7 ms·

I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for

I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for them to be approximated by a single click as a vector mashup in an AI generative search space. And without so much as a by your leave. I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong here. When Microsoft, a billion dollar global software firm, can profit by generating these images I must ask if they are the ones that worked for such reward.

hit8run 4y ago
I feel the same. Especially this shitty company that has proved over decades now that they are up to no good.
- alex_suzuki 4y ago
  Post-Ballmer Microsoft is not so bad.
  - k_ 4y ago
    It's still bad enough imo when it comes to respecting copyright / intellectual property, so not a surprise at all they're doing this to illustrators now :/ Not that they're the only ones doing it these days, admittedly.
injidup 4y ago
I was in the "Alte Pinoteke" in Munich, Germany, on Sunday. It is a fabulous gallery full of huge and old master paintings. There was a certain 4 frame series with each frame about 5m long by 3m high. Each was an architectural study of Rome with each being from a different view direction. What struck me was the text written below the paintings which indicated that the artist, after *3 years of work*, had been quoted that he was sick of the job and wished that the process would be now over. 3 years to produce 4 images so that some aristocrat could hang it on his wall and be reminded of his holiday adventure. The distance between this state of the world, where to make a representation of reality (unreality) at the highest levels of fidelity would take years to achieve, versus what is now possible with digital cameras and AI image generation is staggering. Now anybody can create a Mona Lisa and have it hung in their own toilet to admire. Is this a bad thing that ordinary people have access to the tools to create content vs the old way where only the very very rich could afford to pay a master for three years to produce a few images? I can only assume that the same arguments and complaints were raised at every stage a new technology was introduced that lowered the cost and time to produce "content".
- dtech 4y ago
  This seems completely irrelevant. Photo cameras don't instristically rely on painters having existed and continuing to exist to do their thing.
  - michaelscott 4y ago
    This is a separate (but important) issue. The development and effect that tech like this will have on the place of the artist or designer in the future is going to be a similarly seismic shift for the industry, just as the camera and printing press were in their time. This is going to happen more-or-less regardless of what the outcome of the copyright issue is.
  - Dwolb 4y ago
    Counter example: Cameras often do rely on other professions to have existed to do their thing. e.g. Architects who built city buildings, fashion designers who designed clothes, and engineers who built cars. They don’t get paid every time their work gets put on Instagram, etc.
    - jcelerier 4y ago
      I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights : > the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.
      - jodrellblank 4y ago
        France must get a lot of money from all the photos of the Eiffel Tower on the internet. Has anyone been sued/convicted of breaking that and paid reparations?
callmetom 4y ago
Every time I hear this sentiment expressed I wonder about the speaker's familiarity with history and economics. The labor theory of value is almost a thousand years old and has been pretty thoroughly discredited for nearly the same amount of time. History is full of artisans who discovered just how much they overestimated the value of their skill only after someone came along and found a way to do the same thing more efficiently. I wonder how many tears were shed for the buggy whip craftsmen? The argument that this is different because this is art doesn't work either, because the endeavor's value is regularly quantified in USD - despite attempts to frame it as a non-commercial, almost spiritual, activity.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Indeed, this is the nature of progress.
rvz 4y ago
What artists? They will just move to physical art pieces and charge more for that once commissioned to do that. This only affects digital artists; not those who do physical art, sculptures and hard back paintings. HN only tells me that almost none of you have even visited a modern art museum.
- rdemaria 4y ago
  Generative 3D models for 3D printing will be coming soon, I guess...
- 323 4y ago
  It won't be long until they connect AI to a robot with a paintbrush in it's hand.
  - booleandilemma 4y ago
    This is it. If anything you could say the hard part is already solved.
SideQuark 4y ago
The same argument was made when player pianos came out, when records came out, when radio came out, when photography came out, when TV came out, yet there are likely more performers in every one of these categories than ever. Making content production and duplication cheaper enables more people to consume it, requiring more of it, and more people end up working on the new systems. I suspect these tools will be no different.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  Art isn't a quantitative but qualitative activity. Just consuming more media cheaply is hardly a good thing. If anything we already waste too much time on forgettable, generic media as passive consumers at the expense of health or social life. Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars. This was also true for past media like the TV and the criticism of the medium in many ways was correct. TV remains, despite uptick in quality, more generic, intentionally addictive, attention grabbing than say, film. We're now discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens. Critics of automatically produced mass media tend to be right locking backwards.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars. It doesn't really matter what you, me or the public thinks. If you set up a system that constantly forces people to optimize for lowest cost and highest profits without concern for other things, you eventually will end up with a race to the bottom, where content does cost zero monies. And that's the system most of us live in today. There is seemingly nothing else to do about than to join the rat race, otherwise you get left behind and on the streets. You can try to fight it, but eventually capitalism will overrun you, either by force and sneakily. It eats everything around you. Capitalism and globalism was supposed to be the system that forced everyone to be friends via trade, because why would you hurt your trading partner? Instead we got what we have today, which might be less violent, but maybe the same amount of cruel.
