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The entire AI/ML world is just extremely boring and depressing to me... I like to make art and now places like ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images.

The entire AI/ML world is just extremely boring and depressing to me... I like to make art and now places like ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images. People, obviously, don't disclose that it's AI generated. It's the commenters that point that out. I'm generally worried that we're creating a world which is not for us anymore. Maybe we should introduce boundaries to our world, just so we don't fall into a nihilistic pit of insignificance. Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product. Now we're creating tools to jump directly to the final product. Hedonistic treadmill gets faster and faster. Grim times.

stanmancan 4y ago
I’ve felt the same way. After years of patience and practice my kid has become a fantastic artist. I’m a bit concerned that at some point they might think “why bother?” and give it up after they see someone type some prompt in with “pencil, sketch” as a suffix.
- d0liver 4y ago
  I'd still much rather see real art. It's kind of the difference between eating a homemade meal and eating manufactured crap out of a vending machine. And, from what I can tell, the art generators are basically just stealing other people's stuff. It'll probably be brought up as a real IP issue at some point.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    No, that's just not how they technically work. AI generators train on an image archive, but the resulting model doesn't include the actual pictures in it, and often contains only a tiny influence from each source image. I think the current popular model works out to somewhere around a byte in the model per sample image. Here's a diagram https://www.reddit.com/user/AnOnlineHandle https://www.reddit.com/user/AnOnlineHandle made: https://i.redd.it/yxflzg0z6p3a1.png https://i.redd.it/yxflzg0z6p3a1.png
    - lmarcos 4y ago
      Well, if I were an artist who wants to make work publicly available (previews?) and charge for it, I would make sure the license I use to publish my work explicitly states that it's not allowed to use my work as part of training data for any ML algorithm. If they want my work for that, then pay for it. Hell, I think I as a developer could do that... Gonna invent a new open source license.
      - dale_glass 4y ago
        Okay, but what's that supposed to achieve? If you think you'll get paid, you probably won't because AI trains on very large datasets, and so pretty much any price per image would quickly get too expensive. If you think it'll hamstring AI, I doubt it'll be for long. People will just end up curating their dataset better, and images that allow for it will continue to be created. Also, per https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd -- "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor", so this likely won't get much uptake in open source circles either.
        dwild 4y ago
        >Okay, but what's that supposed to achieve? Not being in the dataset maybe? There's many artists that hate that you can just write "in the style of" with their name. So at least, if it does appear that it works with their name, they now either have been paid that amount, or they can sue for that amount of lost revenue. At least not everything would be lost. I'm not a lawyer though, so really no idea whether this could even be possible as it's seems like currently it's fair use.
        dale_glass 4y ago
        > Not being in the dataset maybe? There's many artists that hate that you can just write "in the style of" with their name. Very few artists have an unique style. Some are very recognizable, yes, but plenty others do more or less the same sort of thing. There's thousands of photographers out there that go for the "razor sharp, high contrast closeup that shows every pore" style (https://photoaspects.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/black-and-white-1590771_1280-1024x683.jpg https://photoaspects.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/black-an...) for instance. With very limited exceptions you could go to a photographer and say "I want a photo that looks like this Vogue cover" and get it done. > So at least, if it does appear that it works with their name, they now either have been paid that amount, or they can sue for that amount of lost revenue. At least not everything would be lost. Don't be silly. If that logic worked, Microsoft could have sued Linus Torvalds for providing an OS for free. Or if you want to be a bit more exact, Sun Microsystems, IBM, or any other Unix vendor.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  AI art is not nearly there yet, and has very significant areas in which it struggles a lot. The funny thing about it is that just like normal art there are easy and hard things to accomplish, but it's nigh impossible for a person new to this concept to tell which is which: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ Overall, the easy part of AI art is generic portraits where you either don't care about the details, or want to use existing, popular things. Eg, you can ask for Harry Potter. And you can ask for a random character. But if you have a personal, distinctive design you made and want to bring to life, then it can get very tough pretty fast. In fact, the best possible user for an AI generator would be an artist that's also capable of training a custom model. That opens up way more possibilities. Here's what this looks like: https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/z7qat8/ai_as_a_tool_the_sequel_overpaint_process_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/z7qat8/ai_as_a_too...
- achenet 4y ago
  all AI art is confined to digital medium (at least for now, 3D printing might change that). You can't see the brushstrokes like in a real life, physical painting. Dancing is one that will be very hard to copy, because you need actual humans for it. Not to mention, the kid may enjoy making art, and his/her art may give others joy, even if it's not a profitable career. It can still be a fun hobby - synthesizers have been around for nearly half a century now, but people still play guitar :)
