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AI won’t make artists redundant – thanks to information theory

• jsemrau 4y ago
  I think so too. AI might affect applications like Photoshop if the result of the provided output is good enough. Stable Diffusion is going into this direction. While ChatGPT is nice, real authors and journalists create value by bringing in a nuanced and subjective insights based on their research/expertise/ideology.
  • elif 4y ago
    Personally, I highly value the vanilla perspective of chatGPT's explanations compared to picking through some authors bias to try to find truth for myself. What you are calling value is nice for entertainment purposes or perhaps some heuristic understanding and essentialization... But it is usually at expense of nuance and truth.
• mdp2021 4y ago
  > Will there be room for human artists? When the details of the machine's output will have a justifiable foundation, then the machine will be an artist. Before that, you employ «human artists» because they have those missing modules. The need is in those missing modules. The agent who has them can "do everything" or cooperate with other specialized agents - like in normal work.
• AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  AI won't make artists redundant because it does not experience human sensations. The only thing an AI can do is read the flow of data we make available to it, which is text, audio and video. An AI will never be able to represent what it means to be subject to police brutality, because it cannot feel being beaten and humiliated by a cop. An AI will never be able to paint an anti-war poster from the perspective of someone who has felt the ground shake due to shelling of their hometown, because an AI has not lived there for 30 years and does not know the feeling. The only way AI will make artists redundant would be if it became completely human, which is contradictory since at that point it would be a real artist
  • Zetobal 4y ago
    You are reading too many coffee table books.
    • AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      You are reading too much Twitter
      • Zetobal 4y ago
        But I don't.
        • AstixAndBelix 4y ago
          And I don't read coffee table books, so now what?
          • Zetobal 4y ago
            Ok. :]
  • bazoom42 4y ago
    You are discounting fiction then. Lots of art describe or depict things the artist never personally experienced.
    • klibertp 4y ago
      It's not that clear-cut. Humans can empathize, to the point where observing someone getting hurt flares similar neural response to the one in the hurt person. Sufficiently vivid imagination in conjunction with a lot of research can give you an experience "close enough" to the real deal to be able to write about it. I've witnessed an author falling into a deep, clinical depression solely due to the subject they decided to tackle. Not every person is capable of such a deep dive into an experience they nominally don't have, but authors and artists tend to be able to do this. In such a setting, "personal experience" is a fluid term, not necessarily synonymous with "he was there at the time personally" or "it happened to him personally". When you wake up from a nightmare, you're covered in cold sweat, you have trouble breathing normally, your hands are shaking - did you "personally experience" what you've dreamed of? Authors and artists are in a business of dreaming like that while awake, and sharing those dreams with others. The AI will surely get there at some point, as others noted, once you model embodiment and imagination it's game over. But it's not as close as others seem to think, in my opinion.
• chewonbananas 4y ago
  What I've seen from all the AI lately is a lot of vague uncanny valley images that somehow don't fit. They're too perfect and even when they try to be imperfect it's too intentional.
• neovialogistics 4y ago
  It doesn't matter whether diffusion programs or even more rarefied approaches to solution spaces can capture the essence of human-produced art. Markets are fundamentally about perceived value instead of actual value. Algorithmically generated creative works do not have to compete in the field of actual value; they has to compete in the field of perceived value. Let's be real, almost all customers of art - whether they pay before or after the production - are pretty bad at estimating actual value. More philosophically, it's not possible to empower humans above human superorganisms. You make a successful walled garden or you fail to reproduce your ideals into the future.
  • tpush 4y ago
    What is "actual value"?
    • Jensson 4y ago
      In fine art? Social signalling. AI generated art is like artificial diamonds.
      • zakki 4y ago
        In the case of diamond it seems better to choose the artificial one. Especially the real one's price is controlled.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • Dalewyn 4y ago
    That is a bunch of minced words to explain a very simple concept: People judge results, not effort. You don't buy a product because the producer put in <X> effort, you buy it because it's good (FSVO good).
    • kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Food Safety and Veterinary Office? Fire Service Vehicle Operator?