ChatGTP 4y ago
I have to agree and to be honest, I was having an objective go of Mid Journey today, honestly, I think it's kind of underwhelming. I know I'm not supposed to say that but it was mixed feelings for me, kind of amazing, but also a lot of regurgitation. The model seems to have it's own style it has trouble escaping for a lot of the images requested. I mean it's amazing that image can be generated from text but honestly, you have to take what you can get, it has it's own "style" you need to just accept what it gives you, even if you prompt it for a long time. There seem to be certain cases where it really excels and others where it just fails really hard. It was interesting to see the way people were trying to use it and how far off the mark it was. However, what really struck me though is how it's such a blatant rip off factory. I asked it to generate some images of musicians I like as sketches, and in some cases it was reproducing famous posters etc and in styles and with similar outlines to those I've seen before. Then the way it takes "styles" of say Ghibli studio and rips it off is just, trash. Most artists just wouldn't do that, they might imitate a style for study, borrow ideas for inspiration (of course) but a professional / respectful artist would develop their own style not to rip someone off so hard. It's quite ridiculous the thing is legal. IMO MS PR must be going into over time convincing us this is all ok. I can't wait till people start ripping off MS product with it and see how they feel. Those who make the argument not allowing this to continue because it's holding back "AI" have really drunk the cool aid. It's fine people research, but to charge money for using other peoples work like that, it's disgusting. I'd say most artists would be ok to lend their art to AI to actually improve and push the boundaries of art itself, but this whole "draw me a scene from x movie, or copy blah's style so I can use it for anything, including commercial purposes", what a load of crap, ha.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  I went through the same exercise recently, and came to a different conclusion. I’m blown away, and I can see how this is the future, and it’s a good thing. While I agree the current state of affairs isn’t great, we have to look past today to where things are going. As far as I can tell tools like Midjourney do enable an iterative creative process. It’s more like painting with a pinball machine than directly with brushes. You have control over the process but only very tenuously. Things can go very wrong with generation that are out of your control, but the control you do have is magical. I used Midjourney to try and generate a character for a project. I started with a source image and a description, and through hours of refining and regeneration, I finally got a character I liked. - Did I steal the character from someone else? No, the character as far as I can tell is a unique one that I arrived at after sifting through thousands of variations. - Did I copy a style? Well no it really, I made a character. I can then apply any style I want to it. The style is orthogonal to my goals of character generation. - Did I get the result through no work of my own? Well I certainly lack the skill to draw the image I landed on. The only technical skill I used was clicking a button and entering text. But that’s the best part! Anyone can do this! The skill I was actually using was my mind’s eye in guiding the iterative prompts, choosing when to blend images, choosing the words and the seed images, etc. That’s a higher-level creative process than moving the brush in the canvas. And you know who will be best at this? Artists! The way I see it, this is a case of the punch card writer being replaced by the compiler. The punch card writer has all the skills necessary to use the compiler to continue producing programs as they were before, but faster. Yes, artists are threatened by this. But they shouldn’t be because they are the most qualified to leverage these tools and to wield them competently. The game used to be to start from a blank canvas and to use an iterative creative process to build a scene that you picture in your head. Nothing has changed about that except now the canvas starts filled. But it still needs to be molded and pushed toward what’s in the kind of the artist. That’s where the artistry comes in.
Iv 4y ago
What has gone wrong is that AI researchers and futurologists have warned for decades that AIs replacing jobs was coming (though everybody was taken by surprise that artists would be first) and that we needed to change our paradigms about labor quickly. We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work. Now incentives are on the other way: everyone tries (understandably) to make it as hard as possible to be replaced but this just leads to a world of bullshit jobs pretending to be useful while the AIs do all the heavy lifting.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work. Completely disagree with this view, especially when it comes to art. This is not advancing society, or art, or anything, it's a freaking knock off factory that's been developed and used for commercial gain. It's not the same as manual loom weavers being replaced, this is a way to steal peoples stuff with little trace or accountability. This is legal trash and MS has plenty of lawyers to make you feel otherwise. I was playing with it today and I couldn't believe the crap I was seeing. Nearly every single known artist is known because they developed a unique style, and worked to develop that style. They didn't just copy other peoples stuff and sell it. To make a machine that just rips off peoples styles and then you charge money for it is freaking lame as and I really hope they get sued hard for it, actually they should be taxed to pay for all the fantasy retirement money you speak of. Do you know that throughout history there has been many, many artists who made counterfeit art works for money? There has been many, many print shops ripping off work etc. This is absolutely no different to automating that same level of theft. In my opinion, what's going on there isn't even really that original. This isn't just about research or advancing anything, because it's not. It takes much and gives back very little. If it was for research, do it in a university, generate some new cool things with it and leave it at that. Having a machine which can just "draw this and do a half ass job at ripping off someone who worked hard to create something cool", what a low blow. Disclaimer: I'm not an artist, so it's not personal, I just now bullshit when I see it, and that thing is bullshit, regardless of the technology behind it.
