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Partially true, I'm currently working with multiple clients in China where AI generated art is heavily utilised. But we are acutely aware of the limitations of

Partially true, I'm currently working with multiple clients in China where AI generated art is heavily utilised. But we are acutely aware of the limitations of AI, therefore human resources were hired for the purpose of clean up AI art. Given the cost saving potential of AI art generation, I suspect it'll only be a matter of time before it becomes mainstream in the west. Instead of having an "us" against "them" mentality, there might be a future where human artists can work alongside AI to push human creativity to a new level.

chefandy 4y ago
It certainly should not be an us-against-them mentality but artists aren't the ones that need to change their tune. Being both a career artist and a career developer, I'm privy to voices from both professions. Frankly, I find many developers' tenor disrespectful or even sadistic– gleefully proclaimimg and gloating about the supposed obsolescence of artists like they're taking about their favorite sports team beating a long time rival. Firstly, this ignorantly trivializes the value, even commercially, of artistic talent (hint, tool usage pretty a small part of it.) The most important ingredient and biggest time sink in bigger high-level projects is the artistic minds that decide what goes on the screen to begin with... how they're made is an implementation detail. The images these algorithms pump out are dazzling to amateurs, but it's not close to precise, reliable or consistent enough to make content for these projects. People who do this stuff at a high level know that this tech will be relagated to supporting tools-- tools that copy one element manually made to many different contexts, mood board or story board panel generators, photo or compositing filters, etc. for the foreseeable future. Insisting otherwise is like saying github copilot is imminently about to replace developers, as if coding is the only important thing that developers contribute to software projects. Sure, it will eventually replace a lot of lower-end utility developers because the higher level developers will be so much more productive, but that's a very different thing. Speaking of that... Secondly, in the market for the higher-volume, lower artistic effort commodity commercial art, tool mastery IS the big selling point, and that market will take a giant hit. These are people with mortgages, kids approaching college age, maybe carrying for sick relatives or relying on employer-sponsored health care for insulin. And it's not like you're getting laid off and can get another job– your entire category of employment is toast. Someone flamboyantly dancing on your grave in public and smugly telling you to find a new profession is pretty fucking good reason to get defensive or offended.
barrkel 4y ago
AI art is also currently cliched in an anti-novelty way. High-level image composition and low-level style are based on the training set and while you can mix and match and tween between different points in the latent space, genuinely novel stuff doesn't come out; you're stuck within a bounded space. They're kaleidoscopes of kitsch. If you want a seven legged demon with three faces all around its head, a monster that doesn't exist and hasn't been drawn in lots of poses in extant art, you can't reach it with prompts. There's also a "terrain" in the latent space, with valleys of popularity and mountain ranges of novel intersections. Generated images can flip from one valley to the other with a small change in prompt, and it's hard to stay in the intersection. Fine tuning helps alter this terrain - that's mostly what fine tuning does. Rather than teaching genuinely new things, it mostly warps and tweaks what's already there to make it easier to target, at the cost of making everything else a tiny bit harder to get to. Teaching the model new things requires including lots of regularization images to ensure it doesn't forget all the other stuff, which is more expensive than fine tuning or dreambooth.
- wincy 4y ago
  I like your mental model here, I’ve described it to friends as it feels like beach combing looking for the perfect seashell. I have a vague idea of where to go to find nice pictures through prompts but am not totally sure what I’ll find when I get there, a lot of them are weird and broken, but some can be cleaned up, polished and look really nice. I can’t really affect what comes out of the “ocean”, though, like you said.

chefandy 4y ago

It certainly should not be an us-against-them mentality but artists aren't the ones that need to change their tune. Being both a career artist and a career developer, I'm privy to voices from both professions. Frankly, I find many developers' tenor disrespectful or even sadistic– gleefully proclaimimg and gloating about the supposed obsolescence of artists like they're taking about their favorite sports team beating a long time rival. Firstly, this ignorantly trivializes the value, even commercially, of artistic talent (hint, tool usage pretty a small part of it.) The most important ingredient and biggest time sink in bigger high-level projects is the artistic minds that decide what goes on the screen to begin with... how they're made is an implementation detail. The images these algorithms pump out are dazzling to amateurs, but it's not close to precise, reliable or consistent enough to make content for these projects. People who do this stuff at a high level know that this tech will be relagated to supporting tools-- tools that copy one element manually made to many different contexts, mood board or story board panel generators, photo or compositing filters, etc. for the foreseeable future. Insisting otherwise is like saying github copilot is imminently about to replace developers, as if coding is the only important thing that developers contribute to software projects. Sure, it will eventually replace a lot of lower-end utility developers because the higher level developers will be so much more productive, but that's a very different thing. Speaking of that... Secondly, in the market for the higher-volume, lower artistic effort commodity commercial art, tool mastery IS the big selling point, and that market will take a giant hit. These are people with mortgages, kids approaching college age, maybe carrying for sick relatives or relying on employer-sponsored health care for insulin. And it's not like you're getting laid off and can get another job– your entire category of employment is toast. Someone flamboyantly dancing on your grave in public and smugly telling you to find a new profession is pretty fucking good reason to get defensive or offended.

barrkel 4y ago

AI art is also currently cliched in an anti-novelty way. High-level image composition and low-level style are based on the training set and while you can mix and match and tween between different points in the latent space, genuinely novel stuff doesn't come out; you're stuck within a bounded space. They're kaleidoscopes of kitsch. If you want a seven legged demon with three faces all around its head, a monster that doesn't exist and hasn't been drawn in lots of poses in extant art, you can't reach it with prompts. There's also a "terrain" in the latent space, with valleys of popularity and mountain ranges of novel intersections. Generated images can flip from one valley to the other with a small change in prompt, and it's hard to stay in the intersection. Fine tuning helps alter this terrain - that's mostly what fine tuning does. Rather than teaching genuinely new things, it mostly warps and tweaks what's already there to make it easier to target, at the cost of making everything else a tiny bit harder to get to. Teaching the model new things requires including lots of regularization images to ensure it doesn't forget all the other stuff, which is more expensive than fine tuning or dreambooth.

wincy 4y ago
I like your mental model here, I’ve described it to friends as it feels like beach combing looking for the perfect seashell. I have a vague idea of where to go to find nice pictures through prompts but am not totally sure what I’ll find when I get there, a lot of them are weird and broken, but some can be cleaned up, polished and look really nice. I can’t really affect what comes out of the “ocean”, though, like you said.