would be to not show other humans the art basically.
    • cloudking 4y ago
      It's not about copying their style, the main difference is AI companies making revenue training their systems on other people's work, while the original artists are not being compensated for helping train their systems.
      • shadowgovt 4y ago
        By and large, the original artists did not help train the systems. Engineers figured out how to scrape sites, decode and filter tags, classify images, and feed them into the training dataset. All the original artist did was publish an image online to be seen by other people. It'd be like Google compensating people for putting things online that the search engine links to.
        • cloudking 4y ago
          Google provides value to the sites it links to by sending them traffic, how does an AI company provide value to the artist by using their work to train their systems? I don't see how your analogy works.
          • rnjesus 4y ago
• baron816 4y ago
  I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists. People always assume that the demand for something will remain static as its production grows and the producers become more productive. But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. This is no different. What’s likely to happen is people are going to invent whole new media that will use this. Incredibly elaborate interactive and personalized experiences will be made possible by this. One person will be able to deliver a huge amount of value, and they will be rewarded accordingly. Think back to the 1980s. Programmers were in very short supply, and the work they were doing was less accessible and more difficult than it was today. IDEs, version control, better languages and frameworks, easy access to tools to learn to code, Stack Overflow, etc. made programming much more accessible and engineers became much more productive. The number of programmers out there is orders of magnitudes greater than three decades ago. Yet real salaries have still grown tremendously. The value per capita has grown even faster than those salaries because they’re so productive. The same thing is going to happen here. Artists will build unimaginably huge, complex projects (on the scale of Google/Facebook/Amazon), and the world will gobble them up.
  • jiggawatts 4y ago
    A friend is a programmer, and he’s always wanted to make a computer game. Suddenly, he’s got a cheap option for getting some basic art for a simple turn based game, card game or similar. If a game of his takes off? He’ll have to hire artists to keep up with the increased workload. AI will move barriers of entry lower, not higher.
    • baron816 4y ago
      Yes, creating art itself will have a lower barrier to entry, just like learning to code in Python has a lower barrier to entry than Assembly. But any software engineer will tell you that most of the challenges don’t come from writing lines of code, they come from building things that can scale at scales. Building a big thing in a big organization means having good communication and project management systems. Those things haven’t been taken over by AI (yet).
    • barbariangrunge 4y ago
• pixelbath 4y ago
  > but he didn’t tell them that ahead of time He actually did disclose this [1], at least to the art fair administration: > Olga Robak, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which oversees the state fair, said Mr. Allen had adequately disclosed Midjourney’s involvement when submitting his piece; the category’s rules allow any “artistic practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process.” The two category judges did not know that Midjourney was an A.I. program, she said, but both subsequently told her that they would have awarded Mr. Allen the top prize even if they had. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-...
• toofy 4y ago
  this reeks of something we see so often recently. implying there is a “panic” or a “hysteria” when there just isn’t. are there occasionally people who say this is something which may upend art? of course. but is there a “panic”? the people this type of clickbait immediately grabs are those who seem to enjoy explaining why “the panicky and the hysterical” are wrong wrong wrong. but ultimately most of the time they seem to be attacking a ghost.
• Animats 4y ago
  Wait until this hits music. It already has, but it's not very good.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-5J5Nv0AC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-5J5Nv0AC4
• double_nan 4y ago
  It’s interesting how fast we will see open positions for AI whisperers: ppl who are proficient with certain text2whatever “AIs” to produce things which are made by relatively low skill workers now days
• ponorin 4y ago
  Text to speech is pretty much a solved question at this point, but nobody said it will replace voice actors, nor did it. It conquered TikTok, I'll give you that, but that's barely an accomplishment. For me AI art is the same thing. It can give you serviceable material in a very fast time, but that's it. It's a Big Mac of the art industry. It's not gonna kill artists like how McDonald's didn't kill restaurants or even rival fast food chains or gourmet hamburger shops, because the only thing redeemable in AI art is you get variations of well-known styles (putting "trending on ArtStation" in the prompt to make it look good is a thing. let that sink in).
  • bitwize 4y ago
    Text to speech isn't really a solved problem yet. Within the next few years, it will be possible to prompt "Sonic the Hedgehog saying: 'I'm sure that'll work, just like the last thousand plans you had, Eggman' with heavy sarcasm" and get a read that's indistinguishable from Roger Craig Smith's. But we're not quite there yet. The models for GLaDOS are very, very close, enough to allow YouTubers to create their own skits -- but getting an AI to sound like an AI is, for obvious reasons, a relative doddle.