Shinchy 4y ago
I couldn't agree more.
imgabe 4y ago
Art, in terms of creating a beautiful rendition of some part of the real world or even a fantastical but recognizable scene has not been a big part of the mainstream capital-A Art market for over a hundred years. Nobody cares if you can paint really well or whatever. Art schools churn out thousands of people a year who can do that. Artworks since at least Duchamp have been more about some abstract concept rather than a nice painting. Now if ChatGPT can churn out convincing BS about why taping a banana to a wall or something is a piece of revolutionary art, then artists will really be in trouble.
- toyg 4y ago
  > Artworks since at least Duchamp have been more about some abstract concept Or rather how you can sell some abstract concept to the paying public. The level of bullshittery in the arts is beyond the scale.
- Karellen 4y ago
  Well, if there's one thing that ChatGPT is good at, it's churning out convincing BS.
jstx1 4y ago
I don't think anything has gone wrong. Progress is ruthless and doesn't care whether you've spent your whole life on mastering some skill - if you can be replaced by something better, eventually you will be. It's still kind of sad for the people who are affected though (when/if they are affected? kind of hasn't happened yet).
- ilkke 4y ago
  In this case, at least so far, "better" means faster and cheaper. Personally I don't see AI itself as the problem, in many ways it's just tech optimising for the shitty hole we have created for ourselves. Can't say I'm too optimistic that it will help us step out of that hole and into more meaningful roles , but perhaps it's exactly the jolt we needed. Very related, am I the only one who finds it funny corp lingo for human artists is "content creators", and what AI is spitting out is called "art"?
- Riverheart 4y ago
  "Progress is ruthless and doesn't care whether you've spent your whole life on mastering some skill" Progress isn't ruthless. People are ruthless. People make these decisions, weighing the profits against the ethical concerns and potential impact on society. It's not some platonic form pulling the trigger. I could argue that cloning myself and forcing myselves into indentured servitude to build my space kingdom on Mars is "progress" but perhaps that is more technological progress than societal progress and therefore undesirable. As far as being replaced, we'll all be replaced at some point so what's the end game look like? Is it "progress" for humanity or AI? Are we just manufacturing our own obsolescence?
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I, for one, don't think there will be any shortage of demand for actually good human-created art. I also don't think that much of what's available online is true "art".
k_ 4y ago
I also don't like where this is going, and can't see any way to make it stop. Maybe some of these illustrators may see their job evolve from content creation to AI training through their art / vision.
noindiecred 4y ago
As soon as I saw that part of page I thought, "oh shit." All I can think about these days is all the parts of my job that will be automated away by AI, until there's no longer a reason to employ me.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>When Microsoft, a billion dollar global software firm, can profit by generating these images I must ask if they are the ones that worked for such reward. The vast majority of the image generation crowd are (surprise surprise) adamantly against paying artists for training materials.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
timeon 4y ago
I already though we were overloaded by ad-like visuals everywhere. Now with generating the stuff with click, floodgates are completely open.
anileated 4y ago
By way of OpenAI, Microsoft is attempting the biggest triple-E bait-and-switch in its history—this time not against open-source developers but anyone who was silly enough to share creative work in the open. Worst of all, the majority here seems to be hailing them for this. My take as to what exactly has gone wrong here is that it’s loss of attribution. I think this is quite intentional: given relevant metadata, the network could obviously be instrumented to reflect and credit the artists whose works contributed to the final derivative in excess of some threshold. However, Microsoft would rather the public thought it is impossible—since otherwise they’d be on the hook to pay those artists-turned-unwilling-ghost-content-creators on whose work they are now capitalizing.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  I’m not sure how you track attribution through a billion or so floating point values.
  - tanseydavid 4y ago
    If it were ChatGPT it would trivially attribute Jonas Salk as the inventor of the Polio vaccine, right? That attribution would be a product of the floating point values (weights) of the model, right?
  - toss1 4y ago
    With another billion or n^x pointers and floating point values...?
- toss1 4y ago
  Yes, it would be all good if they just tracked attribution and organized micro-payments and opt-out for the artists they are leveraging. "Here's the list of artists contributing to your work not already in compensated libraries such as Getty. Your bill is $X.XX and 70% of your payment will go to these artists in this proportion [list]". Instead MS is just pocketing it. It isn't like they lack the funds and hardware/software resources to also implement backtracing... Perhaps what should be advocated is use this for idea generation then present it as part of the design brief to get local designers and artists to do a genuine creative work. And give them credit on the published result.
des1nderlase 4y ago
To offer counter perspective, how is this different than any craftmanship being replaced for centuries by mass scale factories and automation. Is this is just the last wave of workforce displacement by automation?
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Steven Zapata has a really good video on Youtube about "the end of art". He offers this analogy: If a factory worker at a car manufacturing plant was handed a screwdriver, and he claimed it was "replacing" him, we would know that he is incorrect; it is a tool designed to make him more productive. But the day they rolled out the robotic assembly lines, however, he was correct: those were designed to replace him. And they did. And now he lives in the Rust Belt with a degraded quality of life and few job prospects because he didn't just lern 2 code.
  - des1nderlase 4y ago
    Yeah, a tool = increased productivity => output = worker time x multiplier a robot = automation => output = machine time (without human) + worker time (part that cannot yet be automated)

