6 ms·

The difference between (A) software engineers reacting to AI models and systems for programming and (B) artists (whether it's painters, musicians or otherwise)

by Palmik 2y ago

The difference between (A) software engineers reacting to AI models and systems for programming and (B) artists (whether it's painters, musicians or otherwise) reacting to AI models for generating images, music, etc. is very interesting. I wonder what's the reason.

suprjami 2y ago
Because code either works or it doesn't. Nobody is replacing our entire income stream with an LLM. You also need a knowledge of code to instruct an LLM to generate decent code, and even then it's not always perfect. Meanwhile plenty of people are using free/cheap image generation and going "good enough". Now they don't need to pay a graphic artist or a stock photo licence Any layperson can describe what they want a picture to look like so the barrier to entry and successful exit is a lot lower for LLM image generation than for LLM code generation.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  > "Meanwhile plenty of people are using free/cheap image generation and going "good enough". Now they don't need to pay a graphic artist or a stock photo licence" and getting sandwich photos of ham blending into human fingers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/1f8bvb8/my_local_sandwich_shop_using_ai_images_for_ads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/1f8bvb8/my_l...
  - saurik 2y ago
    And yet, even knowing what I was looking for, I didn't see it long enough that I guessed I misunderstood and swiped to the second image, where it was pointed out specifically. Even if I had noticed myself--presumably because I was staring at it for way too long in the restaurant--I can't imagine I would have guessed what was going on, BUT EVEN THEN it just wouldn't have mattered... clearly, this is more than merely a "good enough" image.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  At best it's a prototype and concept generator. It would have to yield assets with layers that can be exported by an illustration or bitmap tool of choice. AI generated images are almost completely useless as-is.
  - suprjami 2y ago
    I agree there are plenty of images with garbled text and hands with 7 fingers, but text to image has freely available generators which create almost perfect images for some prompts. Certainly good enough to replace an actor holding a product, a stock photo, and often a stylised design.
rty32 2y ago
Coding Assistants are not good enough (yet). Inline suggestions and chats are incredibly helpful and boost productivity (and only to those who know to use them well), but that's as fast as they go today. If they can take a Jira ticket, debug the code, create a patch for a large codebase and understand and respect all the workarounds in a legacy codebase, I would have a problem with it.
- xvector 2y ago
  Except they can't do the equivalent for art yet either, and I am fairly familiar with the state of image diffusion today. I've commissioned tens of thousands of dollars in art, and spent many hundreds of hours working with Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Flux. What all the generators are missing is intentionality in art. They can generate something that looks great at surface level, but doesn't make sense when you look at the details. Why is a particular character wearing a certain bracelet? Why do the windows on that cottage look a certain way? What does a certain engraving mean? Which direction is a character looking, and why? The diffusers do not understand what they are generating, so they just generates what "looks right." Often this results in art that looks pretty but has no deeper logic, world building, meaning, etc. And of course, image generators cannot handle the client-artist relationship as well (even LLMs cannot), because it requires an understanding of what the customer wants and what emotion they want to convey with the piece they're commissioning. So - I rely on artists for art I care about (art I will hang on my walls), and image generators for throwaway work (such as weekly D&D campaign images.)
  - rty32 2y ago
    Of course the "art" art -- the part that is all about human creativity -- will always be there. But lots of people in the art business aren't doing that. If you didn't have midjourney etc, what would you be doing for the throwaway work? Learn to design the stuff yourself, hire someone to do it on Upwork, or just not do it all? Some money likely will exchange hands there.
    - xvector 2y ago
viraptor 2y ago
Is it really? I know people who love using LLMs, people who are allergic to the idea of even taking about AI usability and lots of others in between. Same with artists hating the idea, artists who spend hours crafting very specific things with SD, and many in between. I'm not sure I can really point out a big difference here. Maybe the artists are more skewed towards not liking AI since they work with medium that's not digital in the first place, but the range of responses really feels close.