• PAMANOCH 4y ago
  The major problem is that the AI companies are redirecting the profit from artists to themselves. The creative industry will remain, but artists won't be able to receive even one penny, companies could just 1) grab their work with absolute zero payment, 2) fine-tune a new model 3) profit on the style. Artist as a job will cease to exist very soon as they are becoming free suppliers for AI companies. Like, Uber with remote drivers controlling cars, but all drivers work for free as they claim all cars are capable of "self-driving". How is this acceptable and legal is beyond my understanding.
  • throwaway290 4y ago
    That's the exact concern. There is a way we can pit some corporations against the others to help with this though: Train models exclusively on content by megacorps like Disney, then claim it's fair use. Those guys lobbied to get copyright extended for ages for own profit; for once they could help protect the ordinary artist.
    • ShamelessC 4y ago
      Similar to Moore's law, "transformer" deep neural nets have been found to following scaling laws[0]. This means the faster and more VRAM your GPU's have, the better a model you can train "for free". Training models from scratch only works with massive (labeled) datasets covering a massive data distribution. With language models, the datasets being used are quickly approaching "all known written text" sizes. Training a model from scratch on Microsoft's internal code, with not only its precious intellectual property, but also its technical debt. Code at Microsoft is not going to get close to covering the broad range of styles that a coder could possibly use. The model will possibly diverge without enough data, as it needs to see a given "example usage" in multiple different contexts before it can learn it. My current understanding is that deep NN's are quite good at modeling an underlying distribution of data without needing any priors hard-coded about that dataset. But! They need to see a whole lot more of it than an adult human would. Several orders of magnitude more. - and they need to see accurate labels about 75-80% of the time. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/scaling-laws https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/scaling-laws
• sunjester 4y ago
  AI generated art or not, I'd visit an art gallery with cool pictures.
• panzerboiler 4y ago
  Good art stems from an intimate context. AI regurgitated noise in not going to have that peculiarity for a long time, if ever.
  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    You're kinda missing the point with that statement as you're ignoring the financial aspect of it. The reality is that most art creators are getting paid by marketing departments to create essentially stock art for various marketing initiatives. it's likely not particularly enjoyable work, but is probably necessary for living for a lot of unknown artists. If that market is categorically removed from the equation, these artists will have serious issues going forward. It's like the old argument of workers getting redundant by automation. Sure, some people will find new jobs in other deciplines, but not everyone. Though to be fair, current models aren't there yet. They might get there eventually, and that's the fear if a lot of people.
  • visarga 4y ago
    We're the same. Noise to meaning. > In the brain, information is transmitted through the release of chemical neurotransmitters at the junction, or synapse, between neurons. This process is stochastic in nature, which is believed to be a key feature in how the brain operates.
• rSi 4y ago
  the 'fun" aspect of these "ai art" discussions is, that no artist are involved and that they show how little the techies know about art. replicating a style in a digital image is tiny fraction of what art can be. it's so boring having to listen to people talk about the future of something they clearly don't understand. let me give you a couple of points to understand what separates ai and human made images, and why art is something other than replicating and recombining what's already part of our cultural space. (sorry for my bad English, I'm not a native speaker) 1. the medium & technique: what technique is being used to put the artwork into this world? I beg you all, please go to a museum full of paintings (let's not forget that there are sculptures, installations, and so on) and take your time to look at them. you will find out that the digital representation of "the girl with the pearl earrings" is not even half the artwork. it's an oil painting and that has an incredible depth to it. see how the figure is put into the frame - who cares about a hypothetical room she is in - the important part is what is being shown and what is being kept from us. the light and the dark parts.. I could go on... please try to expose yourself to art in person and find out how much more than colour values a painting is! (brush strokes, depth of colour, size, varnish, etc) 2. originality: why have someone paint in the style of someone else? people who are not into art often don't understand that a style is always bound to a person and the time they surface. art after 1945 had many ways of reflecting and processing the horrors of the nazi regime, the holocaust, etc the invention of photography changed the art, but not because craftsman went out of business, but because the subject of the painting changed. before photography abstract art would not have been possible (although artists already changed their styles to less realistic) hyper realyism on the other hand evolved long after photography was invented.... 3. history and provenance of the artwork and the artist: I'm getting tired typing this all out on my phone :) I think i have to redo this in a more concise way with my computer or maybe pen and paper...
• kybernetyk 4y ago
  In the future artists, photographers and the likes will be creating art just to feed it into the AI. Provided some smart licensing scheme this should allow to make artists a living by creating content that is then devoured by the machine.
