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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 pr

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
  The lower the barriers to entry, the more competition game developers face, often by teams willing to charge little or nothing. Look at the app stores on mobile: 0.01% of apps make back their development cost Steam had almost 9000 new games added to it last year, and the average revenue of each fell by almost half a couple of years ago
  - mtrower 4y ago
    From an economic standpoint, perhaps. Consider the hobbyist. If these tools had been available when I was a kid, my tile based RPG could have had the graphics I always wanted it to have. Instead, it never got anything more than map tiles (primitive ones at that). I had no talent or skills for asset creation. Nobody played that game other than me, and (once) a couple other people I knew. That was fine, I made it for me, not others. But I would really have been happy to have access to assets.
yucky 4y ago
> But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. Which law is that? When the tulipmania crash happened, did people start consuming more tulip bulbs?
- mikojan 4y ago
  The "law of diminishing marginal utility" asserts that marginal utility is always positive. More is always better. In any case, it is a bizarre notion with perhaps limited applicability in the real world.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I'm not sure economists have ever overeaten :) More is for sure not always better. For instance, there may be storage costs. I discourage people from giving me nonconsumable gifts, because I don't have enough space for the crap I already have. Other economic actors like corporations can totally have this problem.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Always, you say? Tell me about your thoughts on the marginal utility of child pornography. Need to be careful with those universals.
- superfish 4y ago
  In case you’re genuinely curious about the referenced law: “conversely, as the price of a good decreases (↓), quantity demanded will increase (↑)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand
  - yucky 4y ago
    "All things being equal" is doing the heavy lifting there. All things are no longer equal though, which is the point. The time/effort to produce art has effectively become zero.
    - 4y ago
efsavage 4y ago
Yeah, people always underestimate/forget the ability of artists to use everything for art in novel ways, I see no reason AI is any exception. I'm sure it's already happening and I just haven't been exposed to it yet.
onepointsixC 4y ago
>I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists. Have you talked to any artists? Because in my experience they universally hate AI generated art. Not just a little. I think I've seen more artists who were open to NFT's at this point than AI. Art sharing websites are getting filled to the brim with posts from new accounts sharing AI art which sometimes very directly takes clearly identifiable features and styles from other artists. AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts. There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Then we find ourselves in a creative void as the only art generated will be based on art that of which has come before.
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  Have you looked at the resulting art works? There's an exhibit called "Unsupervised" currently running at the New York Museum of Modern Art [0]. I saw it last week--a fascinating of collage of shifting, waterlike images with delightful trompe l'oeil effects. If this is what AI-generated art can look like I'm all for it. [0] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Waiting to read about the artist that displayed their work — pretending that it is the work of AI, ha ha.
- lolinder 4y ago
  > There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Photography can capture reality far better than any artist could achieve even with a lifetime of practice, and today it can do so with nearly zero cost--take out your phone, hold down the camera button, snap a picture. These advances hardly put an end to drawing and painting as skills. It turned out that there's value in art beyond verisimilitude, and if anything the advent of photography encouraged a resurgence of exploration into what art really is: a movement away from pure verisimilitude in search of feeling. This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game. There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered.
godelski 4y ago
I'm curious how many people have actually tried these networks out. I've dropped a bunch of demos below so you can actually try them and I encourage everyone to do so before they form strong opinions here. As someone that works in generative modeling I think it is important to note that we are hand selecting results and not showing the average ones. There's been such a hype machine that if we show our average results that we'll get killed in review (publishing in a hyped space unfortunately requires a lot of salesmanship). Not a thing I'm particularly happy about, but I think this is important to note because if you're just looking at the images on Twitter, Blogs, and other social media then you're seeing the top 1% results. Images that take quite a bit of time and effort to produce. Likely not as long as an actual artist to make them, but still a lot of skill is involved. I do agree that I think it'll be a big boon for artists. I've even been using these to get better at drawing. The results are bad even with prompt engineering, but hey, my human mind can fill in the gaps and it is good for expanding creativity. We'll get better at these models for sure but I'm not quite convinced it'll kill a lot of art jobs. But maybe I don't know what those jobs are that are being killed. But then again, I've even seen artists do much better at these models than me even though I understand the code and math going on. There's also cool things like walking through the latent spaces, but you won't be able to do that with the hugging face code. But that is art that you won't be able to do elsewhere. It is entirely new. https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/Ghibli-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/Ghibli-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-image-variations-diffusers https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-image-variations-diffus... https://huggingface.co/spaces/shi-labs/Versatile-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/shi-labs/Versatile-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/openjourney https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/openjourney https://huggingface.co/spaces/anzorq/finetuned_diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/anzorq/finetuned_diffusion https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-pokemon-diffusers https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-pokemon-diffusers https://huggingface.co/spaces/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-demo https://huggingface.co/spaces/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-demo
- woolion 4y ago
  I tried Ghibli diffusion to get some decent cartoon styled results with SD, but it's really bad. Results were all hallucinations from the training data, no interesting new combinations, no novel prompts that would work. I stopped after a few dozens. I'd still like to get some good cartoony results with SD, but it's clearly not possible yet.
woolion 4y ago
>But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. This is no different. I don't know such a law, but it's simply false. People have 2 finite budgets they can allocate to entertainment, time and money. In many ways money is not the limiting factor anymore since people have Steam lists with hundreds of unplayed games and the abundance of Free2Play. The main factor it not to have a saleable product, it is to manage to get in in front of enough eyes, with all marketplaces already being saturated and ads being useless unless you have a very high budget. I'm a bit worried that it will devaluate indie productions even further because of an over-abundance of AI generated content, further elevating industry production that can afford really competent artists that you can't even start to replace.
- delusional 4y ago
  I'd draw some parallels to the rise of advertising as well. For most people, the culture industry as entered at "post-scarcity" phase, and the consumption of mass-art is now gated more by eyeballs and less by actual production. The only (reasonable) way to increase eyeballs is through advertisement, paying 3rd parties to force consumers to see (part of) your art.
- sylware 4y ago
  Yep. I have been gaming on native elf/linux (no msft grade proton plz) for a decade, and when we talked about time, it is a bit more complex: based on the type of game, it depends also on your state of mind (tired, motivated, etc). Games are "demanding", as it is not passively watching some content. I cannot play a game of dota2 if I am too tired (namely the adrenaline won't compensate enough), and you will need a break from it once in a while, if not burnt out for good. Namely, it is more than time alone, it is "that right time" and there is much, much less of it.