  - electroly 4y ago
    > at least for now, 3D printing might change that > Dancing is one that will be very hard to copy I'm not sure I'd hang my hat on a particular current inability of AI, particularly inabilities where there's no obvious impediment to AI doing it. You're just begging for AI to eventually gain that ability, and now you're back where you started. Hooking AI up to physical actuators and getting it to work properly strikes me as a "this will 100% happen, I guarantee this is already being worked on" situation; basing your self-worth off the inability of AI to do those things seems like a ticking time bomb.
    - achenet 4y ago
      alright then, I'll fallback to my backup - humans are cheaper. They don't require mining rare earth metals, they're more versatile, and uh... oh gosh it's only a matter of time before we're all replaced by cheap carbon based robots. It's been real <3
    - binarymax 4y ago
      Indeed, this is already happening. This company is using human artist works for now, but the leap to a model producing such art is quite small at this point: https://art.art/blog/portia-de-rossi https://art.art/blog/portia-de-rossi
    - nonameiguess 4y ago
      Seems like this is missing the point of dance, at least part of which is specifically watching humans. Right now, a pitching machine can throw harder than a human, but we still restrict baseball teams to only having humans on them. An automated motorbike can cover 100 meters faster than any human, but we don't allow motorbikes to compete in an Olympic sprint competition. A mechanical sumo wrestler wouldn't need to be intelligent, just heavier than the heaviest competitor, and it could already win against any human right now, but we don't do that. Similarly, people still play chess, go, and Starcraft even though AI can beat them. Human Jeopardy matches still get televised even though Watson could beat them. We still have math olympics even though Wolfram Alpha could have won all of them decades ago. I think human dancers are safe for as long as there are humans.
- layer8 4y ago
  To be honest, I already got to the “why bother” state by seeing on the internet how many human artists are so much better than me. And, on the other hand, if you actually have a specific vision of what you want to create, it is often quite difficult, or actually impossible, to get an AI to generate an output that fulfills your particular vision.
  - xg15 4y ago
    > To be honest, I already got to the “why bother” state by seeing on the internet how many human artists are so much better than me. I'm also learning to draw. As a counterpoint, I found it quite fun and enlightening to use artwork I like as practicing material. You can learn a lot by trying to copy parts of an artwork (without tracing and without uploading the result anywhere) : By copying, you still actually have to draw the artwork and deal with the same challenges that the original artist did - however you can use the original artwork as a sort of guide or cheat sheet on how those problems can be addressed. I found it often even gave me a deeper appreciation for the original artist, because you see all the small, individual decisions they had to make to eventually get to the artwork - it felt sort of similar to reading code and trying to get into the head of the original developers. You can also get creative and only copy parts of the artwork or stitch together a new piece from different sources - essentially doing by hand what image generators do automatically. (Just don't upload your new artwork anywhere without contacting the original authors first)
    - xtracto 4y ago
      These threads remind me a lot of some of Isaac Asimov "Robots" series novels. He painted a world where Robots and AI solved a lot of things, so people didn't have to do things that "worried them". It seems some lost any meaning for living. I've been an "amateurish" guitar player for 30 years. I play chords, I do some OK picking and I love trying to "play" songs I like, even if badly played (I like speed metal and shredding, which I know I will never master in my lifetime). Nevertheless, I do it because I like it, I've seen Satriani, Oscar Lopez, Steve Vai play, and I know I'll never be like them. However I don't think "why bother". I enjoy playing basic guitar some afternoons in my living room, and my wife enjoys listening to me while reading a book. I've always played for me first, and because I enjoyed it. It is a very rare opportunity that we people have the ability/resources to do something just because we enjoy it. With the advent of this wave of AI, we will need to learn to do more things that way.
- mronetwo 4y ago
  Imagine he might choose (or already does it) to do it professionally and struggle to make ends meet because “AI is just good enough. People still consume the media we produce. Why hire artists?”
- iamwpj 4y ago
  Every mind sees things different. The artist struggles to put that to a medium. The successful expression of their vision is extremely common, but the ability for anyone to even iterate on another artist's work is basically nonexistent. Even with AIs cranking out art, the obsessed will continue to fight to share their mind.
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Grim? There's a company out there using AI voice modification to make south Asian call center workers sound American on the phone. It's just depressing any way you look at it.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  think of the brain power, and the human potential we’re wasting on solving such shitty problems.
  - beaker52 4y ago
    Instead of just providing good services, we create new services to enable the original services to exist with the deficiencies they have, now you’ve got n services that enable 0.5 of the services you originally wanted. Sounds like a familiar problem to me. shudders
  - samdcbu 4y ago