• ilyt 4y ago
  They are not worried about making all artists redundant, they are worried about making most artist redundant. Instead of needing to pay for mediocre artist to get mediocre art that's good enough for a purpose, now the AI taught on the good artist (all subjective of course) can produce similarly mediocre art that's fit for purpose. It's equivalent to replacing all of the simple CRUD web devs with AI that does good enough job
  • caseymarquis 4y ago
    Interestingly, it might be easier to replace mid-skill artists than mid-skill developers (not to say both won't happen over time). The key difference is that when generating art, you can say "Make A in-the-style B.", get what you want, and move on. Meanwhile, you have to live with the consequences of AI generated code. Case in point: My wife was trying to build a system to generate POs per vendor from a series of workorders a couple weeks ago. She was using AirTable, which vastly simplifies the creation and use of relational databases. Given a lack of database experience, the structure that she made was misaligned with what she actually needed (and completely denormalized). Putting it into production would have caused major problems over time. This made me realize that writing code is only one of the barriers to entry in software. Eliminating this barrier effectively gives everyone in the world access to a small team of incredibly junior developers who have no idea what they're doing. Just like mismanaged DIY home projects create more work for professional contractors, I think AI might -oddly enough- create more positions for mid-tier and higher developers.
    • ilyt 4y ago
      It most definitely is for simple reason - non interactivity. Image doesn't need to be told what clicking this button does or how that pop up menu needs to animate or million other interactions. > Just like mismanaged DIY home projects create more work for professional contractors, I think AI might -oddly enough- create more positions for mid-tier and higher developers. It might also create a lot of jobs for "AI crafters" - know enough about it to craft good prompts about what client wants and have enough graphic editing knowledge to tweak and mix AI input to create what is needed. It probably will also empower "one man shops" dealing in small customized websites for customers, replacing or augmenting what now stock images are used for.
• anonylizard 4y ago
  This entire article misses critical developments in the AI art space. Controlnet was just released last week. It allows for precise fine-tuning of the image with skeletal positions, depth maps, outline sketches, etc. It has been exceptionally received in the AI art community, because pure-text-prompting precisely runs into the issue described in the article. You can only convey so much information with text prompts. That being said, artists in general still don't want to touch controlnet. Because despite controlnet solving their complaints about how the AI isn't controllable precisely, it doesn't solve the real problem, that drawing skills are massive devalued. Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read basic python), and storytellers (like manga artists). It'll be a higher-pay, higher-prestige, higher-skill-requirement job than before. And all those artists who devoted their lives to draw better, find this to be an incredibly brutal adjustment. PS: Despite how people made fun of 'proompters', or predicted that prompting would be automated away. The skill ceiling to good AI art has radically increased. There's now 10 different fine-tuned models you need to learn the basics of, each with different strengths. There's thousands of LORAs to insert into prompts to precisely reproduce a subject that the base model has no information on. There's 20 parameters to tune, each with different effects. There's VAEs which affect coloring and fine-details. Now there's controlnet, and you'd better learn blender to rig basic skeletons to feed it. This likely suggests the future of an AI-augmented economy: People become AI wranglers. Wordpress was supposed to make blogging easier, instead it spawned an industry of WP wranglers.
  • LASR 4y ago
    Yeah this post seems like it will not stand the rest of time. The fundamental conceptual shift is the emergent behaviors displayed by these models. And that is highly unforeseeable. We’re not working with machines that do what they’re built to do. They’re doing more. And every day we discover something new they’re capable of doing. Making any sort of statement about the limits of this technology is going to be shortsighted.
    • mirsadm 4y ago
      The opposite is also true. People overestimate what is possible and underestimate how much more effort and time is required to start replacing industries.
• imaginationra 4y ago
  Artist here: Article is an idealistic take not based in reality- the Jeff Koons of the world will be safe with their 30 million balloon art sales. Everyone else is going to be rekt. All of the work my artist friends do is for businesses- businesses trying to make the biggest profit. Ai art generators are faster/cheaper/more flexible. The artists are done and now it's all about the prompt engineers that don't need to be artists to excel. Market will decide what to pay "artists" but seems like it will be a race to the bottom. Artist types I know are preparing accordingly.