• xg15 4y ago
  I think especially tech people would do good to re-read the article, replace "artist" with "developer" and "artwork" with "program", "architecture" or "software stack" and see if the arguments that there is nothing to worry about still make sense to them. If Copilot is any indication, we're really not far from some tool which can take a spec as a prompt and output an entire software system - front end, back end, DB layout, configuration - which sort of fulfills that spec.
  • mtrower 4y ago
    This just sounds like an evolution of the compiler to me.
  • OctopusLupid 4y ago
    That would be great, honestly. An average person can finally write their own apps for themselves and their friends.
    • xg15 4y ago
      I mean, it seems to be happening right now, so we will see how things go on from here...
• PostOnce 4y ago
  50s/70s/90s art are recognizably different I have wondered if merely being behind the curve will be the Achilles heel of AI art -- nobody wants a bunch of old-looking crap, and if you're on the cutting edge, there isn't a large enough body of work to train the AI from, so it can never catch up; i.e., 2030 art might not look like 2020 art, and you may never have a current-enough labelled dataset to look "current" I do hope AI art will make game and film production cheaper, but at the same time I suspect for commercial ads and a large part of graphic design, AI won't be that useful, since it is "imprecise" (can't fit the art in exactly such and such a position in a beautiful way -- or even, think of a dashed line with misaligned corner-dashes), or ads will look old and "wrong". Just thinking out loud.
  • qayxc 4y ago
    Even worse: imagine the whole internet being flooded with AI generated regurgitations of older art styles. The next generations of AI models would then use this as training data, creating a feedback-loop that gets us nowhere fast.
• kilotaras 4y ago
  Progress in the space is at breakneck speed. Check out this comparison of 5 months (!) of midjourney progress [0]. [0] https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1595846677591904257 https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1595846677591904257
• art-is-human 4y ago
  Speaking as a full-time professional artist (painter) with fine art training in atelier environments, the fine art world finally has come together with a single purpose - to whole heartedly reject ai art, regardless of what you may hear from the "ai art wins art contest headlines". Looking strictly at my margins, engagements on reddit and instagram, major art platforms banning the sale and display of ai art, etc. one thing is perfectly clear: art is human. First there was photography, then there was digital art, then there was nfts, now there is ai art - after each of these more and more people appreciate the inherent creativity of the non-deterministic nature of the human spirit. Enjoy your cheap Beksinski imitations if you will, but it's better to go see his work in person in Poland. You will understand the meaning of art.
  • curl-up 4y ago
    > one thing is perfectly clear: art is human. Genuine question: what would change your mind on this? Or is "human-made" part of your definition of the word "art", and as such there is nothing that would change your mind? Additionally, do you have at least a vague idea where the line is between "human-made" and "machine-made", in the spectrum that spans "oil painting" - "photography" - "photoshop" - ... - "dall-e"? Maybe you're considering a completely different spectrum - I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that. Please note, I'm not trying to argue "it's impossible to have a hard threshold so everything goes", I'm just trying to better understand where the art world is on these topics, as I'm mostly in the tech bubble otherwise.
    • art-is-human 4y ago
      My brother is a machine learning and bioinformatics researcher at a top university in the US and we often discuss the idea that human creativity itself at the upper echelon can be most interestingly defined to include a "non-systemetizable" quality. Thus, the result of a.i. art, being purely systematic, is an image whose style (artistic fundamentals of form, line, value, etc.) only ever lags just behind the artists whose work it was trained on. The a.i. flow itself requires new artists to create new styles or there's stagnation. Most of us (art world) can look at an image (a.i. or otherwise) and immediately recall the artist(s) it was mostly influenced by. As a common example, this is why most dark surreal a.i. output feels like a botched Beksinski piece, however the tragic life of Beksinski informed his technical stylistic depth. Dall-E is a purely (practically speaking as compared to other forms) deterministic system. Even photography requires the human eye to compose, light, design, filter, granulate, texturize, etc. Edit: Not sure if I exactly answered your question, but I think I've tried to explain how there's a direct connection between the human experience and novelty in style, A.i. undercuts it, but a conscious system cultivating new styles based on its experience would be the closest thing to change my mind.