    If this is depressing let me tell you about quants and consultants, the true black holes of human capital.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    Current capitalistic system defines what is valuable or what is not. As long as your solution to a problem generates a profit, the thing you are doing is valuable....
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Sounds like an alignment problem.
    - throw10920 4y ago
      You're conflating two very different meanings for the word "valuable" - one that means "to have monetary value", and another that means "has use for society", and so your comment doesn't make sense.
fullshark 4y ago
Boundaries like paywalls and walled gardens with human verification of users seem inevitable to me as every other platform just becomes flooded with AI generated junk food.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Indeed; artists will get wise and stop the AI exploitation from plagiarizing and laundering their product.
  - fxtentacle 4y ago
    Too late, the datasets containing all human-generated artwork already exist.
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      It'll be a great disproof of the whole "everything is derivative" line when they continue creating original and novel art.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Yeah depends how you look at it. It is very grim when you look at it from the hedonistic perspective. To avoid nihilism you have to consider the complete opposite. That you are contributing to the collective in a significant way, even if you suck at art, coding, writing, etc. We're already quite deep in a meaning crisis. Nothing should stop each individual on this planet from searching for their meaning regardless of current innovation. Like you mention, humans grow from the pain and process, AI will never have that nor understand it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11987.The_Myth_of_Sisyphus_and_Other_Essays https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11987.The_Myth_of_Sisyph... EDIT: There's also a beautiful book regarding an existential courage to "be" which rejects this nihilism/meaninglessness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175141.The_Courage_to_Be https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175141.The_Courage_to_Be
2devnull 4y ago
Blame Walter Benjamin. People, many of us, pay for human made art. Paul Graham is an investor and believer in art. He also believes ai has value. Don’t be fooled. It’s a false dichotomy. Make better art. If you can’t be better than ai, you don’t “get” what art is in essence.
- mronetwo 4y ago
  Seems you’re ignoring the entire professional space of people who want to make art and make money out of it. Impoverished internal lives of CEOs will always push them to pick cheap AI generated, laundered art, instead of hiring an artist. It’s cheaper and that all those people care about in the end.
  - pksebben 4y ago
    this is less a problem with ai, and more a problem with persisting an economic model that had it's last major redesign in the 1700s.
  - hectorlorenzo 4y ago
    As it happened with book binders, printing press operators, tailors, lamplighters, milkmen... what is so special about professional artists?
  - 2devnull 4y ago
    Paul Graham is one the people who is supporting talented artists by buying their work. The patronage system has brought much beauty to the world. It’s imperfect and one wishes you could remove the rich men from the art world, but tradition speaks of truths which you’d be wise to listen to.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > Make better art. If you can’t be better than ai, you don’t “get” what art is in essence. I think that first sentence invalidates the second. "Better than AI" implies the artist's work should be more commercially successful than an AI's. Which of these two enterprises are more likely to have a sales team?
yonixw 4y ago
I see it in a total different light (putting aside legal discussion). Ever since learning to program, I hated redundancy of learning, learn loop in C#, learn loop syntax in Python etc. to the point I hated new languages and wanted all ecosystems to be centralized around few. Not to mention about getting depressed that I will never be able to draw anything good even tough there are many stories I want to tell with pictures I've imagined. All these "time" requirements have made me lose hope and guided me to just stick to my lane. But since Copilot and Stable Diffusion came out I felt alive like never before. Suddenly I can get a boilerplate to a new language in a few click (and unit tests also!). I can create images I like and put my imagination into reality like never before. Every stable diffusion model is a new area I can expand into. I can waste hours in front of it just curios about how styles can be merged together. All those "time" obstacles I thought were hardcoded in reality, just gone! I see it as an amazing advancement. > ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images. That is just spam, and low effort content, and yes, Stable diffusion also opened a spam route using it models. But I think it will be solved in a year or two. (Like those anti-deepfakes AI that are published now, few years after deepfakes)
- Lewton 4y ago
  > But I think it will be solved in a year or two. (Like those anti-deepfakes AI that are published now, few years after deepfakes) Anything used to detect ai generated images will be used to train image generators, there’s no escape
lloeki 4y ago
Could we make a ML filter thing that would detect ML generated art and shove it > /dev/null? Oh, wait. Someone would plug it into a fitness function for their ML generating thing to drive it to not generate art that matches the filter. Coming soon to ReCAPTCHA: "click on images that have been AI generated" I wish I could dream again about technology.
jkestner 4y ago
Once we develop bots to automatically perform our consumer functions (damnit, Alexa, you were the chosen one), the loop will be closed and we can return to the trees.
julvo 4y ago
> Now we're creating tools to jump directly to the final product The same could've been said when the printing press or highly automated manufacturing was invented
