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I suspect "let the public type in prompts and generate funky images" isn't going to be a significant market. But with improvements to the models I can see it f

I suspect "let the public type in prompts and generate funky images" isn't going to be a significant market. But with improvements to the models I can see it fitting into a "integrated into professional creative tooling" business model. Generate a rough "first draft" based on a prompt and edit. It simultaneously keeps a human in the loop to filter some of the model's zanier outputs, makes sure the output coheres with some design vision, and also people using these features professionally are much more likely to actually pay for what will be fairly expensive-to-operate features. I'm excited about generative models, buuuuut I will echo the other thoughts here re: VC hype. The last cycle of VC investments turned out to be full of hot air and no substance. The kind of hype around generative models feels a lot like crypto: lots of breathless excitement combined with few details. We are simply being promised that this technology will usher in some kind of golden era but nobody can seem to point to killer use cases. There's so much hand-waving around actual applications that it threatens to generate a hurricane from the sheer amount of air being displaced. As someone who works in the AI/ML field I've explored this stuff and it's definitely promising for some use cases and can potentially be transformative for some niches, but I do not see this as world-transformative at this point and considering where said breathless hypeness is coming from I'd encourage caution in over-exuberance. [edit] My sincere hope for this new cycle of tech hype is that we actually create some businesses of worth. I do not expect this to come from VC-world, who seem to have spent the last decade building wholly incompetent businesses and foisting them on public investors (or in the case of crypto and ICOs, just fleecing retail investors directly). My hope is that developers can actually use these models to do valuable things that people will pay for, as opposed to shovel yet more money into yet more furnaces to prop up absurd valuations around comparably tiny revenue.

freejazz 4y ago
There are some serious copyright implications if the initial design of anything is going to be done by an "AI". Because copyright cannot be granted in AI work, any subsequent work based upon the AI's original creation will have to be scoped out from its relation to the original work, not leaving much for copyright to protect. This is a business concern for any business that relies on copyright to ensure their materials are not copied (pretty much all businesses).
- exit 4y ago
  these results are so impressive that rather than constraining the technology copyrighting may be exactly what ends up being disrupted for non-photorealistic work, or if it becomes virtually indistinguishable from photography, how would you know whether an image was expensively sourced from a human artists/photographer or cheaply generated by an AI? how would we enforce copyrights in relation to AI if anyone can lie and claim "oh yeah, i paid a wetware neural net to do that, no problem.."?
  - freejazz 4y ago
    None of this is a problem in copyright litigation today, in which anyone can copy anyone else's work and lie about it. They will have to use evidence to prove whatever claims they made. The difficulty isn't in distinguishing between the works.
    - exit 4y ago
      we aren't talking about "copyright litigation today", we're hypothesising about how deeply disrupted the current arrangement could be by ai content generation in particular, the argument that "ai generated works is not copyrightable" in support of it being untenable to use it for business purposes is challenged by the observation that "we won't be able to tell where it came from anyway"
      - trention 4y ago
        >we won't be able to tell whether where it came from anyway You won't be able to if you look solely at the output. There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant.
        exit 4y ago
        > You won't be able to if you look solely at the output. i think this is the scenario in question, if someone is lying about the source of an image > There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant. this is interesting to know about. do you have some zero knowledge proof arrangement in mind here?

freejazz 4y ago

There are some serious copyright implications if the initial design of anything is going to be done by an "AI". Because copyright cannot be granted in AI work, any subsequent work based upon the AI's original creation will have to be scoped out from its relation to the original work, not leaving much for copyright to protect. This is a business concern for any business that relies on copyright to ensure their materials are not copied (pretty much all businesses).

exit 4y ago
these results are so impressive that rather than constraining the technology copyrighting may be exactly what ends up being disrupted for non-photorealistic work, or if it becomes virtually indistinguishable from photography, how would you know whether an image was expensively sourced from a human artists/photographer or cheaply generated by an AI? how would we enforce copyrights in relation to AI if anyone can lie and claim "oh yeah, i paid a wetware neural net to do that, no problem.."?
- freejazz 4y ago
  None of this is a problem in copyright litigation today, in which anyone can copy anyone else's work and lie about it. They will have to use evidence to prove whatever claims they made. The difficulty isn't in distinguishing between the works.
  - exit 4y ago
    we aren't talking about "copyright litigation today", we're hypothesising about how deeply disrupted the current arrangement could be by ai content generation in particular, the argument that "ai generated works is not copyrightable" in support of it being untenable to use it for business purposes is challenged by the observation that "we won't be able to tell where it came from anyway"
    - trention 4y ago
      >we won't be able to tell whether where it came from anyway You won't be able to if you look solely at the output. There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant.
      - exit 4y ago
        > You won't be able to if you look solely at the output. i think this is the scenario in question, if someone is lying about the source of an image > There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant. this is interesting to know about. do you have some zero knowledge proof arrangement in mind here?