8 ms·

I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time. People don't create perfection. If you hired a graphic artist to cr

I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time. People don't create perfection. If you hired a graphic artist to create an image and gave them the same prompt, there would almost certainly be things that you'd want changed. So far, AI seems to do very well with ambiguous prompts that give it enough latitude to "do what it does best". Areas of an image where there is a lot of source images to work from end up great, while areas where there is little - or where there is a lot of variability in the source images - don't do so well. Maybe we'll get to the point where AI generates acceptable (or even excellent) results the first time, every time. Maybe it'll even be soon, but we're not there yet. For now, AI is a very useful tool that can multiply the productivity of professionals and let amateurs fake being entry-level. For now at least, there is a huge gap between "entry level" and "professional". Because of that, we'll need professionals for the foreseeable future.

ivanbakel 3y ago
The article isn't really asking for perfection. I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise (the hallucinated objects being a particularly bad example), and which are a big obstacle to taking AI-generated work seriously. Who cares if the work that AI produces is great, or even good, if it can't stop generating nonsense at the same time? The article even mentions this - you can try to work out the turds, but then productivity takes a big hit, and you're still not guaranteed any consistency. So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, from the perspective of a professional, or even an entry-level?
- echelon 3y ago
  AI tools are in their infancy. People are so scared and threatened that they're calling AI outputs "turds". What's been accomplished thus far has been mostly pure research. Now billions of dollars and human engineering hours are going into this problem to optimize into ease of use, speed, productivity, and utility. In four years these people will all be using AI or they will be out of jobs. Period. Don't use AI => Go extinct like a butter churner.
  - runarberg 3y ago
    Isn’t there something about how getting 90% takes much less effort than the last 10%. I have a feeling AI will never become perfect, there will always be trivial mistakes such as these. There will be fewer of them for sure, and perhaps they‘ll become even less obvious as the technology matures, but there will always be mistakes made by AI which would make a professional deeply embarrassed. Also the notion of “Use AI or loose your job” sound kind of ridiculous when it is considered a tool in the toolbox of a professional. It is like saying that cabinet makers should use routers or be out of job, or statisticians should use Kalman filters or loose their jobs. Sure there are times where an artist will use AI in their $dayjob, there probably already are, but that artists which don’t will loose their job, that is a weird prediction.
    - theLiminator 3y ago
      It's similar to a secretary who refuses to use a computer. Maybe you can find a few odd examples of that working out in the real world, but you're largely going to be out of a job if you don't minimally learn how to use a computer. There are going to be many white collar jobs where if you refuse to use ai tooling, you're going to be an order of magnitude slower than your peers who do use it.
      - runarberg 3y ago
        The job of a secretary does not offer nearly the same creative outlet as the job of a graphic designer or an illustrator, let alone an artist. Also a computer is a way more general purpose tool than AI generation. The job of an illustrator is to return a finalized product, how you get there is less important, and sometimes the quality of the product, the unique style of the artist, etc. is way more important to a customer than the speed in which it is created. The work of a secretary does not have this aspect. I think the secretary analogy does not work in the same way as a woodworker analogy, a clothes maker analogy, or even a programmer analogy.
        theLiminator 3y ago
- l33tman 3y ago
  You've obviously never used the AI image generators :) It takes me 2 minutes to generate a bunch of iterations of an AI image, masking out and replacing elements as I iterate of whatever might be undesired. The result is an image that would have taken weeks to do otherwise (or impossible if I lack the talent).
  - __loam 3y ago
    I hate the self assured smugness everyone in the AI art communities seem to operate with. "You obviously never used the AI image generators passive aggressive smiley face" Like, why are you guys so obnoxious when you talk about this crap?
    - l33tman 3y ago
      Well, have you? Obviously we're both discussing this here and not in an "AI art community" and your tone comes off as trolling at best both in this comment and your original comment. HN is about curiosity and it's prudent to test and try stuff before you bash around - in this case, the AI art tools empowers everybody, and it's for free as well so why not learn it (or not).
      - __loam 3y ago
        Empowering everyone to produce crappy images to flood online spaces used by artists after stealing their work. Truly amazing product we have here.
        laratied 3y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 3y ago
        You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly. This comment here was the most egregious of the ones I saw - we ban accounts that do personal attacks like this. But you've been breaking them in many other places too. That's not ok if you want to keep posting here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here from now on? We'd appreciate it.
- rhdunn 3y ago
  I see AI tools as being useful for getting a first draft of something (art, code, text, etc.) which the artist, writer, etc. can use to edit and refine into a product. It can also be useful for experimenting with/iterating on concepts. For example, getting the tool to create 4-5 concepts you can use for inspiration.
  - mid-kid 3y ago