masterof0 4y ago
It just spam automation improvements in a nutshell.
seydor 4y ago
> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product One has to assume that Sisyphus was happy. But isn't that a bit sad
- mronetwo 4y ago
  Has to? Why? No one would ever defend the statement that “all processes make us happy”…
  - zild3d 4y ago
    "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." are the final lines of Camus' essay
    - goatlover 4y ago
      One "must" imagine Camus was wrong. There are plenty of struggles humans do not find happy, particularly when they seem pointless or don't get you anywhere.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  How does this relate to art and fulfillment exactly?
- gbjw 4y ago
  "God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" "Push this boulder, and imagine yourself happy."
serverholic 4y ago
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I feel like people get caught up in the, admittedly cool, individual projects but fail to see how this stuff is impacting our society as a whole. Society sucks right now and abuse of technology is a huge part of it. I know people love their TikTok, Reddit, stable diffusion, etc. but the world would be better off without it. And if you think blasting peoples brains with ADHD content on TikTok is bad then just wait for AI generated content. It’ll be way worse. Endless novelty at your fingertips. Whatever you can dream up will be generated on the fly for you to consume.
sdwr 4y ago
Retreat! Retreat to the local!
eternalban 4y ago
> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product. tbh, your comment doesn't convey this belief at all. Btw a couple of generations ago artists were upset over people like Jeff Koons & Warhol. Creative process or fame/fortune. Pick one. I can see commercial artists, illustrators, etc. who mostly end up doing what the client wants anyway (so "process" is not the main issue) to make a living being upset here. Corporate corridors and offices need "art" and sure, this trend will cut into that business. But not the tiniest of dents has been made in the universe of actually creative minds, imo.
thedangler 4y ago
I believe it is because people are naturally lazy these days. And if they can do something fast and easy that might make them a profit, not matter how crap it is, they will do it. Look how many SaaS companies started up from openAI GPT-3 to create headlines, blog posts, grammar fixed, ect. You'll see the same thing with code soon. Poeple are using those sites to create the same youtube videos and promoting the products with affiliate links.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I don't think we're going to solve the lazy people problem before we solve the system-that-encourages-people-to-be-lazy problem. We cannot change behavior without changing incentives. Of course everyone is going to try to make a profit doing as little work as possible - we've built a system for incentivizing precisely that mode of work.
egypturnash 4y ago
My job is art and AI art is super depressing.
hectorlorenzo 4y ago
There is something off about this argument. On one hand, you say "Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product", which I completely agree. But you also say "places like ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images", which seems to indicate there is a focus on showing off the final product. I make pottery, and my pieces suck (in terms of shape, usability, even stability) compared to ones made by professional artists or in a factory. I cannot make two similar mugs for the life of me. But it is the process I enjoy, the learning, the improving. And the nice community I've built around me that shares the same passion. Maybe I'm underestimating the power of text-to-image, but people still learn how to play the guitar (despite Ableton), or chess (despite Stockfish), or sculpture (despite 3D printing). My honest question is: why should this time be different?
- mronetwo 4y ago
  You've posed a lot of questions, which I won't address. When it comes to "focus on showing off the final product" I don't think there is anything off here. First of all there is the professional aspect of it. People just have to market themselves to get jobs. ArtStation (its predecessors actually) eradicated the new to have a portfolio website. It's THE place to host your work. Then there is the need for validation. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be appreciated for your accomplishments. That's just one of our needs. Community aspect is also important. People want to get better and they want to learn from others. Showing your work and exposing it to scrutiny or inspiring others is perfectly fine. Lastly, I've never said that we derive EVERYTHING from the process. Final result is also important. It's just meaningless without the process, imo.
  - hectorlorenzo 4y ago
    I agree with all your points and I struggle to see how AI-generated imagery will change any of this. I honesty believe that people will still appreciate (or criticise, or ignore) your work and communities will still be formed around "traditional" artists. As for the professional aspect of it, yes, designers, illustrators, copywriters, programmers will see their work deeply changed by this technology, to an extend that I do not understand at all. I share your worries in that front.
tmountain 4y ago
I also like making art, but AI has no bearing on my enjoyment in doing so. For me, it’s just a matter of carving out time to do my project organically (and analog), enjoying the process, and reflection on the results. Someone creating their own “work” with AI doesn’t make me enjoy the artistic journey more or less.
gbjw 4y ago
> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product. This is what gives me solace. Surely much of 'art' (in so far as a definition is useful) is not a static 'product' that you can replicate at will. It is a connection between two people: the artist and the consumer. Yes, AI 'art' can look aesthetically pleasing: but does it evoke emotion? Does it connect you to the 'artist'?