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
The lower the barriers to entry, the more competition game developers face, often by teams willing to charge little or nothing. Look at the app stores on mobile: 0.01% of apps make back their development cost Steam had almost 9000 new games added to it last year, and the average revenue of each fell by almost half a couple of years ago
- mtrower 4y ago
  From an economic standpoint, perhaps. Consider the hobbyist. If these tools had been available when I was a kid, my tile based RPG could have had the graphics I always wanted it to have. Instead, it never got anything more than map tiles (primitive ones at that). I had no talent or skills for asset creation. Nobody played that game other than me, and (once) a couple other people I knew. That was fine, I made it for me, not others. But I would really have been happy to have access to assets.

yucky 4y ago

> But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. Which law is that? When the tulipmania crash happened, did people start consuming more tulip bulbs?

mikojan 4y ago
The "law of diminishing marginal utility" asserts that marginal utility is always positive. More is always better. In any case, it is a bizarre notion with perhaps limited applicability in the real world.
- maxbond 4y ago
  I'm not sure economists have ever overeaten :) More is for sure not always better. For instance, there may be storage costs. I discourage people from giving me nonconsumable gifts, because I don't have enough space for the crap I already have. Other economic actors like corporations can totally have this problem.
- salawat 4y ago
  Always, you say? Tell me about your thoughts on the marginal utility of child pornography. Need to be careful with those universals.
superfish 4y ago
In case you’re genuinely curious about the referenced law: “conversely, as the price of a good decreases (↓), quantity demanded will increase (↑)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand
- yucky 4y ago
  "All things being equal" is doing the heavy lifting there. All things are no longer equal though, which is the point. The time/effort to produce art has effectively become zero.
  - 4y ago

efsavage 4y ago

Yeah, people always underestimate/forget the ability of artists to use everything for art in novel ways, I see no reason AI is any exception. I'm sure it's already happening and I just haven't been exposed to it yet.

onepointsixC 4y ago

>I’m convinced AI art is going to be a boon for artists. Have you talked to any artists? Because in my experience they universally hate AI generated art. Not just a little. I think I've seen more artists who were open to NFT's at this point than AI. Art sharing websites are getting filled to the brim with posts from new accounts sharing AI art which sometimes very directly takes clearly identifiable features and styles from other artists. AI generated art is beckoning a possible dark age for visual arts. There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Then we find ourselves in a creative void as the only art generated will be based on art that of which has come before.