  • hanoz 4y ago
    Out of interest, how are they preparing accordingly? It's not remotely my own field but I'm starting to wonder how I should be guiding my children who have tallent for art, in light of all this.
    • anonylizard 4y ago
      Draw comics, or really manga in particular. The only real challenge in AI art, that won't be solved any time soon, is storytelling: chaining multiple panels together for coherent stories. Even ChatGPT cannot tell a coherent story longer than 2 paragraphs. Being able to write a long story well, requires understanding world modelling, human motivations , etc, AGI tier abilities. Also, expose them to AI-art. If they lose interest in art after seeing AI art, that means they were never meant to be artists, they merely like to draw, not to make art. And drawing alone is not really economically useful anymore.
      • andy_ppp 4y ago
        Don’t worry, soon AI will be a wonderful story teller for adults and children alike <smiling face with smiling eyes emoji>.
      • sebzim4500 4y ago
        Presumably a skilled artist using SD can produce comics far faster than an artist on their own can? Or is it hard to get the model to draw consistent characters etc.
• aczerepinski 4y ago
  I hire artists to turn my terrible sketches into decent looking stickers, generally in a fun, cartoony style. For the last two ideas I tried midjouney and the best I could get from it was an additional reference to send to an artist. I watched a few YouTube tutorials that offered some interesting techniques for getting better and better images from midjouney, but to my eyes those midjouney experts seem awfully flexible about what the final output will be. They’re dancing with the AI but not fully wielding it. Perhaps next time I’ll hire both an artist and a midjouney expert and compare results that way.
  • kyleyeats 4y ago
    If it's just a character, you want Stable Diffusion. If it's a "scene" then you might want Midjourney.
  • nestorD 4y ago
    That is a very good point: having tight control on style and composition is significantly harder than getting a good-looking image with those techniques (it is doable but it takes practice to learn how to engineer prompt accordingly)
  • smusamashah 4y ago
    Look into ControlNet. Midjourney is not very customizable. Checkout reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion for examples of controlnet. You can turn your sketches into art with it.
• doublerabbit 4y ago
  I want to make a cartoon. Who can produce the imagery faster? Either spend $ commissioning an artist or spend money entering text in to a computer. "A teddy bear walking though a park". If I don't choose the artist, the artist is out of the job and the AI wins. You could say someone needs to train the AI with an artwork dataset but once that's initially done, its over, considering that studios are the main supplier to artists income. Does this not cause redundancies?
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    Be realistic and practical here, in what situation are you going to start typing into a computer "A teddy bear walking in a park" and then start to do anything with the images it generates in a case where you would've entrusted and artist or designer to make something for you ? What about when you need different scales, different colors, different this and that, are you going to sit there and keep prompting for this ? I've worked with people who are really good with Illustrator, they can change and produce images for different purposes in a ridiculously short amount of time already. The ting is, even if I could recruit AI to do it, I probably wouldn't and just want someone else to take care of it. To make favicons and screw around with thumbnails and vector images and the list goes on. There's also the fact that, some people have an eye for style and application of it. Even when I've tried to use DALL-E, which I never have successfully because it always generates something weird enough to be unusable, I've not been confident that my own personal selection is good enough, I'm not a designer, I don't have an eye for art or color, or style etc. It's not my profession to know what's nice. I don't want that responsibility, so I outsource it.
    • nonbirithm 4y ago
      The problem arises if a bunch of studios start adopting AI assisted workflows to increase productivity and the studios that are holdouts get left behind because it would no longer be economically viable to continue animating without AI. It could be similar to how traditional cel animation has declined in use. If AI assisted output clears the bar for consumers, then it's probably good enough for managers. People using AI professionally probably won't put the raw output of DALL-E straight into the finished work either, I've seen artists that use Stable Diffusion to generate a base image and then do heavy amounts of editing with Photoshop or similar.
