6 ms·

I admit to having had him on my IG for several months together with other portrait photographers as an inspiration and a way to improve my own portrait skills.

I admit to having had him on my IG for several months together with other portrait photographers as an inspiration and a way to improve my own portrait skills. I had no idea. And thinking about this now, I find what he's done brilliant. It shows in a very simple and concise way how far the generative AI has been for months now. And it shows (and proves) this to people who otherwise wouldn't be playing with any diffusion models otherwise. In a way it blows your mind. If that's not art, I don't know what is.

baby 4y ago
It’s interesting because I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.
- eru 4y ago
  > I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future. I don't think one failed prediction invalidates all predictions? We have already partially replaced artists with technology. Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Or see how recorded music removed the need for each bar to have their own performer. In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future.
  - imiric 4y ago
    > Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Has it, though? You can make a point that photorealism in painting has been technically superseded by photography, but we still find such paintings enjoyable and impressive. Sure, there's a smaller market demand from a purely practical perspective, but photorealistic paintings are still popular, and demonstrate the artist's skill and craftsmanship. Technology can never replace art. It can just enhance it, broaden our abilities, and give us new perspectives to enjoy it.
    - eru 4y ago
      I agree, that's why I wrote: In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future. Similar: cars have not completely replaced horses. Horses still exist. People just have a very different relationship with them these days, and we also have much fewer horses (especially per capita) than 100 years ago.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    Honestly I’d say I disagree. I also find it curious there is still so much demand for photography when pretty much every photo you could ever want has already been taken. I can buy anything from Getty images. Have you seen the level of photography on popular photography social media over the last ten years ? It absolutely blows your mind the amount of good content in there. I’m not sure “more” content will necessarily matter? Then there’s authenticity. A photo of a real object, person or event actually matters to people for all sorts of reasons. I’m still going to guess people will still pay artists to paint there portraits in 500 years, and just as we geeks like to argue computers are just better at everything, I’m not sure that’s what matters to people when it comes to art.
    - baby 4y ago
      I mean everybody is a photographer these days, and nobody can tell you the name of a “famous photographer”.
      - ChatGTP 4y ago
        I don’t understand your point sorry ?
- ackbar03 4y ago
  Somebody has to run the AI. And post it on instagram.
- adwn 4y ago
  > [...] I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. A better guess would probably be any job that requires the dexterity, strength, versatility, and sensitivity of human hands (not just one of those, but their combination). Think electricians, or plumbers.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  > I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future. IDK, I think that in the AI circles the idea that this would happen was clear long before it actually became possible. I recall a university workshop probably 20 years ago with a discussion about generative art of various forms (music, visual, etc) - as some genres of computer-generated art were a thing even back the - and the main conclusion about genres of "mainstream" art (which were far beyond our reach at the time) was that the difficult part is "judging taste"; in essence, if we got a reasonably accurate way of evaluating that one song/picture/sculpture/whatever is "better" than the other, then the rest is "just" relatively straightforward engineering. So the consensus prediction already two decades ago was that it's going to happen. And while we don't have that "magic taste function", what we have made is an "indistinguishability" function, which can fulfil a similar role, and is effectively what the "photographer" in this story has used - if a model generates items that are (almost) indistinguishable from "good portrait photography art", however you define that, then it can make "art" that is as good as the rest of it. It can't really go beyond that, because if it accidentally generated something better then the model wouldn't be able to recognize that it's better, only that it's different, and discard that option, so improving on the status quo would require curation from someone with "good taste", but it apparently can beat mediocre photographers by matching the results of good ones.
- imiric 4y ago
  Artists won't be replaced by AI. Human art is about expression, about communicating thoughts and feelings. This current AI generation can only mimic the product, not the intent. Even when we get AGI that can truly be emotional, it still won't replace or compete with human art. There will just be more of it, and we'll learn to appreciate it in different ways. Art is not competitive. Just as new art styles and techniques made by humans didn't replace previous ones, AI won't either. It's just another tool or outlet.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    There may be a dividing line somewhere between "people making art for the sake of it with no regard for its perception by others" and "people making art to be received by others" (whether they're making it only/primarily as a product for others is a different story). The latter ones will definitely compete with AI-generated art because human attention is limited. If there's more stuff to pay attention to (say, a million expressive portraits with a nice-sounding backstory a day), the attention will be divided among those, and the humans will receive less of it.