hodgesrm 4y ago
Have you looked at the resulting art works? There's an exhibit called "Unsupervised" currently running at the New York Museum of Modern Art [0]. I saw it last week--a fascinating of collage of shifting, waterlike images with delightful trompe l'oeil effects. If this is what AI-generated art can look like I'm all for it. [0] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Waiting to read about the artist that displayed their work — pretending that it is the work of AI, ha ha.
lolinder 4y ago
> There are many lost arts already, if AI trivializes the costs and efforts why bother honing it. Photography can capture reality far better than any artist could achieve even with a lifetime of practice, and today it can do so with nearly zero cost--take out your phone, hold down the camera button, snap a picture. These advances hardly put an end to drawing and painting as skills. It turned out that there's value in art beyond verisimilitude, and if anything the advent of photography encouraged a resurgence of exploration into what art really is: a movement away from pure verisimilitude in search of feeling. This is what I expect to happen with AI art today. Yes, the AI models can produce art that looks awesome and wonderful now, but it's frankly already starting to wear thin. Art exists to fulfill humanity's need to experience something new, and AI alone simply cannot keep up with the meta game. There will need to be human artists guiding the AI to produce something valuable, and there will continue to be human artists working by hand to create the novel works that the AI could never have rendered.

godelski 4y ago

I'm curious how many people have actually tried these networks out. I've dropped a bunch of demos below so you can actually try them and I encourage everyone to do so before they form strong opinions here. As someone that works in generative modeling I think it is important to note that we are hand selecting results and not showing the average ones. There's been such a hype machine that if we show our average results that we'll get killed in review (publishing in a hyped space unfortunately requires a lot of salesmanship). Not a thing I'm particularly happy about, but I think this is important to note because if you're just looking at the images on Twitter, Blogs, and other social media then you're seeing the top 1% results. Images that take quite a bit of time and effort to produce. Likely not as long as an actual artist to make them, but still a lot of skill is involved. I do agree that I think it'll be a big boon for artists. I've even been using these to get better at drawing. The results are bad even with prompt engineering, but hey, my human mind can fill in the gaps and it is good for expanding creativity. We'll get better at these models for sure but I'm not quite convinced it'll kill a lot of art jobs. But maybe I don't know what those jobs are that are being killed. But then again, I've even seen artists do much better at these models than me even though I understand the code and math going on. There's also cool things like walking through the latent spaces, but you won't be able to do that with the hugging face code. But that is art that you won't be able to do elsewhere. It is entirely new. https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/Ghibli-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/Ghibli-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-image-variations-diffusers https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-image-variations-diffus... https://huggingface.co/spaces/shi-labs/Versatile-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/shi-labs/Versatile-Diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/openjourney https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/openjourney https://huggingface.co/spaces/anzorq/finetuned_diffusion https://huggingface.co/spaces/anzorq/finetuned_diffusion https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-pokemon-diffusers https://huggingface.co/lambdalabs/sd-pokemon-diffusers https://huggingface.co/spaces/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-demo https://huggingface.co/spaces/hakurei/waifu-diffusion-demo

woolion 4y ago
I tried Ghibli diffusion to get some decent cartoon styled results with SD, but it's really bad. Results were all hallucinations from the training data, no interesting new combinations, no novel prompts that would work. I stopped after a few dozens. I'd still like to get some good cartoony results with SD, but it's clearly not possible yet.

woolion 4y ago

>But as the cost of something falls, people consume more of it. That’s a law in economics. This is no different. I don't know such a law, but it's simply false. People have 2 finite budgets they can allocate to entertainment, time and money. In many ways money is not the limiting factor anymore since people have Steam lists with hundreds of unplayed games and the abundance of Free2Play. The main factor it not to have a saleable product, it is to manage to get in in front of enough eyes, with all marketplaces already being saturated and ads being useless unless you have a very high budget. I'm a bit worried that it will devaluate indie productions even further because of an over-abundance of AI generated content, further elevating industry production that can afford really competent artists that you can't even start to replace.

delusional 4y ago
I'd draw some parallels to the rise of advertising as well. For most people, the culture industry as entered at "post-scarcity" phase, and the consumption of mass-art is now gated more by eyeballs and less by actual production. The only (reasonable) way to increase eyeballs is through advertisement, paying 3rd parties to force consumers to see (part of) your art.
sylware 4y ago
Yep. I have been gaming on native elf/linux (no msft grade proton plz) for a decade, and when we talked about time, it is a bit more complex: based on the type of game, it depends also on your state of mind (tired, motivated, etc). Games are "demanding", as it is not passively watching some content. I cannot play a game of dota2 if I am too tired (namely the adrenaline won't compensate enough), and you will need a break from it once in a while, if not burnt out for good. Namely, it is more than time alone, it is "that right time" and there is much, much less of it.