• hellfish 4y ago
  This whole thing, the way it's being talked about... it's just very troubling It's like the author (and others here) see the artist and art as separate entities, as if art is just regular labor that gets separated from a worker What makes Kafka good? Not just the words on the page, or the prose behind the words on the page, but the person who wrote it and his own unique life experiences. Same for art The fact that some people see art as just another product of labor and not something more personal is incredibly chilling and solipsistic Not only this, but long term if we start to separate the creator from the creation, we no longer will control the terms of the creation. Imagine a hypothetical world where everyone forgets how to actually make art, and the AI art generators are rigged to try not to show any regime-critical art Will AI replace art? I doubt it, but the way we're talking about it is chilling
  • JonathanMerklin 4y ago
    I don't think that it's a strict binary of "art is not just another product of labor" and "artist and art are separate entities". Surely you've heard some variation of the turn of phrase "separating the art from the artist" over the last handful of years, even before this most recent boom in "AI art." I'm writing this at 5am in a weird anxiety-induced sleep-procrastination HN session so I'm having trouble pinpointing and articulating the je ne sais quoi, but maybe some examples will meander gradually towards it: I've read many novels that I thought were good and knew nothing of the authors but the name (isn't this part of the point of a nom de plume?) and I've read novels I thought were middling, sometimes by the very same names. I know nothing about the artists of street murals I occasionally walk by, and I know nothing about the artists of non-mural graffiti tags along walls and overpasses on the very same roads, and I know nothing about the artists of phallic scrawls on the walls of the bathroom stalls I use along the way, but there's a pretty clear ordering of their artistic merits based on some ethereal non-quantitative aesthetic quality despite all being ostensibly "art". I'm not an art buff, but when I first encountered the works of Caravaggio, I found them to be a master class in form and light that resonated with me on some level, and I still thought that after eventually reading about his brawls and exile due to the murder/manslaughter of Tommasoni. Sometimes it'll take more than a year between discovering a musician or band that I enjoy, listening through their oeuvre, and finally reading their Wikipedia article (or Soundcloud/Twitter bio, for the sufficiently obscure). For some, it never happens. In the hoi polloi art form of standup comedy, I can still laugh hard at Louis C.K. or John Mulaney or Bill Cosby despite knowing stories about their lives off of the stage that paint them in a bad light, and I can laugh just as hard at the tight 5 or crowdwork or even the recorded album of someone I've never heard of, if the material and delivery have that non-quantitative quality of, well, being funny. I don't find my art consumption habits or perspective troubling or chilling. I'm willing to celebrate what humanity is capable of without celebrating a specific subset of humans, or even knowing what subset of humans are worth celebrating. It's like how I try hard to write clean yet robust code at work, but am not bothered that even when I hit the mark, it will only be appreciated by those within my corporate walls, and fade when I or the organization am gone. You can run the "git blame", sure, but "it's just code" - today's "big wins" are tomorrow's "legacy garbage". Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But hey, I've struggled with lifelong chronic solipsism, so maybe this perspective is chilling to you nevertheless. I'm a real human, there's a "me" in here. I don't like to think that what makes me smile - and why/how - is any more a canary for our march towards oblivion than anyone else's smile-inducers.
• daedlanth 4y ago
  AI art is nothing more than a tool. I wonder how many billions of hours it will take it just to catch up to me. Hint: I don't make cheap posters.
• namkt 4y ago
  I'd really like that one where you give it a ref sheet and out comes a 3D model, or at least a baseline to tinker with in, e.g., Blender. I think NVIDIA was doing text-to-3d recently, but it did so from a single image and I'm not sure as to the accuracy of the model.
• amoopa 4y ago
  So much potential in this category and yet so much hate. Yea, elements need to be sorted out around IP and similar, but the potential this offers over time for artists is massive.
• pxoe 4y ago
  AI art itself is not the problem, it's the abuse of image copyrights. Companies continually dodge the question, redirect the conversation to "but is it art", make excuses like 'the scale is too big to control for image licenses' (but not too big to take advantage of that data), when in reality, no effort has been made to acknowledge that images have owners, licenses, copyrights, and no effort has been made into creating a system that would take those licenses into account and process data accordingly. If these advancements are a result of systematic ignoring and abuse of image copyrights, is it ethical to continue to use them? That said, as much as it is 'image copyright abuse' problem, it's still directly connected to AI art, so denouncing all AI art is justified. I don't see these issues being resolved any time soon. This massive scale exploitation will go on, as it continues to exist in legal gray area and not get enough legal attention and pushback (when a system abuses billions of works, and individual artists might be small and disparate, it may be hard for pushback to accumulate, or even happen at all), and then it might just get a green light to continue functioning the way it does. Sure, some 'more ethical' systems might pop up, but that won't change the bigger picture.
• kvetching 4y ago
  Regarding the text being gibberish with these models. Looking at Parti / Imagen papers. Once the training reaches a certain point, words start making sense.