    - imiric 4y ago
      True, but that's always been the case with any product. There have always been imitations and knock-offs of any genuine product, whenever the technology or means to massively produce it cheaply and quickly becomes available. The effect of this is that it floods the market, a larger section of the population get to enjoy an inferior product (whether they care about that or not), but it doesn't take the genuine goods off the market. In some cases we create regulations around it if it becomes abusive, and companies can sort it out legally if they wish, but people who seek the original product will always have ways to find it. In the case of art, I wouldn't label AI-generated works to be inferior, just different. Once we're able to distinguish them from traditional works done manually by humans, it will eventually settle into its own category, with its own supply and demand. The current problem is that it can pose as something that traditionally takes effort and skill to produce, but we'll find ways around that.
      - 4y ago
- louthy 4y ago
  Artists who do art will never be replaced. Artists who do art for money may well be.
  - baby 4y ago
    Yeah this is what I meant. The job will become much more tool-assisted which will lower the barrier for entry and we then won’t celebrate “artists” like we used to
- imgabe 4y ago
  But they’re not replaced. The guy is an artist using an AI tool to make art. Every new medium encounters resistance from the old guard that it’s “not real art”. This is nothing new.
- palata 4y ago
  Did cameras replace painters? I think art/performances are about what they mean to you. You can listen to a recording of a classical orchestra with a headset at home, but it's not the same experience as going to a live concert. And I don't see a handmade woodwork the same as an industrial one. Context matters a lot. I'm certain artists will find a way to use AI, but it will not remove the need for the artist to make art. Just like I can take photos with my camera, but that does not make them art.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Cameras replaced some painters and changed the reality for others. Change will of course continue for everyone.
  - e1g 4y ago
    If, in an alternative universe, we had no cameras, there would be a lot more painters for portraits, news pieces, books, travel guides, etc. A notable wedding or a summit would have 5-10 artists capturing key moments. So yes, cameras did replace painters in the same way cars replaced horses. Not a total elimination, but close by comparison to what would be.
    - palata 4y ago
      It replaced "utilitarian" (if that's a word) paintings, right? Not "artistic" paintings. Of course, maybe the same people were doing both and had to adapt. My point was about art. I don't think that cameras made it harder to make artistic paintings, did they?
      - e1g 4y ago
        Cameras paved the way to Hollywood and YouTube. The word “artist” also has become much broader in the wake of that fractal innovation, but I posit that if we had no movies or digital media, there would be many more Art Basels everywhere.
- cvalka 4y ago
  In many cases ART is bs.
Applejinx 4y ago
"If that's not art, I don't know what is" Duchamp and Warhol would emphatically, EMPHATICALLY agree with you there. All this is very Warhol. Andy would have loved this. I'm sure some of the surviving Pop artists are trying to think of something cool to do with it. In a way, the coolest Pop thing they can do with it is to sit back and watch literally all the world become artists (in a sense). Everybody will be an artist for fifteen minutes. Warhol had it all figured out.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
  oh, I was very much thinking of Duchamp when writing this
bigDinosaur 4y ago
It's certainly good, but I find zero point in portraits of nonexistent people. Why should they exist? Isn't the point of a portrait to document and expose a facet of real life?
- MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
  question here is "why does a photograph exist". Problem with this kind of question is that the answer is either personal and subjective, or it's an enumeration and an attempt to unite all (or subset) of the subjective reasons into some coherent theory. What You're referring to reminds me of something like event photography. Photos that serve as a souvenir of an event / person / thing. Pictures that can be described as having "moment captured in time" as their raison d'etre. These are indeed unlikely to be replaced anytime soon. But that's only a small subset of what we use photographs for. Lots of photography is about capturing an emmotion, rather than reality. Think of all the marketing (to name the biggest economic factor). If You're making an ad for watches, You don't give a damn if that cool guy wearing them is real or not. If You're a hotel or some travel agency, You are probably going to need "smiling happy couples / families around an infinity pool with a sunny beach as a background". Oh, hej, looks like that's actually a Stable Diffusion prompt...
- hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
  If you believe photography is only a technic for creating a pretty picture to hang on the wall, you’ll be impressed with AI pictures. No one who understands the intent behind photography will be impressed by randomized data crafted to deceive as the real thing. For instance, portraiture is to document people, who they are, their history, culture, etc. What’s so impressive about people that don’t exist? You’re correct.