• A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
  There's a mistaken assumption here. The author seems to believe that these generators operate on the basis of random chance, hence a 200x200 pixel image in RGB has a possibility space of 10^300000 images. ...But an overwhelming majority of those images are random noise, and are effectively homogeneous and interchangeable. They're perfectly identical. Like human artists, the image generators are (very strongly) biased to create "structured" images, which are derivative of existing artistic works or natural representations in the form of photographs. In principle, there's no a priori qualitative difference between the AIs and humans in this respect -- no human art is created de novo, but is always a continuation of, or a reaction to, existing forms. Further, there's no reason to believe that (a) the size of the possibility space matters in a quantitative sense, and (b) that AIs will never be as capable of qualitative "originality" -- in conception, composition, or subject matter representation -- as a human artist would be.
  • stared 4y ago
    I put my caveats on indistinguishable images. And three is the challange - to make a better estimation of an effective number of distinguishable images. > (b) that AIs will never be as capable of qualitative "originality" -- in conception, composition, or subject matter representation -- as a human artist would be. Sure, AI already creates original things. The point is that questions like "create a drawing that presents friendship" can be approached from many, many different, and what is crucial - subjective, ways.
• The_Colonel 4y ago
  AI will make many, but not all, artists redundant. As usual, the lower skill/value work will be automatized sooner. Platforms like fiverr will probably suffer a lot, but so will many "for hire" artists. High value work will remain to be exclusive for humans. Many high value artists (programmers ...) started as low value and worked themselves up. But if the low value segment is eaten up by AI then the path will be destroyed as well. I wonder if this will make classical education more valuable (after graduation you're starting as high value producer) and further increase class division.
  • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I don't think education has anything to do with this. AI tools are pretty easily accessible to anyone and you don't need a "classical education" to wield them. If anything, I think the necessity of education is going to be weakened further and more quickly in the next decade.
    • bamboozled 4y ago
      What a nice sounding dystopian future you've described there.
      • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
        What's dystopian about it?
        • bamboozled 4y ago
          Having people not really needing education and just becoming dumb consumers of AI products? Sounds like a boring future.
          • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
            We already have too many people going to university. Less people getting degrees would be a net positive. Knowledge and education is still important, but credentialed education is reducing in value. Not sure why people using AI tools would mean they're "dumb consumers". Are we "dumb consumers" of IDEs? Credentials mattering less and more AI tools sounds like a very interesting future to me.
• GaggiX 4y ago
  >an open-source Stable Diffusion, which is a basis for multiple projects, including commercial Midjourney. source? The model behind Midjourney looks quite different from Stable Diffusion, to me it looks like a model conditioned to image embeddings (like Karlo or Dalle 2) instead of text embeddings, also I don't see any mention of the Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license on their website, when they experimented with SD in August they added it but it has not been there for months, To me it is clear that MJ has trained a new diffusion model from scratch, it is also noticeable by the difference in performance, even for a model trained in AI image recognition it struggles with images generated by Nijijourney (MJ but finetuned for anime) while it has an easy time with anime images generated by SD and its finetuned models [1], which means that the distribution of images is very different. [1]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/saltacc/anime-ai-detect https://huggingface.co/spaces/saltacc/anime-ai-detect
• Satam 4y ago
  AI just needs to be better at creating art from instructions than a hired artist is. And we already know great art can be created following a prompt - hired artists interpret their client's instructions all the time (concept art, game art, movie art, etc.).
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    hired artists interpret their client's instructions all the time (concept art, game art, movie art, etc.). I cannot disagree with this comment any more, I hire creative people to help me to create things which isn't in my skillset. I don't hire them to tell them what I want entirely. Sometimes I'd at least describe what I want, but often they will say, well that's good but how about... That is a huge part of the value add for me personally. If I knew what I wanted, half the battle would be one, AI or not.
    • Satam 4y ago
      I don't think we disagree. Artists help you turn a relatively short and vague description into a finished artwork. The clients usually already provide very little information in comparison to the number of decisions needed to complete the work (e.g. choosing composition, theme, style, colors, lighting, etc.). Working from vague prompts is exactly what the current AIs do. Follow up questions and ability to do precise edits are likely next steps in the evolution.
