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Everyone overlooks the fact that it will still take someone (i.e. a graphic artist) to produce great AI imagery. First, AI generated art is random and disposab

by radley 3y ago

Everyone overlooks the fact that it will still take someone (i.e. a graphic artist) to produce great AI imagery. First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it. Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing images. At the very least, you can seed the AI with a paid graphic artist's work (seed-based AI images can be copyrighted). But that artist will do it better than your unpaid intern.

prox 3y ago
Also people cannot judge great art or imagery. Unless you have had the training. But the average person? Nope. You can tell what you LIKE but that’s not the same.
- charlieyu1 3y ago
  I don’t have much training but it is not that difficult to spot AI arts which is pretty repetitive. The first couple are awesome but it gets old really fast.
The_Blade 3y ago
sewing machine
karaterobot 3y ago
Mmm, I don't know about this. At the very least AI lowers the bar for how talented a graphic artist needs to be to produce professional work, which means it'll be easier to undercut them, which means it'll get much harder to make a living as a graphic designer. It amounts to the same thing as killing off the profession, as seen from the perspective of someone in the profession as opposed to someone without skin in the game. It's like saying push-button elevators didn't hurt the profession of elevator operator, because somebody's still got to push those buttons.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  It also raises the bar of what's possible. What counts as "professional level" changes each time some new technique emerges. A skilled artist will always be better than a random person. The visual entertainment "supply" is not limited by the current state of tools. It's always limited by the skills of the top crop. Professionals are always ahead and hard to come by. The industry's self-regulating mechanism is novelty; what is abundant becomes fundamentally uninteresting and dies.
- danenania 3y ago
  I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will shift value away from technical proficiency and toward creativity and taste. Implementation of an idea/vision will be commoditized, but having a great idea, a unique insight, the taste and ability to identify top-tier work will still be highly valuable. This could well remain true post-AGI. In graphic arts, the overlap between people with technical proficiency and vision/taste is probably quite high, but it's not one-to-one. There are people with excellent taste who can identify great art or design when they see it, and who can perhaps imagine incredible masterpieces in their minds, but cannot draw a convincing stick figure. On the other side, there are people who can expertly make someone else's concept real, but can't come up with a compelling concept themselves. AI will be great for the former, and bad for the latter (or at least force the latter to adapt). Whether this will have the effect of concentrating wealth or distributing it more widely strikes me as a very difficult question. It may be devastating for certain professions, but could also enable a whole new class of entrepreneurs. I could see it going either way, or the two effects may cancel each other out and economic equality stays about where it is. We're in the realm of complex systems here, so I wouldn't put much stock in anyone's prediction.
  - bsder 3y ago
    > I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will shift value away from technical proficiency and toward creativity and taste. The problem is that an artist still needs to eat in the 10-20 years it takes to develop "creativity and taste". What AI will do/is doing is knock out the entry-level jobs. If you can't train humans on the entry-level, you will eventually have no experienced people.
michaelmrose 3y ago
> Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing images. No. First off trademarks exist and they found that work done solely by the machine couldn't be treated as a work for hire copyrighted by the machine and assigned to the operator. There is no reason to believe that work couldn't be treated directly as copyrighted by the human operator who has creative input nor is the matter with the images used to train the model truly settled. >First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it. You can already get variations on a them and text driven modification eg make the blank a blank or make the blank blanker.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  Trademarks are different from copyright. Random variations aren't interesting, they just make something abundant even more abundant and secondary. Unless you have a model with sufficient intelligence that can create something conceptually original (at which point we're all fucked, not just artists or programmers), it's not going to fly. Text driven modifications imply conceptual human input; besides, they are inherently worse than higher-order input, just like text to image alone is worthless for anything meaningful.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    There exist systems where you can describe not only initial scenes but successive textual modifications to existing images and furthermore variations aren't random. Successive selections are a way to zero in on a concept. You are about a year behind the state of the art.
    - orbital-decay 3y ago
      AKA tell me you haven't spent time with diffusion models, without telling it :) I actually did figure out what works and what doesn't in real artistic use. Which is the entire point of the article in OP which nobody seem to have read - text doesn't work well beyond the basic use or amateur play, regardless of it being the initial prompt or editing; you need sketching and references (and actual skill) to do real work. I don't think anybody's using available methods of textual modifications for anything complex - they are cumbersome and unreliable, even worse than textual prompts. In fact, I haven't seen anyone using them at all. Besides the implementation details, natural language just doesn't have enough semantic density and precision to give artistic directions, even for a human or AGI. That's a fundamental limitation. Higher order guidance, style transfer, and compositing is how it's done.
charlieyu1 3y ago
I agree with you, but the main problem is that illustrators are under-appreciated. We are in a world where management with no technical knowledge are having too much power and stealing paychecks.
- radley 3y ago
  I totally know. I started as an illustrator: https://radleymarx.com/work/elemental/ https://radleymarx.com/work/elemental/
soligern 3y ago
AI generated art may be disposable but it certainly is very, very good. Midjourney makes plenty of impeccable art and photorealistic images that have no flaws. Also, even if there are flaws a week with some YouTube videos can teach anyone how to fix them, you don’t need someone with five years of deep experience.
ranguna 3y ago
> Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it. Checkout confyui, it has an incredible amount of composability that allows you to generate new images based on others. Like image to image but on steroids. For example, you can generate a character sheet and use it to generate the same characters on different poses using controlnet. Or you can have a base image for an object and use that to generate the same object from different angles and/or different colours etc.

by radley 3y ago

prox 3y ago

Also people cannot judge great art or imagery. Unless you have had the training. But the average person? Nope. You can tell what you LIKE but that’s not the same.

charlieyu1 3y ago
I don’t have much training but it is not that difficult to spot AI arts which is pretty repetitive. The first couple are awesome but it gets old really fast.