    Last time I tried github copilot to see if the "using AI to get a draft" workflow worked, I ended up with too many situations where I'd spend time reading and tweaking the generated code, to the point I had essentially rewritten the entire thing. This wasted a lot of time compared to just writing it like I wanted to in the first place. I'm really not sure how to incorporate it into my workflow. I really care about code being correct and looking similar in both style and thought process to the rest of the codebase. People have an easier time reading code that has internal consistency in the way it does things. I wish it worked better, because it's already very good at picking things up from context.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, So, really we're going back to about 1750 at this point and asking the question "What is the point of making this machine that makes mistakes pretty often and is slower than a human" And then 2 centuries later we would answer the same question in "Why the hell would a human do that, a machine is a thousand times faster" It's not going take us another two centuries to go from first machines to automation powerhouse. Hell, I'm not sure if it's going to take us another two years to get past most of these problems.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    If in 200 years we have no human artists left, we won't have any generated art either, because there won't be nothing to learn from.
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  > I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise Sure, I can recognize them. I can't draw at anywhere near the level of the output in the article, though. AI (e.g., MidJourney) lets someone like me, who has neither the ability to create art on my own nor the time/motivation to acquire it, make whatever I need. If I see a "turd", I can regenerate that portion of the image until I'm happy. To put it another way: AI makes different mistakes than an artist would, at any skill level. The strengths and weaknesses of humans and AIs seem to be similar in scale, but they're not in the same areas.
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    >If I see a "turd", I can regenerate that portion of the image until I'm happy. Assuming the API is free, and you have unlimited time, sure. But if the API costs money for each generation, turd-free or full of turds, then at some point the cost of calling the API over and over and throwing away the turds starts to approach the cost -- both in time and money -- of just paying an artist to do it right in one iteration.
    - rcoveson 3y ago
      You're off by so many orders of magnitude that I'm forced to ask if you've looked into text-to-image generation prices versus artist commision prices, as well as completion timeframes. There are a lot of things that AI text-to-image just can't do, like generate really novel or even uncommon configurations of objects that look like they're still obeying the laws of our universe. Plenty of use cases remain, for now, where it's true you do want a human artist. ...But underneath the (expanding) umbrella of things that you can do with AI, you simply cannot compare the costs. Humans are just absurdly expensive and slow compared to GPUs.
- Vvector 3y ago
  Here is more nonsense shadows by AI. Oops, not AI, but famous paintings by famous artists. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-art-of-the-shadow-how-painters-have-gotten-it-wrong-for-centuries/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-art-of-the-shadow-how...
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    Difference is, those people invented art, they didn't copy it without understanding what it is. Also, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can draw shadows because humans figured out how to do it first. Because humans are humans, and they eventually figured out how shadows work. They didn't need to be shown thousands of examples of correct shadows before learning how to do it.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  A lot of people use it as an exploratory tool, they're also quite good at generating base images which you can bring in as the bottom most layer in PS and start iterating upon it. The authors main complaint of turds, a rather crass descriptor, is really more about visual coherence of the overall image many of which are easily fixable if you have even a bare modicum of design/tech skills. The author also seems largely unfamiliar with the most important tools of generative art which are image2image and inpainting. These tools make it relatively trivial to mask certain sections of an image and replace them with the background, insert new objects, you can even use things like controlnet to set up specific perspectives and angles using depth/segmentation maps. You can do fast prototyping, storyboarding, conceptual art, mockups, etc. most of my friends who work in the professional design world are already leveraging these tools.
itake 3y ago
The other huge frustration with AI tools is getting them to "professional" level requires extra professional level time to fix those problems. If those images were created with layers in PS, it is easy to modify and swap out and correct those issues. With generative AI, you could in-paint until it generates a good enough version, but who has time for that. Recently, I generated an image with an extremely malformed hand. After 4 attempts to repaint failed, I gave up and cropped the image out.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  Photoshop supports non-destructive generative layering as part of their new beta in conjunction with Adobe fire fly AI. unfortunately that means you have to install adobe cc...
  - itake 3y ago
    I think it just removes objects, it can't redraw a hand with 6 fingers?
    - GaggiX 3y ago
      Generative Fill can also generate objects, etc... So you can use it to fix a hand.
      - itake 3y ago
        I tried replacing the hand with a hand holding a bottle, so at least Stable Diffusion needs to draw less fingers, but it still looked off (just like how there are weird angles and lighting in the above blog with objects in the room).
jordanpg 3y ago
> I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time. The more interesting part of this for me is the degree to which this intermediate conclusion has translated into: because it's not perfect now, it therefore cannot replace humans at doing X. In fact, I expect LLMs, etc. to improve at a breathtaking pace, and whatever nitpicking "turds" people find with them now, will be trivially fixed. I agree with your overall point that professionals will still be needed in some, perhaps changed, capacity for some time to come. But if you think your job, as it exists today, is safe because LLMs, etc. can't do it exactly perfectly right now, then there is probably a failure of imagination happening.