• elif 4y ago
  I think artists will just have to leverage the tech on a larger scale to be effective. No matter how it's created, the best art will still have value.. It may not be economical to, for instance, have an entire studio of dozens or hundreds of artists produce an animated film with an anticipatory budget.. but I suspect it will still be quite profitable for a handful of artists and some AI to produce that same film in a shorter time period. Or it may be profitable for a 13 year old kid to produce that film in his spare time. In that way, I see it as a sort of artistic renaissance where new voices are found and the pace of artistic acceleration is unprecedented.
• junglistguy 4y ago
  "AI won’t make artists redundant" Of course it will make them redundant. All it takes is one "creative" in place of several graphic designers. What you write are just theories. Do you know what the design process looks like? How many "human problems" are there along the way? Only the ARTISTS will remain. Artists whose work you will want to buy. Such a fancy for the rich.
• college_physics 4y ago
  Only society can make artists redundant. If people want to get their "art" by digitally rehashing what real artists did in the past then we don't need artists. How exactly things will play out is not clear: photography did not eliminate painting. Algorithms will not eliminate more "manual" creative work. Some new genres might emerge. Ultimately what is a more important problem is that the commercialization of artistic production was always challenging. When you can create infinite replicas with semi-random variations it only makes the problem worse.
  • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    Exactly. Art as an economic industry may die out. As a career, it may be reduced to a much smaller scope. But we'll always be able to express ourselves artistically - maybe even more so if AI frees up more time in which to do so.
    • bamboozled 4y ago
      ...or enjoy making art with other people to use in our commercial endeavors ? Like, it might actually be fun to work with creatives to make art. It's one of the areas of my work I actually really enjoy. I can't imagine prompting DALL-E to be as fun and enjoyable, nor would it be "creative".
      • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        No, definitely not. It's a sad fact that many people have to do what most of us would consider 'boring' work in our day-to-day lives. Prompting DALL-E may not be 'as creative' as not using it, in the same way that using Photoshop tools might not be 'as creative' as painting with a brush, but that doesn't invalidate either process.
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Commercialization of anything and everything is the real capital P Problem that needs solving, in the grand scheme of things.
• bilqis 4y ago
  I think that “AI” (there is not even a drop of an actual AI in the current technology) is overhyped and barely can handle any of jobs people wanted it to do. It’s maybe good for sketching, be that code, text or images, but not for final product, and won’t be any time soon. As it was with all “AI” products in the past, it’s over advertised by ML bros and grifters.
  • klibertp 4y ago
    Half an hour trying to force one of the models to spit a manga-style picture of a character... with correct number of arms and legs. No successes so far. It's frankly disgusting most of the time, prob due to uncanny valley-like effect - it's kinda close, but not quite there. Not to mention, I'm sure I did not put "amputee" in the prompt, but I got a few pictures that should be honestly tagged with "guro"... and I wasn't even trying for NSFW! Same experience with code: Github Copilot is 90% right 100% of the time. Its suggestions for comments and docstrings are so bad I would never accept them in a code review, basically your old "a++ # adds 1 to a"; the generated code is always wrong, and the bigger the chunk of code generated the more wrong it is. It's kind of OK as a replacement for Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V and for generating boilerplate... which shouldn't be there in good code anyway. I suspect that for every impressive output we see there are tens of thousands of trash outputs someone had to wade through. Further, the less popular your prompt and the smaller the representation of what you want in the model, the harder it is to get something even remotely resembling what you want. Though, I'm not a "prompt engineer" (WTF is that...), so maybe I'm just using it wrong...
    • anonylizard 4y ago
      You guys need to understand, that the skill ceiling for AI art is very high. Its not some iphone-selfie tier technology. Go to Civitai.com and huggingface, to start comprehending how many AI models there are, and how powerful the latest models are. It takes at least two weeks of intense usage to get the hang of the basics/parameters and produce good output. AI art in the end will probably be dominated by professionals because of the increasing skill requirements.