The_Blade 3y ago

sewing machine

karaterobot 3y ago

Mmm, I don't know about this. At the very least AI lowers the bar for how talented a graphic artist needs to be to produce professional work, which means it'll be easier to undercut them, which means it'll get much harder to make a living as a graphic designer. It amounts to the same thing as killing off the profession, as seen from the perspective of someone in the profession as opposed to someone without skin in the game. It's like saying push-button elevators didn't hurt the profession of elevator operator, because somebody's still got to push those buttons.

orbital-decay 3y ago
It also raises the bar of what's possible. What counts as "professional level" changes each time some new technique emerges. A skilled artist will always be better than a random person. The visual entertainment "supply" is not limited by the current state of tools. It's always limited by the skills of the top crop. Professionals are always ahead and hard to come by. The industry's self-regulating mechanism is novelty; what is abundant becomes fundamentally uninteresting and dies.
danenania 3y ago
I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will shift value away from technical proficiency and toward creativity and taste. Implementation of an idea/vision will be commoditized, but having a great idea, a unique insight, the taste and ability to identify top-tier work will still be highly valuable. This could well remain true post-AGI. In graphic arts, the overlap between people with technical proficiency and vision/taste is probably quite high, but it's not one-to-one. There are people with excellent taste who can identify great art or design when they see it, and who can perhaps imagine incredible masterpieces in their minds, but cannot draw a convincing stick figure. On the other side, there are people who can expertly make someone else's concept real, but can't come up with a compelling concept themselves. AI will be great for the former, and bad for the latter (or at least force the latter to adapt). Whether this will have the effect of concentrating wealth or distributing it more widely strikes me as a very difficult question. It may be devastating for certain professions, but could also enable a whole new class of entrepreneurs. I could see it going either way, or the two effects may cancel each other out and economic equality stays about where it is. We're in the realm of complex systems here, so I wouldn't put much stock in anyone's prediction.
- bsder 3y ago
  > I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will shift value away from technical proficiency and toward creativity and taste. The problem is that an artist still needs to eat in the 10-20 years it takes to develop "creativity and taste". What AI will do/is doing is knock out the entry-level jobs. If you can't train humans on the entry-level, you will eventually have no experienced people.

michaelmrose 3y ago

> Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing images. No. First off trademarks exist and they found that work done solely by the machine couldn't be treated as a work for hire copyrighted by the machine and assigned to the operator. There is no reason to believe that work couldn't be treated directly as copyrighted by the human operator who has creative input nor is the matter with the images used to train the model truly settled. >First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it. You can already get variations on a them and text driven modification eg make the blank a blank or make the blank blanker.

orbital-decay 3y ago
Trademarks are different from copyright. Random variations aren't interesting, they just make something abundant even more abundant and secondary. Unless you have a model with sufficient intelligence that can create something conceptually original (at which point we're all fucked, not just artists or programmers), it's not going to fly. Text driven modifications imply conceptual human input; besides, they are inherently worse than higher-order input, just like text to image alone is worthless for anything meaningful.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  There exist systems where you can describe not only initial scenes but successive textual modifications to existing images and furthermore variations aren't random. Successive selections are a way to zero in on a concept. You are about a year behind the state of the art.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    AKA tell me you haven't spent time with diffusion models, without telling it :) I actually did figure out what works and what doesn't in real artistic use. Which is the entire point of the article in OP which nobody seem to have read - text doesn't work well beyond the basic use or amateur play, regardless of it being the initial prompt or editing; you need sketching and references (and actual skill) to do real work. I don't think anybody's using available methods of textual modifications for anything complex - they are cumbersome and unreliable, even worse than textual prompts. In fact, I haven't seen anyone using them at all. Besides the implementation details, natural language just doesn't have enough semantic density and precision to give artistic directions, even for a human or AGI. That's a fundamental limitation. Higher order guidance, style transfer, and compositing is how it's done.

charlieyu1 3y ago

I agree with you, but the main problem is that illustrators are under-appreciated. We are in a world where management with no technical knowledge are having too much power and stealing paychecks.

radley 3y ago
I totally know. I started as an illustrator: https://radleymarx.com/work/elemental/ https://radleymarx.com/work/elemental/

soligern 3y ago

AI generated art may be disposable but it certainly is very, very good. Midjourney makes plenty of impeccable art and photorealistic images that have no flaws. Also, even if there are flaws a week with some YouTube videos can teach anyone how to fix them, you don’t need someone with five years of deep experience.

ranguna 3y ago

> Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it. Checkout confyui, it has an incredible amount of composability that allows you to generate new images based on others. Like image to image but on steroids. For example, you can generate a character sheet and use it to generate the same characters on different poses using controlnet. Or you can have a base image for an object and use that to generate the same object from different angles and/or different colours etc.