stanmancan 4y ago

I’ve felt the same way. After years of patience and practice my kid has become a fantastic artist. I’m a bit concerned that at some point they might think “why bother?” and give it up after they see someone type some prompt in with “pencil, sketch” as a suffix.

d0liver 4y ago
I'd still much rather see real art. It's kind of the difference between eating a homemade meal and eating manufactured crap out of a vending machine. And, from what I can tell, the art generators are basically just stealing other people's stuff. It'll probably be brought up as a real IP issue at some point.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  No, that's just not how they technically work. AI generators train on an image archive, but the resulting model doesn't include the actual pictures in it, and often contains only a tiny influence from each source image. I think the current popular model works out to somewhere around a byte in the model per sample image. Here's a diagram https://www.reddit.com/user/AnOnlineHandle https://www.reddit.com/user/AnOnlineHandle made: https://i.redd.it/yxflzg0z6p3a1.png https://i.redd.it/yxflzg0z6p3a1.png
  - lmarcos 4y ago
    Well, if I were an artist who wants to make work publicly available (previews?) and charge for it, I would make sure the license I use to publish my work explicitly states that it's not allowed to use my work as part of training data for any ML algorithm. If they want my work for that, then pay for it. Hell, I think I as a developer could do that... Gonna invent a new open source license.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Okay, but what's that supposed to achieve? If you think you'll get paid, you probably won't because AI trains on very large datasets, and so pretty much any price per image would quickly get too expensive. If you think it'll hamstring AI, I doubt it'll be for long. People will just end up curating their dataset better, and images that allow for it will continue to be created. Also, per https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd -- "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor", so this likely won't get much uptake in open source circles either.
      - dwild 4y ago
        >Okay, but what's that supposed to achieve? Not being in the dataset maybe? There's many artists that hate that you can just write "in the style of" with their name. So at least, if it does appear that it works with their name, they now either have been paid that amount, or they can sue for that amount of lost revenue. At least not everything would be lost. I'm not a lawyer though, so really no idea whether this could even be possible as it's seems like currently it's fair use.
        dale_glass 4y ago
        > Not being in the dataset maybe? There's many artists that hate that you can just write "in the style of" with their name. Very few artists have an unique style. Some are very recognizable, yes, but plenty others do more or less the same sort of thing. There's thousands of photographers out there that go for the "razor sharp, high contrast closeup that shows every pore" style (https://photoaspects.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/black-and-white-1590771_1280-1024x683.jpg https://photoaspects.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/black-an...) for instance. With very limited exceptions you could go to a photographer and say "I want a photo that looks like this Vogue cover" and get it done. > So at least, if it does appear that it works with their name, they now either have been paid that amount, or they can sue for that amount of lost revenue. At least not everything would be lost. Don't be silly. If that logic worked, Microsoft could have sued Linus Torvalds for providing an OS for free. Or if you want to be a bit more exact, Sun Microsystems, IBM, or any other Unix vendor.
dale_glass 4y ago
AI art is not nearly there yet, and has very significant areas in which it struggles a lot. The funny thing about it is that just like normal art there are easy and hard things to accomplish, but it's nigh impossible for a person new to this concept to tell which is which: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ Overall, the easy part of AI art is generic portraits where you either don't care about the details, or want to use existing, popular things. Eg, you can ask for Harry Potter. And you can ask for a random character. But if you have a personal, distinctive design you made and want to bring to life, then it can get very tough pretty fast. In fact, the best possible user for an AI generator would be an artist that's also capable of training a custom model. That opens up way more possibilities. Here's what this looks like: https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/z7qat8/ai_as_a_tool_the_sequel_overpaint_process_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/comments/z7qat8/ai_as_a_too...
achenet 4y ago
all AI art is confined to digital medium (at least for now, 3D printing might change that). You can't see the brushstrokes like in a real life, physical painting. Dancing is one that will be very hard to copy, because you need actual humans for it. Not to mention, the kid may enjoy making art, and his/her art may give others joy, even if it's not a profitable career. It can still be a fun hobby - synthesizers have been around for nearly half a century now, but people still play guitar :)