      • 4y ago
• kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Reading the comments it seems that everyone assumes that art is always and only presented as pixels on a screen. Whereas most of the art in my house is hand painted on canvas and wood, hand embroidered, hand knitted, hand woven, hand thrown and decorated pottery. One picture was hammered out of a sheet of pewter. One of my favourite places is the Henie-Onstadt Art Centre sculpture park, another is Vigelands Anlegg in Oslo, no pixels in either place. So why does everyone seem to think that art is only flat, lit, pixels on a flat surface?
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    I think the exact same thing, obviously because we're on hacker news where most people seem to be hoping they can spend their days prompting machines for art so they can replace "artists" and save some money. It's actually funny when I think about it because most people wouldn't know what image to use and how to use it even when it was generated for them, there's even a skill in selecting art. You could argue enough good photos have already been taken that all practically all photographers should have already been made redundant since the year 2000, we still have photographers.
    • throwaway47291 4y ago
      I think if people are ignoring AI's limitations, it's more out of fear that programming is next than having something to gain. I doubt having the money/labour that's currently used creating art for something else would help me in a noticeable way: -the money would just trickle up -not that much money is spent on it anyway -world becomes more depressing, nothing you look at had any effort put into it, no-one had to believe in an advert on any level, instead it's the output of a machine optimised to trick you (as one of a shrinking number of people with any agency) to spend and therefore make the machine stronger. -artists/potential future artists decide to learn to code instead?
    • turtleyacht 4y ago
      That reminds me of Ira Glass' quote about taste: artists know it when they see it. Or why it's a mystery some folks prefer tabs vs spaces, or recoil from what they consider shoddy code. Somewhere in the discipline of point, line, and perspective, in the composition of shapes and their organization, is the artifact of amalgamated neurons, to be observed by yet another consciousness. I wonder if AI art will just help generate more gacha games. And one may wonder, of the limited time left on this planet, what really could we spend it on? The library of every book contains no meaningful work in the search. The space of all generated art is oblivion.
• wokwokwok 4y ago
  Imagine a world where AI art tools are commonly used. Ignore the messy legal and moral issues; just imagine, for a moment. What's changed? These tools effectively enable artists to: - generate a variety of concepts for some desired output - render out the detail, lighting and shading that has traditionally been done by hand - convert existing images and concepts into artistic 'styles' You want a set of icons? You want a custom font? The effort is reduced from weeks or work to days, if that. People will have to learn to use them; just like any other tool. So really, what actually changes? Two things, specifically spring to mind: - The existing skills that people have to do these things become obsolete. - The number of people needed to do the current job that artists are employed to do is drastically reduced. That's what's going to happen, and it's happening already. You need people to paint tween frames for your animated video? Well, 2 guys in a basement can do it now instead of a team of 10. Yeah, you still need the key frames... but the mechanical shading and drawing that employs of lot of people, specifically in the animation industry, is going to be ERADICATED. In corporate teams, will your 'design team' of 5 people be cut to 1? Probably not. ...but, those industries don't employ the majority of creatives. The majority of artists do not draw concept art. They do mechanical technical processes in VFX and animation. There will be new companies, and new roles. ...but, a lot of people will find the mechanical work that earns them their daily living wage will replaced by a much more efficient automated process. Those people may, perhaps, be able to re-train and get new creative roles doing other things. ... What the 'anti-AI' movement has won is a short reprieve until the 'ethical' and 'watermarked' corporate AI art generators roll out, and get accepted as industry standard. Maybe that's a good thing? I dunno. I think it's fair to sat that the cat is out of the box now. In the future, there will not be industrial scale human drawn 2d art. That industry will no longer exist. Hopefully the people currently in that industry can find other creative roles (or retire) by the time that happens. When photography came out, it had a similar impact on hand drawn photo-realistic paintings; and I think you can see thing, historically. It's not that no one does it any more. It's that it has become a niche job, that is technically inferior to just taking a photo. That's where this is headed for 2D artists.