ivanbakel 3y ago

The article isn't really asking for perfection. I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise (the hallucinated objects being a particularly bad example), and which are a big obstacle to taking AI-generated work seriously. Who cares if the work that AI produces is great, or even good, if it can't stop generating nonsense at the same time? The article even mentions this - you can try to work out the turds, but then productivity takes a big hit, and you're still not guaranteed any consistency. So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, from the perspective of a professional, or even an entry-level?

echelon 3y ago
AI tools are in their infancy. People are so scared and threatened that they're calling AI outputs "turds". What's been accomplished thus far has been mostly pure research. Now billions of dollars and human engineering hours are going into this problem to optimize into ease of use, speed, productivity, and utility. In four years these people will all be using AI or they will be out of jobs. Period. Don't use AI => Go extinct like a butter churner.
- runarberg 3y ago
  Isn’t there something about how getting 90% takes much less effort than the last 10%. I have a feeling AI will never become perfect, there will always be trivial mistakes such as these. There will be fewer of them for sure, and perhaps they‘ll become even less obvious as the technology matures, but there will always be mistakes made by AI which would make a professional deeply embarrassed. Also the notion of “Use AI or loose your job” sound kind of ridiculous when it is considered a tool in the toolbox of a professional. It is like saying that cabinet makers should use routers or be out of job, or statisticians should use Kalman filters or loose their jobs. Sure there are times where an artist will use AI in their $dayjob, there probably already are, but that artists which don’t will loose their job, that is a weird prediction.
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    It's similar to a secretary who refuses to use a computer. Maybe you can find a few odd examples of that working out in the real world, but you're largely going to be out of a job if you don't minimally learn how to use a computer. There are going to be many white collar jobs where if you refuse to use ai tooling, you're going to be an order of magnitude slower than your peers who do use it.
    - runarberg 3y ago
      The job of a secretary does not offer nearly the same creative outlet as the job of a graphic designer or an illustrator, let alone an artist. Also a computer is a way more general purpose tool than AI generation. The job of an illustrator is to return a finalized product, how you get there is less important, and sometimes the quality of the product, the unique style of the artist, etc. is way more important to a customer than the speed in which it is created. The work of a secretary does not have this aspect. I think the secretary analogy does not work in the same way as a woodworker analogy, a clothes maker analogy, or even a programmer analogy.
      - theLiminator 3y ago
l33tman 3y ago
You've obviously never used the AI image generators :) It takes me 2 minutes to generate a bunch of iterations of an AI image, masking out and replacing elements as I iterate of whatever might be undesired. The result is an image that would have taken weeks to do otherwise (or impossible if I lack the talent).
- __loam 3y ago
  I hate the self assured smugness everyone in the AI art communities seem to operate with. "You obviously never used the AI image generators passive aggressive smiley face" Like, why are you guys so obnoxious when you talk about this crap?
  - l33tman 3y ago
    Well, have you? Obviously we're both discussing this here and not in an "AI art community" and your tone comes off as trolling at best both in this comment and your original comment. HN is about curiosity and it's prudent to test and try stuff before you bash around - in this case, the AI art tools empowers everybody, and it's for free as well so why not learn it (or not).
    - __loam 3y ago
      Empowering everyone to produce crappy images to flood online spaces used by artists after stealing their work. Truly amazing product we have here.
      - laratied 3y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 3y ago
        You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly. This comment here was the most egregious of the ones I saw - we ban accounts that do personal attacks like this. But you've been breaking them in many other places too. That's not ok if you want to keep posting here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here from now on? We'd appreciate it.
rhdunn 3y ago
I see AI tools as being useful for getting a first draft of something (art, code, text, etc.) which the artist, writer, etc. can use to edit and refine into a product. It can also be useful for experimenting with/iterating on concepts. For example, getting the tool to create 4-5 concepts you can use for inspiration.
- mid-kid 3y ago
  Last time I tried github copilot to see if the "using AI to get a draft" workflow worked, I ended up with too many situations where I'd spend time reading and tweaking the generated code, to the point I had essentially rewritten the entire thing. This wasted a lot of time compared to just writing it like I wanted to in the first place. I'm really not sure how to incorporate it into my workflow. I really care about code being correct and looking similar in both style and thought process to the rest of the codebase. People have an easier time reading code that has internal consistency in the way it does things. I wish it worked better, because it's already very good at picking things up from context.
pixl97 3y ago
>So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, So, really we're going back to about 1750 at this point and asking the question "What is the point of making this machine that makes mistakes pretty often and is slower than a human" And then 2 centuries later we would answer the same question in "Why the hell would a human do that, a machine is a thousand times faster" It's not going take us another two centuries to go from first machines to automation powerhouse. Hell, I'm not sure if it's going to take us another two years to get past most of these problems.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  If in 200 years we have no human artists left, we won't have any generated art either, because there won't be nothing to learn from.
Ancapistani 3y ago
> I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise Sure, I can recognize them. I can't draw at anywhere near the level of the output in the article, though. AI (e.g., MidJourney) lets someone like me, who has neither the ability to create art on my own nor the time/motivation to acquire it, make whatever I need. If I see a "turd", I can regenerate that portion of the image until I'm happy. To put it another way: AI makes different mistakes than an artist would, at any skill level. The strengths and weaknesses of humans and AIs seem to be similar in scale, but they're not in the same areas.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  >If I see a "turd", I can regenerate that portion of the image until I'm happy. Assuming the API is free, and you have unlimited time, sure. But if the API costs money for each generation, turd-free or full of turds, then at some point the cost of calling the API over and over and throwing away the turds starts to approach the cost -- both in time and money -- of just paying an artist to do it right in one iteration.
  - rcoveson 3y ago
    You're off by so many orders of magnitude that I'm forced to ask if you've looked into text-to-image generation prices versus artist commision prices, as well as completion timeframes. There are a lot of things that AI text-to-image just can't do, like generate really novel or even uncommon configurations of objects that look like they're still obeying the laws of our universe. Plenty of use cases remain, for now, where it's true you do want a human artist. ...But underneath the (expanding) umbrella of things that you can do with AI, you simply cannot compare the costs. Humans are just absurdly expensive and slow compared to GPUs.
Vvector 3y ago
Here is more nonsense shadows by AI. Oops, not AI, but famous paintings by famous artists. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-art-of-the-shadow-how-painters-have-gotten-it-wrong-for-centuries/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-art-of-the-shadow-how...
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  Difference is, those people invented art, they didn't copy it without understanding what it is. Also, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can draw shadows because humans figured out how to do it first. Because humans are humans, and they eventually figured out how shadows work. They didn't need to be shown thousands of examples of correct shadows before learning how to do it.
throwaway675309 3y ago
A lot of people use it as an exploratory tool, they're also quite good at generating base images which you can bring in as the bottom most layer in PS and start iterating upon it. The authors main complaint of turds, a rather crass descriptor, is really more about visual coherence of the overall image many of which are easily fixable if you have even a bare modicum of design/tech skills. The author also seems largely unfamiliar with the most important tools of generative art which are image2image and inpainting. These tools make it relatively trivial to mask certain sections of an image and replace them with the background, insert new objects, you can even use things like controlnet to set up specific perspectives and angles using depth/segmentation maps. You can do fast prototyping, storyboarding, conceptual art, mockups, etc. most of my friends who work in the professional design world are already leveraging these tools.