hit8run 4y ago

I feel the same. Especially this shitty company that has proved over decades now that they are up to no good.

alex_suzuki 4y ago
Post-Ballmer Microsoft is not so bad.
- k_ 4y ago
  It's still bad enough imo when it comes to respecting copyright / intellectual property, so not a surprise at all they're doing this to illustrators now :/ Not that they're the only ones doing it these days, admittedly.

injidup 4y ago

I was in the "Alte Pinoteke" in Munich, Germany, on Sunday. It is a fabulous gallery full of huge and old master paintings. There was a certain 4 frame series with each frame about 5m long by 3m high. Each was an architectural study of Rome with each being from a different view direction. What struck me was the text written below the paintings which indicated that the artist, after *3 years of work*, had been quoted that he was sick of the job and wished that the process would be now over. 3 years to produce 4 images so that some aristocrat could hang it on his wall and be reminded of his holiday adventure. The distance between this state of the world, where to make a representation of reality (unreality) at the highest levels of fidelity would take years to achieve, versus what is now possible with digital cameras and AI image generation is staggering. Now anybody can create a Mona Lisa and have it hung in their own toilet to admire. Is this a bad thing that ordinary people have access to the tools to create content vs the old way where only the very very rich could afford to pay a master for three years to produce a few images? I can only assume that the same arguments and complaints were raised at every stage a new technology was introduced that lowered the cost and time to produce "content".

dtech 4y ago
This seems completely irrelevant. Photo cameras don't instristically rely on painters having existed and continuing to exist to do their thing.
- michaelscott 4y ago
  This is a separate (but important) issue. The development and effect that tech like this will have on the place of the artist or designer in the future is going to be a similarly seismic shift for the industry, just as the camera and printing press were in their time. This is going to happen more-or-less regardless of what the outcome of the copyright issue is.
- Dwolb 4y ago
  Counter example: Cameras often do rely on other professions to have existed to do their thing. e.g. Architects who built city buildings, fashion designers who designed clothes, and engineers who built cars. They don’t get paid every time their work gets put on Instagram, etc.
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights : > the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.
    - jodrellblank 4y ago
      France must get a lot of money from all the photos of the Eiffel Tower on the internet. Has anyone been sued/convicted of breaking that and paid reparations?