baby 4y ago

It’s interesting because I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future.

eru 4y ago
> I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future. I don't think one failed prediction invalidates all predictions? We have already partially replaced artists with technology. Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Or see how recorded music removed the need for each bar to have their own performer. In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future.
- imiric 4y ago
  > Have a look at how photography changed painting (eg painting portraits is no longer the staple breadwinner it used to be). Has it, though? You can make a point that photorealism in painting has been technically superseded by photography, but we still find such paintings enjoyable and impressive. Sure, there's a smaller market demand from a purely practical perspective, but photorealistic paintings are still popular, and demonstrate the artist's skill and craftsmanship. Technology can never replace art. It can just enhance it, broaden our abilities, and give us new perspectives to enjoy it.
  - eru 4y ago
    I agree, that's why I wrote: In the past technology just meant that we re-defined art and what it means to be an artist. We will continue to do so in the future. Similar: cars have not completely replaced horses. Horses still exist. People just have a very different relationship with them these days, and we also have much fewer horses (especially per capita) than 100 years ago.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  Honestly I’d say I disagree. I also find it curious there is still so much demand for photography when pretty much every photo you could ever want has already been taken. I can buy anything from Getty images. Have you seen the level of photography on popular photography social media over the last ten years ? It absolutely blows your mind the amount of good content in there. I’m not sure “more” content will necessarily matter? Then there’s authenticity. A photo of a real object, person or event actually matters to people for all sorts of reasons. I’m still going to guess people will still pay artists to paint there portraits in 500 years, and just as we geeks like to argue computers are just better at everything, I’m not sure that’s what matters to people when it comes to art.
  - baby 4y ago
    I mean everybody is a photographer these days, and nobody can tell you the name of a “famous photographer”.
    - ChatGTP 4y ago
      I don’t understand your point sorry ?
ackbar03 4y ago
Somebody has to run the AI. And post it on instagram.
adwn 4y ago
> [...] I always imagined that artists would be the last ones to be replaced by technology. A better guess would probably be any job that requires the dexterity, strength, versatility, and sensitivity of human hands (not just one of those, but their combination). Think electricians, or plumbers.
PeterisP 4y ago
> I guess it really shows that we have no way to predict the future. IDK, I think that in the AI circles the idea that this would happen was clear long before it actually became possible. I recall a university workshop probably 20 years ago with a discussion about generative art of various forms (music, visual, etc) - as some genres of computer-generated art were a thing even back the - and the main conclusion about genres of "mainstream" art (which were far beyond our reach at the time) was that the difficult part is "judging taste"; in essence, if we got a reasonably accurate way of evaluating that one song/picture/sculpture/whatever is "better" than the other, then the rest is "just" relatively straightforward engineering. So the consensus prediction already two decades ago was that it's going to happen. And while we don't have that "magic taste function", what we have made is an "indistinguishability" function, which can fulfil a similar role, and is effectively what the "photographer" in this story has used - if a model generates items that are (almost) indistinguishable from "good portrait photography art", however you define that, then it can make "art" that is as good as the rest of it. It can't really go beyond that, because if it accidentally generated something better then the model wouldn't be able to recognize that it's better, only that it's different, and discard that option, so improving on the status quo would require curation from someone with "good taste", but it apparently can beat mediocre photographers by matching the results of good ones.
imiric 4y ago
Artists won't be replaced by AI. Human art is about expression, about communicating thoughts and feelings. This current AI generation can only mimic the product, not the intent. Even when we get AGI that can truly be emotional, it still won't replace or compete with human art. There will just be more of it, and we'll learn to appreciate it in different ways. Art is not competitive. Just as new art styles and techniques made by humans didn't replace previous ones, AI won't either. It's just another tool or outlet.
- luckylion 4y ago
  There may be a dividing line somewhere between "people making art for the sake of it with no regard for its perception by others" and "people making art to be received by others" (whether they're making it only/primarily as a product for others is a different story). The latter ones will definitely compete with AI-generated art because human attention is limited. If there's more stuff to pay attention to (say, a million expressive portraits with a nice-sounding backstory a day), the attention will be divided among those, and the humans will receive less of it.
  - imiric 4y ago
    True, but that's always been the case with any product. There have always been imitations and knock-offs of any genuine product, whenever the technology or means to massively produce it cheaply and quickly becomes available. The effect of this is that it floods the market, a larger section of the population get to enjoy an inferior product (whether they care about that or not), but it doesn't take the genuine goods off the market. In some cases we create regulations around it if it becomes abusive, and companies can sort it out legally if they wish, but people who seek the original product will always have ways to find it. In the case of art, I wouldn't label AI-generated works to be inferior, just different. Once we're able to distinguish them from traditional works done manually by humans, it will eventually settle into its own category, with its own supply and demand. The current problem is that it can pose as something that traditionally takes effort and skill to produce, but we'll find ways around that.
    - 4y ago
louthy 4y ago
Artists who do art will never be replaced. Artists who do art for money may well be.
- baby 4y ago
  Yeah this is what I meant. The job will become much more tool-assisted which will lower the barrier for entry and we then won’t celebrate “artists” like we used to
imgabe 4y ago
But they’re not replaced. The guy is an artist using an AI tool to make art. Every new medium encounters resistance from the old guard that it’s “not real art”. This is nothing new.
palata 4y ago
Did cameras replace painters? I think art/performances are about what they mean to you. You can listen to a recording of a classical orchestra with a headset at home, but it's not the same experience as going to a live concert. And I don't see a handmade woodwork the same as an industrial one. Context matters a lot. I'm certain artists will find a way to use AI, but it will not remove the need for the artist to make art. Just like I can take photos with my camera, but that does not make them art.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Cameras replaced some painters and changed the reality for others. Change will of course continue for everyone.
- e1g 4y ago
  If, in an alternative universe, we had no cameras, there would be a lot more painters for portraits, news pieces, books, travel guides, etc. A notable wedding or a summit would have 5-10 artists capturing key moments. So yes, cameras did replace painters in the same way cars replaced horses. Not a total elimination, but close by comparison to what would be.
  - palata 4y ago
    It replaced "utilitarian" (if that's a word) paintings, right? Not "artistic" paintings. Of course, maybe the same people were doing both and had to adapt. My point was about art. I don't think that cameras made it harder to make artistic paintings, did they?
    - e1g 4y ago
      Cameras paved the way to Hollywood and YouTube. The word “artist” also has become much broader in the wake of that fractal innovation, but I posit that if we had no movies or digital media, there would be many more Art Basels everywhere.
cvalka 4y ago
In many cases ART is bs.