  • sebzim4500 4y ago
    >What the 'anti-AI' movement has won is a short reprieve until the 'ethical' and 'watermarked' corporate AI art generators roll out, They've managed to get some NSFW models shut down, but have they achieved anything else? MSFT looks like they want to go full steam ahead with this, and they have pretty good lawyers who will not be frightened by a few frivolous lawsuits.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zenith035 4y ago
  Founder of dreamphilic.com here. Based on our users I am seeing some trends: 1. Great artists are generating great prompts and thus great images because at the end it all comes down to your imagination. 2. I expected most users to be young population but what I see is they are mostly people of age 35 and above. 3. Creative people are enjoying it. People who are not good at using artistic tools or don't have access to those expensive tools but have good imagination can also see their imaginations come to life, thanks to AI.
• neatze 4y ago
  I wait when game from like Dark Souls series is released and all concept art is generated by AI, to me it seems such game will have no style consistency, it will look like game that is is put together from market place props (eg. cheap garbage). Because AI can generate very good looking art works, I don't think it is all there in making compelling, consistent, and visually pleasing art, simply because there are feed back loops, between multiple people, from concept art to end product.
  • SunghoYahng 4y ago
    - 3 years later -
    • turtleyacht 4y ago
      The whole game is generated. It brings on a renaissance of game designers, because now ideas can be iterated and polished instead of dumping thousands of hours into prototyping. AI can create the skeleton (for now), but we need new AI models for the meta-analysis (game balance, replayability, novel mechanics). And AI game reviewers to curate that, because we won't have time to play everything.
• HeavyStorm 4y ago
  How do you vote down a link?
  • nickthegreek 4y ago
    With the flag button. You won’t have access to it til you get 500 upvotes I believe.
• moth-fuzz 4y ago
  AI won’t make artists redundant because you don’t pay an artist for a picture in the first place, you pay them for their creativity, their ideas, which may eventually result in a picture. You know, their artistry. Too many artists devalue themselves and their livelihood by defining their work as entirely mechanical, entirely defined by their material product. Art is more than just produce. You’d think artists would be the first to say that.
  • rightbyte 4y ago
    The value in artist is their skill in realizing their creativity. I can be creative too but but sure as hell I can't paint it.
• pxoe 4y ago
  it sure as hell will displace artists and wreck art market. people are already choosing to pay couple bucks for an app to get some "art" from a random company that repackages stable diffusion, which was built on unlicensed art, instead of paying an actual artist to create something. and when called out on their choice, people make excuses like 'it's just for fun', 'it's cheaper than paying an artist', 'i don't have money for an actual commission' (and yet, somehow they have enough money to pay for an app). apps are currently actively undercutting and pricing out artists, and it is working for the apps, which also get free promo with every customer that gleefully posts their results. apps can set any price they want on what costs very little to create - there's some compute, storage, etc. - but they can just repackage existing models, train on unlicensed artwork, get all the parts for free, and then price it (and undercut) any way they want. there's a lot of leeway on how aggressively can a service like that price it's "goods" which are basically free to make, and can be made in no time, at enormous scale. there's infinite possibilities for predatory pricing when the base price is approaching zero. actual human artists, who do commission work, which take time to complete, and are worked on one piece at a time, can hardly compete. even an entire market (or a piece of it), full of different artists, hardly can.
  • Vecr 4y ago
    That's only a market problem if they are "dumping", i.e. selling under their price of production in order to gain more market share. Like Uber subsidizing their actual product with VC money and gaining more market share. I think you can sustainably sell the images for pennies as long as you run your own hardware and keep a lookout for unnecessary costs/middlemen (AWS, various paid Google products, etc.)
    • pxoe 4y ago
      Apparently, undercutting (and other forms of predatory pricing) is not a market problem. To reiterate, they're pricing out other artists, and undercutting artwork (such as, commission work) prices, not just the price/cost of generated output (which services can also undercut/predatorily price between their own kind, going as low as 'free' - 'but you'll have to pay us extra for priority/compute/features/whatever'). An artist might be offering commissions for, say, $10. Someone on fiver might do something for $5. An app comes in, and offers you a package of 20 "commissions" for $2. See how that undercuts artists? It's frowned upon even within artist/trade circles when artists do that sort of thing (as overt lowering of prices can affect everybody else in the market), let alone when a random non-entity comes into the market to disrupt it (and that is the intent, when such services specifically advertise their 'art-making' ability), and does so while operating on your own unlicensed (stolen) artwork.