callmetom 4y ago

Every time I hear this sentiment expressed I wonder about the speaker's familiarity with history and economics. The labor theory of value is almost a thousand years old and has been pretty thoroughly discredited for nearly the same amount of time. History is full of artisans who discovered just how much they overestimated the value of their skill only after someone came along and found a way to do the same thing more efficiently. I wonder how many tears were shed for the buggy whip craftsmen? The argument that this is different because this is art doesn't work either, because the endeavor's value is regularly quantified in USD - despite attempts to frame it as a non-commercial, almost spiritual, activity.

satvikpendem 4y ago
Indeed, this is the nature of progress.

rvz 4y ago

What artists? They will just move to physical art pieces and charge more for that once commissioned to do that. This only affects digital artists; not those who do physical art, sculptures and hard back paintings. HN only tells me that almost none of you have even visited a modern art museum.

rdemaria 4y ago
Generative 3D models for 3D printing will be coming soon, I guess...
323 4y ago
It won't be long until they connect AI to a robot with a paintbrush in it's hand.
- booleandilemma 4y ago
  This is it. If anything you could say the hard part is already solved.

SideQuark 4y ago

The same argument was made when player pianos came out, when records came out, when radio came out, when photography came out, when TV came out, yet there are likely more performers in every one of these categories than ever. Making content production and duplication cheaper enables more people to consume it, requiring more of it, and more people end up working on the new systems. I suspect these tools will be no different.

Barrin92 4y ago
Art isn't a quantitative but qualitative activity. Just consuming more media cheaply is hardly a good thing. If anything we already waste too much time on forgettable, generic media as passive consumers at the expense of health or social life. Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars. This was also true for past media like the TV and the criticism of the medium in many ways was correct. TV remains, despite uptick in quality, more generic, intentionally addictive, attention grabbing than say, film. We're now discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens. Critics of automatically produced mass media tend to be right locking backwards.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars. It doesn't really matter what you, me or the public thinks. If you set up a system that constantly forces people to optimize for lowest cost and highest profits without concern for other things, you eventually will end up with a race to the bottom, where content does cost zero monies. And that's the system most of us live in today. There is seemingly nothing else to do about than to join the rat race, otherwise you get left behind and on the streets. You can try to fight it, but eventually capitalism will overrun you, either by force and sneakily. It eats everything around you. Capitalism and globalism was supposed to be the system that forced everyone to be friends via trade, because why would you hurt your trading partner? Instead we got what we have today, which might be less violent, but maybe the same amount of cruel.

ChatGTP 4y ago

I have to agree and to be honest, I was having an objective go of Mid Journey today, honestly, I think it's kind of underwhelming. I know I'm not supposed to say that but it was mixed feelings for me, kind of amazing, but also a lot of regurgitation. The model seems to have it's own style it has trouble escaping for a lot of the images requested. I mean it's amazing that image can be generated from text but honestly, you have to take what you can get, it has it's own "style" you need to just accept what it gives you, even if you prompt it for a long time. There seem to be certain cases where it really excels and others where it just fails really hard. It was interesting to see the way people were trying to use it and how far off the mark it was. However, what really struck me though is how it's such a blatant rip off factory. I asked it to generate some images of musicians I like as sketches, and in some cases it was reproducing famous posters etc and in styles and with similar outlines to those I've seen before. Then the way it takes "styles" of say Ghibli studio and rips it off is just, trash. Most artists just wouldn't do that, they might imitate a style for study, borrow ideas for inspiration (of course) but a professional / respectful artist would develop their own style not to rip someone off so hard. It's quite ridiculous the thing is legal. IMO MS PR must be going into over time convincing us this is all ok. I can't wait till people start ripping off MS product with it and see how they feel. Those who make the argument not allowing this to continue because it's holding back "AI" have really drunk the cool aid. It's fine people research, but to charge money for using other peoples work like that, it's disgusting. I'd say most artists would be ok to lend their art to AI to actually improve and push the boundaries of art itself, but this whole "draw me a scene from x movie, or copy blah's style so I can use it for anything, including commercial purposes", what a load of crap, ha.