crimsoneer 2y ago
I mean, it's supply and demand right. - There is a big demand for really complex software development, and an LLM can't do that alone. So software devs have to do lots of busywork, and like the opportunity to be augmented by AI - Conversely, there is a huge demand for not very high level art. - eg, lots of people want a custom logo or a little jingle, but no many people want to hire a concert pianist or comission the next Salvadore Dali. So most artists spend a lot of time doing a lot of low level work to pay the bills, while software devs spend a lot of time doing low level code monkey work so they can get to the creative part of their job.
aithrowaway1987 2y ago
Look at who the tools are marketed towards. Writing software involves a lot of tedium, eye strain, and frustration, even for experts who have put in a lot of hours practicing, so LLMs are marketed to help developers make their jobs easier. This is not the case for art or music generators: they are marketed towards (and created by) laypeople with who want generic content and don't care about human artists. These systems are a significant burden on productivity (and fatal burden on creativity) if you are an honest illustrator or musician. Another perspective: a lot of the most useful LLM codegen is not asking the LLM to solve a tricky problem, but rather to translate and refine a somewhat loose English-language solution into a more precise JavaScript solution (or whatever), including a large bag of memorized tricks around sorting, regexes, etc. It is more "science than art," and for a sufficiently precise English prompt there is even a plausible set of optimal solutions. The LLM does not have to "understand" the prompt or rely on plagiarism to give a good answer. (Although GPT-3.5 was a horrific F# plagiarist... I don't like LLM codegen but it is far more defensible than music generation) This is not the case with art or music generators: it makes no sense to describe them as "English to song" translators, and the only "optimal" solutions are the plagiarized / interpolated stuff the human raters most preferred. They clearly don't understand what they are drawing, nor do they understand what melodies are. Their output is either depressing content slop or suspiciously familiar. And their creators have filled the tech community with insultingly stupid propaganda like "they learn art just like human artists do." No wonder artists are mad!
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  What you say may be true about the simplest workflow: enter a prompt and get one or more finished images. But many people use diffusion models in a much more interactive way, doing much more of the editing by hand. The simplest case is to erase part of a generated image, and prompt to infill. But there are people who spend hours to get a single image where they want it.
  - eropple 2y ago
    This is true, and there's some really cool stuff there, but that's not who most of this is marketed at. Small wonder there's backlash from artists and people who appreciate artists when the stated value proposition is "render artists unemployed".
tcdent 2y ago
It's just gatekeeping. Artists put a ton of time into education and refining their vision inside the craft. Amateur efforts to produce compelling work always look amateur. With augmentation, suddenly the "real" artists aren't as differentiated. The whole conversation is obviously extremely skewed toward digital art, and the ones talking about it most visibly are the digital artists. No abstract painter thinks AI is coming for their occupation or cares wether it is easier to create anime dreamscapes this year or the next.
denizener 2y ago
I love art and code, IMO is because Cursor is really good and AI art is not that good. There isn't a good metaphor for the problem with AI art. I would say it is like some kind of chocolate cake that the first few bites seem like the best cake you have ever had and then progressive bites become more and more shit until you stop even considering eating it. Then at some point even the thought of the cake makes you want to puke. I say this as someone who thought we reached the art singularity in December 2022. I have no philosophical or moral problem with AI art. It just kind of sucks. Cursor/Sonnet on the other hand just blew my mind earlier today.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  There are really good models for AI art, if people care. I think that AI is better at making an image from start to finish than making some software from start to finish. And I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet myself.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  AI art is an oxymoron. It will never give me chills or make me cry.