Applejinx 4y ago

"If that's not art, I don't know what is" Duchamp and Warhol would emphatically, EMPHATICALLY agree with you there. All this is very Warhol. Andy would have loved this. I'm sure some of the surviving Pop artists are trying to think of something cool to do with it. In a way, the coolest Pop thing they can do with it is to sit back and watch literally all the world become artists (in a sense). Everybody will be an artist for fifteen minutes. Warhol had it all figured out.

MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
oh, I was very much thinking of Duchamp when writing this

bigDinosaur 4y ago

It's certainly good, but I find zero point in portraits of nonexistent people. Why should they exist? Isn't the point of a portrait to document and expose a facet of real life?

MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
question here is "why does a photograph exist". Problem with this kind of question is that the answer is either personal and subjective, or it's an enumeration and an attempt to unite all (or subset) of the subjective reasons into some coherent theory. What You're referring to reminds me of something like event photography. Photos that serve as a souvenir of an event / person / thing. Pictures that can be described as having "moment captured in time" as their raison d'etre. These are indeed unlikely to be replaced anytime soon. But that's only a small subset of what we use photographs for. Lots of photography is about capturing an emmotion, rather than reality. Think of all the marketing (to name the biggest economic factor). If You're making an ad for watches, You don't give a damn if that cool guy wearing them is real or not. If You're a hotel or some travel agency, You are probably going to need "smiling happy couples / families around an infinity pool with a sunny beach as a background". Oh, hej, looks like that's actually a Stable Diffusion prompt...
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
If you believe photography is only a technic for creating a pretty picture to hang on the wall, you’ll be impressed with AI pictures. No one who understands the intent behind photography will be impressed by randomized data crafted to deceive as the real thing. For instance, portraiture is to document people, who they are, their history, culture, etc. What’s so impressive about people that don’t exist? You’re correct.