ModernMech 4y ago
I went through the same exercise recently, and came to a different conclusion. I’m blown away, and I can see how this is the future, and it’s a good thing. While I agree the current state of affairs isn’t great, we have to look past today to where things are going. As far as I can tell tools like Midjourney do enable an iterative creative process. It’s more like painting with a pinball machine than directly with brushes. You have control over the process but only very tenuously. Things can go very wrong with generation that are out of your control, but the control you do have is magical. I used Midjourney to try and generate a character for a project. I started with a source image and a description, and through hours of refining and regeneration, I finally got a character I liked. - Did I steal the character from someone else? No, the character as far as I can tell is a unique one that I arrived at after sifting through thousands of variations. - Did I copy a style? Well no it really, I made a character. I can then apply any style I want to it. The style is orthogonal to my goals of character generation. - Did I get the result through no work of my own? Well I certainly lack the skill to draw the image I landed on. The only technical skill I used was clicking a button and entering text. But that’s the best part! Anyone can do this! The skill I was actually using was my mind’s eye in guiding the iterative prompts, choosing when to blend images, choosing the words and the seed images, etc. That’s a higher-level creative process than moving the brush in the canvas. And you know who will be best at this? Artists! The way I see it, this is a case of the punch card writer being replaced by the compiler. The punch card writer has all the skills necessary to use the compiler to continue producing programs as they were before, but faster. Yes, artists are threatened by this. But they shouldn’t be because they are the most qualified to leverage these tools and to wield them competently. The game used to be to start from a blank canvas and to use an iterative creative process to build a scene that you picture in your head. Nothing has changed about that except now the canvas starts filled. But it still needs to be molded and pushed toward what’s in the kind of the artist. That’s where the artistry comes in.

Iv 4y ago

What has gone wrong is that AI researchers and futurologists have warned for decades that AIs replacing jobs was coming (though everybody was taken by surprise that artists would be first) and that we needed to change our paradigms about labor quickly. We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work. Now incentives are on the other way: everyone tries (understandably) to make it as hard as possible to be replaced but this just leads to a world of bullshit jobs pretending to be useful while the AIs do all the heavy lifting.

ChatGTP 4y ago
We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work. Completely disagree with this view, especially when it comes to art. This is not advancing society, or art, or anything, it's a freaking knock off factory that's been developed and used for commercial gain. It's not the same as manual loom weavers being replaced, this is a way to steal peoples stuff with little trace or accountability. This is legal trash and MS has plenty of lawyers to make you feel otherwise. I was playing with it today and I couldn't believe the crap I was seeing. Nearly every single known artist is known because they developed a unique style, and worked to develop that style. They didn't just copy other peoples stuff and sell it. To make a machine that just rips off peoples styles and then you charge money for it is freaking lame as and I really hope they get sued hard for it, actually they should be taxed to pay for all the fantasy retirement money you speak of. Do you know that throughout history there has been many, many artists who made counterfeit art works for money? There has been many, many print shops ripping off work etc. This is absolutely no different to automating that same level of theft. In my opinion, what's going on there isn't even really that original. This isn't just about research or advancing anything, because it's not. It takes much and gives back very little. If it was for research, do it in a university, generate some new cool things with it and leave it at that. Having a machine which can just "draw this and do a half ass job at ripping off someone who worked hard to create something cool", what a low blow. Disclaimer: I'm not an artist, so it's not personal, I just now bullshit when I see it, and that thing is bullshit, regardless of the technology behind it.

Shinchy 4y ago

I couldn't agree more.

imgabe 4y ago

Art, in terms of creating a beautiful rendition of some part of the real world or even a fantastical but recognizable scene has not been a big part of the mainstream capital-A Art market for over a hundred years. Nobody cares if you can paint really well or whatever. Art schools churn out thousands of people a year who can do that. Artworks since at least Duchamp have been more about some abstract concept rather than a nice painting. Now if ChatGPT can churn out convincing BS about why taping a banana to a wall or something is a piece of revolutionary art, then artists will really be in trouble.

toyg 4y ago
> Artworks since at least Duchamp have been more about some abstract concept Or rather how you can sell some abstract concept to the paying public. The level of bullshittery in the arts is beyond the scale.
Karellen 4y ago
Well, if there's one thing that ChatGPT is good at, it's churning out convincing BS.