- electroly 4y ago
  > at least for now, 3D printing might change that > Dancing is one that will be very hard to copy I'm not sure I'd hang my hat on a particular current inability of AI, particularly inabilities where there's no obvious impediment to AI doing it. You're just begging for AI to eventually gain that ability, and now you're back where you started. Hooking AI up to physical actuators and getting it to work properly strikes me as a "this will 100% happen, I guarantee this is already being worked on" situation; basing your self-worth off the inability of AI to do those things seems like a ticking time bomb.
  - achenet 4y ago
    alright then, I'll fallback to my backup - humans are cheaper. They don't require mining rare earth metals, they're more versatile, and uh... oh gosh it's only a matter of time before we're all replaced by cheap carbon based robots. It's been real <3
  - binarymax 4y ago
    Indeed, this is already happening. This company is using human artist works for now, but the leap to a model producing such art is quite small at this point: https://art.art/blog/portia-de-rossi https://art.art/blog/portia-de-rossi
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    Seems like this is missing the point of dance, at least part of which is specifically watching humans. Right now, a pitching machine can throw harder than a human, but we still restrict baseball teams to only having humans on them. An automated motorbike can cover 100 meters faster than any human, but we don't allow motorbikes to compete in an Olympic sprint competition. A mechanical sumo wrestler wouldn't need to be intelligent, just heavier than the heaviest competitor, and it could already win against any human right now, but we don't do that. Similarly, people still play chess, go, and Starcraft even though AI can beat them. Human Jeopardy matches still get televised even though Watson could beat them. We still have math olympics even though Wolfram Alpha could have won all of them decades ago. I think human dancers are safe for as long as there are humans.
layer8 4y ago
To be honest, I already got to the “why bother” state by seeing on the internet how many human artists are so much better than me. And, on the other hand, if you actually have a specific vision of what you want to create, it is often quite difficult, or actually impossible, to get an AI to generate an output that fulfills your particular vision.
- xg15 4y ago
  > To be honest, I already got to the “why bother” state by seeing on the internet how many human artists are so much better than me. I'm also learning to draw. As a counterpoint, I found it quite fun and enlightening to use artwork I like as practicing material. You can learn a lot by trying to copy parts of an artwork (without tracing and without uploading the result anywhere) : By copying, you still actually have to draw the artwork and deal with the same challenges that the original artist did - however you can use the original artwork as a sort of guide or cheat sheet on how those problems can be addressed. I found it often even gave me a deeper appreciation for the original artist, because you see all the small, individual decisions they had to make to eventually get to the artwork - it felt sort of similar to reading code and trying to get into the head of the original developers. You can also get creative and only copy parts of the artwork or stitch together a new piece from different sources - essentially doing by hand what image generators do automatically. (Just don't upload your new artwork anywhere without contacting the original authors first)
  - xtracto 4y ago
    These threads remind me a lot of some of Isaac Asimov "Robots" series novels. He painted a world where Robots and AI solved a lot of things, so people didn't have to do things that "worried them". It seems some lost any meaning for living. I've been an "amateurish" guitar player for 30 years. I play chords, I do some OK picking and I love trying to "play" songs I like, even if badly played (I like speed metal and shredding, which I know I will never master in my lifetime). Nevertheless, I do it because I like it, I've seen Satriani, Oscar Lopez, Steve Vai play, and I know I'll never be like them. However I don't think "why bother". I enjoy playing basic guitar some afternoons in my living room, and my wife enjoys listening to me while reading a book. I've always played for me first, and because I enjoyed it. It is a very rare opportunity that we people have the ability/resources to do something just because we enjoy it. With the advent of this wave of AI, we will need to learn to do more things that way.
mronetwo 4y ago
Imagine he might choose (or already does it) to do it professionally and struggle to make ends meet because “AI is just good enough. People still consume the media we produce. Why hire artists?”
iamwpj 4y ago
Every mind sees things different. The artist struggles to put that to a medium. The successful expression of their vision is extremely common, but the ability for anyone to even iterate on another artist's work is basically nonexistent. Even with AIs cranking out art, the obsessed will continue to fight to share their mind.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