itake 3y ago

The other huge frustration with AI tools is getting them to "professional" level requires extra professional level time to fix those problems. If those images were created with layers in PS, it is easy to modify and swap out and correct those issues. With generative AI, you could in-paint until it generates a good enough version, but who has time for that. Recently, I generated an image with an extremely malformed hand. After 4 attempts to repaint failed, I gave up and cropped the image out.

throwaway675309 3y ago
Photoshop supports non-destructive generative layering as part of their new beta in conjunction with Adobe fire fly AI. unfortunately that means you have to install adobe cc...
- itake 3y ago
  I think it just removes objects, it can't redraw a hand with 6 fingers?
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    Generative Fill can also generate objects, etc... So you can use it to fix a hand.
    - itake 3y ago
      I tried replacing the hand with a hand holding a bottle, so at least Stable Diffusion needs to draw less fingers, but it still looked off (just like how there are weird angles and lighting in the above blog with objects in the room).

jordanpg 3y ago

> I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time. The more interesting part of this for me is the degree to which this intermediate conclusion has translated into: because it's not perfect now, it therefore cannot replace humans at doing X. In fact, I expect LLMs, etc. to improve at a breathtaking pace, and whatever nitpicking "turds" people find with them now, will be trivially fixed. I agree with your overall point that professionals will still be needed in some, perhaps changed, capacity for some time to come. But if you think your job, as it exists today, is safe because LLMs, etc. can't do it exactly perfectly right now, then there is probably a failure of imagination happening.