jstx1 4y ago

I don't think anything has gone wrong. Progress is ruthless and doesn't care whether you've spent your whole life on mastering some skill - if you can be replaced by something better, eventually you will be. It's still kind of sad for the people who are affected though (when/if they are affected? kind of hasn't happened yet).

ilkke 4y ago
In this case, at least so far, "better" means faster and cheaper. Personally I don't see AI itself as the problem, in many ways it's just tech optimising for the shitty hole we have created for ourselves. Can't say I'm too optimistic that it will help us step out of that hole and into more meaningful roles , but perhaps it's exactly the jolt we needed. Very related, am I the only one who finds it funny corp lingo for human artists is "content creators", and what AI is spitting out is called "art"?
Riverheart 4y ago
"Progress is ruthless and doesn't care whether you've spent your whole life on mastering some skill" Progress isn't ruthless. People are ruthless. People make these decisions, weighing the profits against the ethical concerns and potential impact on society. It's not some platonic form pulling the trigger. I could argue that cloning myself and forcing myselves into indentured servitude to build my space kingdom on Mars is "progress" but perhaps that is more technological progress than societal progress and therefore undesirable. As far as being replaced, we'll all be replaced at some point so what's the end game look like? Is it "progress" for humanity or AI? Are we just manufacturing our own obsolescence?

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I, for one, don't think there will be any shortage of demand for actually good human-created art. I also don't think that much of what's available online is true "art".

k_ 4y ago

I also don't like where this is going, and can't see any way to make it stop. Maybe some of these illustrators may see their job evolve from content creation to AI training through their art / vision.

noindiecred 4y ago

As soon as I saw that part of page I thought, "oh shit." All I can think about these days is all the parts of my job that will be automated away by AI, until there's no longer a reason to employ me.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>When Microsoft, a billion dollar global software firm, can profit by generating these images I must ask if they are the ones that worked for such reward. The vast majority of the image generation crowd are (surprise surprise) adamantly against paying artists for training materials.

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timeon 4y ago

I already though we were overloaded by ad-like visuals everywhere. Now with generating the stuff with click, floodgates are completely open.

anileated 4y ago

By way of OpenAI, Microsoft is attempting the biggest triple-E bait-and-switch in its history—this time not against open-source developers but anyone who was silly enough to share creative work in the open. Worst of all, the majority here seems to be hailing them for this. My take as to what exactly has gone wrong here is that it’s loss of attribution. I think this is quite intentional: given relevant metadata, the network could obviously be instrumented to reflect and credit the artists whose works contributed to the final derivative in excess of some threshold. However, Microsoft would rather the public thought it is impossible—since otherwise they’d be on the hook to pay those artists-turned-unwilling-ghost-content-creators on whose work they are now capitalizing.

jimbokun 4y ago
I’m not sure how you track attribution through a billion or so floating point values.
- tanseydavid 4y ago
  If it were ChatGPT it would trivially attribute Jonas Salk as the inventor of the Polio vaccine, right? That attribution would be a product of the floating point values (weights) of the model, right?
- toss1 4y ago
  With another billion or n^x pointers and floating point values...?
toss1 4y ago
Yes, it would be all good if they just tracked attribution and organized micro-payments and opt-out for the artists they are leveraging. "Here's the list of artists contributing to your work not already in compensated libraries such as Getty. Your bill is $X.XX and 70% of your payment will go to these artists in this proportion [list]". Instead MS is just pocketing it. It isn't like they lack the funds and hardware/software resources to also implement backtracing... Perhaps what should be advocated is use this for idea generation then present it as part of the design brief to get local designers and artists to do a genuine creative work. And give them credit on the published result.

des1nderlase 4y ago

To offer counter perspective, how is this different than any craftmanship being replaced for centuries by mass scale factories and automation. Is this is just the last wave of workforce displacement by automation?

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Steven Zapata has a really good video on Youtube about "the end of art". He offers this analogy: If a factory worker at a car manufacturing plant was handed a screwdriver, and he claimed it was "replacing" him, we would know that he is incorrect; it is a tool designed to make him more productive. But the day they rolled out the robotic assembly lines, however, he was correct: those were designed to replace him. And they did. And now he lives in the Rust Belt with a degraded quality of life and few job prospects because he didn't just lern 2 code.
- des1nderlase 4y ago
  Yeah, a tool = increased productivity => output = worker time x multiplier a robot = automation => output = machine time (without human) + worker time (part that cannot yet be automated)