Grim? There's a company out there using AI voice modification to make south Asian call center workers sound American on the phone. It's just depressing any way you look at it.

rpastuszak 4y ago
think of the brain power, and the human potential we’re wasting on solving such shitty problems.
- beaker52 4y ago
  Instead of just providing good services, we create new services to enable the original services to exist with the deficiencies they have, now you’ve got n services that enable 0.5 of the services you originally wanted. Sounds like a familiar problem to me. shudders
- samdcbu 4y ago
  If this is depressing let me tell you about quants and consultants, the true black holes of human capital.
- m00dy 4y ago
  Current capitalistic system defines what is valuable or what is not. As long as your solution to a problem generates a profit, the thing you are doing is valuable....
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Sounds like an alignment problem.
  - throw10920 4y ago
    You're conflating two very different meanings for the word "valuable" - one that means "to have monetary value", and another that means "has use for society", and so your comment doesn't make sense.

fullshark 4y ago

Boundaries like paywalls and walled gardens with human verification of users seem inevitable to me as every other platform just becomes flooded with AI generated junk food.

jollyllama 4y ago
Indeed; artists will get wise and stop the AI exploitation from plagiarizing and laundering their product.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Too late, the datasets containing all human-generated artwork already exist.
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    It'll be a great disproof of the whole "everything is derivative" line when they continue creating original and novel art.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Yeah depends how you look at it. It is very grim when you look at it from the hedonistic perspective. To avoid nihilism you have to consider the complete opposite. That you are contributing to the collective in a significant way, even if you suck at art, coding, writing, etc. We're already quite deep in a meaning crisis. Nothing should stop each individual on this planet from searching for their meaning regardless of current innovation. Like you mention, humans grow from the pain and process, AI will never have that nor understand it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11987.The_Myth_of_Sisyphus_and_Other_Essays https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11987.The_Myth_of_Sisyph... EDIT: There's also a beautiful book regarding an existential courage to "be" which rejects this nihilism/meaninglessness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175141.The_Courage_to_Be https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175141.The_Courage_to_Be

2devnull 4y ago

Blame Walter Benjamin. People, many of us, pay for human made art. Paul Graham is an investor and believer in art. He also believes ai has value. Don’t be fooled. It’s a false dichotomy. Make better art. If you can’t be better than ai, you don’t “get” what art is in essence.

mronetwo 4y ago
Seems you’re ignoring the entire professional space of people who want to make art and make money out of it. Impoverished internal lives of CEOs will always push them to pick cheap AI generated, laundered art, instead of hiring an artist. It’s cheaper and that all those people care about in the end.
- pksebben 4y ago
  this is less a problem with ai, and more a problem with persisting an economic model that had it's last major redesign in the 1700s.
- hectorlorenzo 4y ago
  As it happened with book binders, printing press operators, tailors, lamplighters, milkmen... what is so special about professional artists?
- 2devnull 4y ago
  Paul Graham is one the people who is supporting talented artists by buying their work. The patronage system has brought much beauty to the world. It’s imperfect and one wishes you could remove the rich men from the art world, but tradition speaks of truths which you’d be wise to listen to.
rchaud 4y ago
> Make better art. If you can’t be better than ai, you don’t “get” what art is in essence. I think that first sentence invalidates the second. "Better than AI" implies the artist's work should be more commercially successful than an AI's. Which of these two enterprises are more likely to have a sales team?

yonixw 4y ago

I see it in a total different light (putting aside legal discussion). Ever since learning to program, I hated redundancy of learning, learn loop in C#, learn loop syntax in Python etc. to the point I hated new languages and wanted all ecosystems to be centralized around few. Not to mention about getting depressed that I will never be able to draw anything good even tough there are many stories I want to tell with pictures I've imagined. All these "time" requirements have made me lose hope and guided me to just stick to my lane. But since Copilot and Stable Diffusion came out I felt alive like never before. Suddenly I can get a boilerplate to a new language in a few click (and unit tests also!). I can create images I like and put my imagination into reality like never before. Every stable diffusion model is a new area I can expand into. I can waste hours in front of it just curios about how styles can be merged together. All those "time" obstacles I thought were hardcoded in reality, just gone! I see it as an amazing advancement. > ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images. That is just spam, and low effort content, and yes, Stable diffusion also opened a spam route using it models. But I think it will be solved in a year or two. (Like those anti-deepfakes AI that are published now, few years after deepfakes)

Lewton 4y ago
> But I think it will be solved in a year or two. (Like those anti-deepfakes AI that are published now, few years after deepfakes) Anything used to detect ai generated images will be used to train image generators, there’s no escape

lloeki 4y ago

Could we make a ML filter thing that would detect ML generated art and shove it > /dev/null? Oh, wait. Someone would plug it into a fitness function for their ML generating thing to drive it to not generate art that matches the filter. Coming soon to ReCAPTCHA: "click on images that have been AI generated" I wish I could dream again about technology.

jkestner 4y ago

Once we develop bots to automatically perform our consumer functions (damnit, Alexa, you were the chosen one), the loop will be closed and we can return to the trees.

julvo 4y ago

> Now we're creating tools to jump directly to the final product The same could've been said when the printing press or highly automated manufacturing was invented

masterof0 4y ago

It just spam automation improvements in a nutshell.