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Wish I could filter this conversation to those who are actually artists by profession. A little hard to hear a whole bunch of non-artists telling them what they should do or feel about this.
  • turtleyacht 4y ago
    That's interesting. HN has a software bent on startups and such. As if programming is one of The Known Ways to create something. Fundamentally, our instructions are executed by a machine to some effect, one of which could be profit. I wonder if artists are having their "software moment": a decade from now (or sooner) they will say, "Adobe Photoshop is the assembly language of digital art; use these AI frameworks/prompts/GPU cloud mix to do X and Y." From that perspective, it's just pragmatic. No one writes assembly unless it's either for passion or practical.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    This is a strange line of thought. I mean, yes we'll get a whole bunch of bullcrap posts from people not involved, but effectively you're instead reducing the conversation to "Lets give the artist their 15 minutes of neo-luddism". Artists are not the first group to fall under the hammer of technology and automation, and they will not be the last. I'm sure most blacksmiths thought themselves artists that worked hard to master a craft after years of work, and now a press stamps out that same work in seconds. This is hitting people hard now because things we think of as distinctly human are now being accomplished by machines (though was this not true in the past?). There are discussions for artists here, but there are plenty more for all of society. Jobs will get replaced and change in form at an ever increasing rate due to technology if trends keep up. Will the rate of technology change job requirements faster than humans can retrain? If it does what are nations and societies going to do about this. Much like the AI safety issues, we need to answer these large scale issues now before artists and programmers are stabbing each other in the streets for breadcrumbs while multitrillionares that own the technology live like gods.
• bilsbie 4y ago
  The valuable art will simply become more performative. We still pay a ton for live music even though we can hear the same music for dirt cheap. We pay a ton for theatre when we can just watch a movie or recorded play. We have adapted to cheap art many times before.
• karmakaze 4y ago
  I wouldn't say thanks to information theory, but rather on human tendency to be bored with repeated styles. It doesn't matter how good the tech is, but if it comes out like Michael Bay movies or anything else that we learn to recognize, people are going to want 'more original' art. The other difference is that the point of art is to express and evoke emotions, it's an open question whether that can be done effectively without having feelings during the process.
  • thenoblesunfish 4y ago
    Bingo - solving the problem of making "good" AI art seems close to solving the problem of making AI human.
    • karmakaze 4y ago
      I wouldn't make that strong a statement anymore. The level of play by AlphaGo/Zero seems to demonstrate creativity and understanding that we would only attribute to humans. That is to say I can't say for certain that emotion couldn't be faked, and we don't know that human emotion is super-special, only that it's complex.
      • galleywest200 4y ago
        Do they demonstrate creativity, or is that just us romanticizing it? Maybe these games really are just reducible to numbers at the end of the day.
        • karmakaze 4y ago
          They do in the sense that choices are so far off what's known good "based on the numbers". How else do we define creativity? With the brute force search tree being roughly 191^lookahead and outcome being life/death of a groups of stones that depend on distantly neighboring influences, it's hard to call it simply computation.
  • ttjjtt 4y ago
• thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  I have a hard time being worried until AI actually becomes comparable to human intelligence (and then art will probably be a lesser concern amongst others). Why? Because art is about the generation of things that people find appealing, which you can automate, but it's as much about am emotional conversation between people (using a "language" words can't replicate), interest in artists as people, and doing novel things. My suspicion is that whatever great thing people can do with AI, in the ways it exists now, people will get bored with it very, very quickly and move on to something they feel is more soulful.
• fatih-erikli 4y ago
  Great artist will steal from AI and leave the 95% of artists redundant.
• hgs3 4y ago
  What's sad about AI is peoples reaction to it. The defensiveness from artists misses the point: Technology should better our lives and free us to pursue our passions. The real problem is under our current economic model, it has the opposite effect. Instead of getting defensive, we should be rethinking the role of our economy. Sadly (and cynically) I suspect we won't see change until AI comes for the CEO's and politicians.