seydor 4y ago

> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product One has to assume that Sisyphus was happy. But isn't that a bit sad

mronetwo 4y ago
Has to? Why? No one would ever defend the statement that “all processes make us happy”…
- zild3d 4y ago
  "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." are the final lines of Camus' essay
  - goatlover 4y ago
    One "must" imagine Camus was wrong. There are plenty of struggles humans do not find happy, particularly when they seem pointless or don't get you anywhere.
spacemadness 4y ago
How does this relate to art and fulfillment exactly?
gbjw 4y ago
"God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" "Push this boulder, and imagine yourself happy."

serverholic 4y ago

I wish I could upvote this 100 times. I feel like people get caught up in the, admittedly cool, individual projects but fail to see how this stuff is impacting our society as a whole. Society sucks right now and abuse of technology is a huge part of it. I know people love their TikTok, Reddit, stable diffusion, etc. but the world would be better off without it. And if you think blasting peoples brains with ADHD content on TikTok is bad then just wait for AI generated content. It’ll be way worse. Endless novelty at your fingertips. Whatever you can dream up will be generated on the fly for you to consume.

sdwr 4y ago

Retreat! Retreat to the local!

eternalban 4y ago

> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product. tbh, your comment doesn't convey this belief at all. Btw a couple of generations ago artists were upset over people like Jeff Koons & Warhol. Creative process or fame/fortune. Pick one. I can see commercial artists, illustrators, etc. who mostly end up doing what the client wants anyway (so "process" is not the main issue) to make a living being upset here. Corporate corridors and offices need "art" and sure, this trend will cut into that business. But not the tiniest of dents has been made in the universe of actually creative minds, imo.

thedangler 4y ago

I believe it is because people are naturally lazy these days. And if they can do something fast and easy that might make them a profit, not matter how crap it is, they will do it. Look how many SaaS companies started up from openAI GPT-3 to create headlines, blog posts, grammar fixed, ect. You'll see the same thing with code soon. Poeple are using those sites to create the same youtube videos and promoting the products with affiliate links.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
I don't think we're going to solve the lazy people problem before we solve the system-that-encourages-people-to-be-lazy problem. We cannot change behavior without changing incentives. Of course everyone is going to try to make a profit doing as little work as possible - we've built a system for incentivizing precisely that mode of work.

egypturnash 4y ago

My job is art and AI art is super depressing.

hectorlorenzo 4y ago

There is something off about this argument. On one hand, you say "Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product", which I completely agree. But you also say "places like ArtStation get flooded with AI generated images", which seems to indicate there is a focus on showing off the final product. I make pottery, and my pieces suck (in terms of shape, usability, even stability) compared to ones made by professional artists or in a factory. I cannot make two similar mugs for the life of me. But it is the process I enjoy, the learning, the improving. And the nice community I've built around me that shares the same passion. Maybe I'm underestimating the power of text-to-image, but people still learn how to play the guitar (despite Ableton), or chess (despite Stockfish), or sculpture (despite 3D printing). My honest question is: why should this time be different?

mronetwo 4y ago
You've posed a lot of questions, which I won't address. When it comes to "focus on showing off the final product" I don't think there is anything off here. First of all there is the professional aspect of it. People just have to market themselves to get jobs. ArtStation (its predecessors actually) eradicated the new to have a portfolio website. It's THE place to host your work. Then there is the need for validation. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be appreciated for your accomplishments. That's just one of our needs. Community aspect is also important. People want to get better and they want to learn from others. Showing your work and exposing it to scrutiny or inspiring others is perfectly fine. Lastly, I've never said that we derive EVERYTHING from the process. Final result is also important. It's just meaningless without the process, imo.
- hectorlorenzo 4y ago
  I agree with all your points and I struggle to see how AI-generated imagery will change any of this. I honesty believe that people will still appreciate (or criticise, or ignore) your work and communities will still be formed around "traditional" artists. As for the professional aspect of it, yes, designers, illustrators, copywriters, programmers will see their work deeply changed by this technology, to an extend that I do not understand at all. I share your worries in that front.

tmountain 4y ago

I also like making art, but AI has no bearing on my enjoyment in doing so. For me, it’s just a matter of carving out time to do my project organically (and analog), enjoying the process, and reflection on the results. Someone creating their own “work” with AI doesn’t make me enjoy the artistic journey more or less.

gbjw 4y ago

> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product. This is what gives me solace. Surely much of 'art' (in so far as a definition is useful) is not a static 'product' that you can replicate at will. It is a connection between two people: the artist and the consumer. Yes, AI 'art' can look aesthetically pleasing: but does it evoke emotion? Does it connect you to the 'artist'?