by Palmik 2y ago

suprjami 2y ago

Because code either works or it doesn't. Nobody is replacing our entire income stream with an LLM. You also need a knowledge of code to instruct an LLM to generate decent code, and even then it's not always perfect. Meanwhile plenty of people are using free/cheap image generation and going "good enough". Now they don't need to pay a graphic artist or a stock photo licence Any layperson can describe what they want a picture to look like so the barrier to entry and successful exit is a lot lower for LLM image generation than for LLM code generation.

jodrellblank 2y ago
> "Meanwhile plenty of people are using free/cheap image generation and going "good enough". Now they don't need to pay a graphic artist or a stock photo licence" and getting sandwich photos of ham blending into human fingers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/1f8bvb8/my_local_sandwich_shop_using_ai_images_for_ads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/1f8bvb8/my_l...
- saurik 2y ago
  And yet, even knowing what I was looking for, I didn't see it long enough that I guessed I misunderstood and swiped to the second image, where it was pointed out specifically. Even if I had noticed myself--presumably because I was staring at it for way too long in the restaurant--I can't imagine I would have guessed what was going on, BUT EVEN THEN it just wouldn't have mattered... clearly, this is more than merely a "good enough" image.
datavirtue 2y ago
At best it's a prototype and concept generator. It would have to yield assets with layers that can be exported by an illustration or bitmap tool of choice. AI generated images are almost completely useless as-is.
- suprjami 2y ago
  I agree there are plenty of images with garbled text and hands with 7 fingers, but text to image has freely available generators which create almost perfect images for some prompts. Certainly good enough to replace an actor holding a product, a stock photo, and often a stylised design.

rty32 2y ago

Coding Assistants are not good enough (yet). Inline suggestions and chats are incredibly helpful and boost productivity (and only to those who know to use them well), but that's as fast as they go today. If they can take a Jira ticket, debug the code, create a patch for a large codebase and understand and respect all the workarounds in a legacy codebase, I would have a problem with it.

xvector 2y ago
Except they can't do the equivalent for art yet either, and I am fairly familiar with the state of image diffusion today. I've commissioned tens of thousands of dollars in art, and spent many hundreds of hours working with Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Flux. What all the generators are missing is intentionality in art. They can generate something that looks great at surface level, but doesn't make sense when you look at the details. Why is a particular character wearing a certain bracelet? Why do the windows on that cottage look a certain way? What does a certain engraving mean? Which direction is a character looking, and why? The diffusers do not understand what they are generating, so they just generates what "looks right." Often this results in art that looks pretty but has no deeper logic, world building, meaning, etc. And of course, image generators cannot handle the client-artist relationship as well (even LLMs cannot), because it requires an understanding of what the customer wants and what emotion they want to convey with the piece they're commissioning. So - I rely on artists for art I care about (art I will hang on my walls), and image generators for throwaway work (such as weekly D&D campaign images.)
- rty32 2y ago
  Of course the "art" art -- the part that is all about human creativity -- will always be there. But lots of people in the art business aren't doing that. If you didn't have midjourney etc, what would you be doing for the throwaway work? Learn to design the stuff yourself, hire someone to do it on Upwork, or just not do it all? Some money likely will exchange hands there.
  - xvector 2y ago

viraptor 2y ago

Is it really? I know people who love using LLMs, people who are allergic to the idea of even taking about AI usability and lots of others in between. Same with artists hating the idea, artists who spend hours crafting very specific things with SD, and many in between. I'm not sure I can really point out a big difference here. Maybe the artists are more skewed towards not liking AI since they work with medium that's not digital in the first place, but the range of responses really feels close.

crimsoneer 2y ago

I mean, it's supply and demand right. - There is a big demand for really complex software development, and an LLM can't do that alone. So software devs have to do lots of busywork, and like the opportunity to be augmented by AI - Conversely, there is a huge demand for not very high level art. - eg, lots of people want a custom logo or a little jingle, but no many people want to hire a concert pianist or comission the next Salvadore Dali. So most artists spend a lot of time doing a lot of low level work to pay the bills, while software devs spend a lot of time doing low level code monkey work so they can get to the creative part of their job.

aithrowaway1987 2y ago

Look at who the tools are marketed towards. Writing software involves a lot of tedium, eye strain, and frustration, even for experts who have put in a lot of hours practicing, so LLMs are marketed to help developers make their jobs easier. This is not the case for art or music generators: they are marketed towards (and created by) laypeople with who want generic content and don't care about human artists. These systems are a significant burden on productivity (and fatal burden on creativity) if you are an honest illustrator or musician. Another perspective: a lot of the most useful LLM codegen is not asking the LLM to solve a tricky problem, but rather to translate and refine a somewhat loose English-language solution into a more precise JavaScript solution (or whatever), including a large bag of memorized tricks around sorting, regexes, etc. It is more "science than art," and for a sufficiently precise English prompt there is even a plausible set of optimal solutions. The LLM does not have to "understand" the prompt or rely on plagiarism to give a good answer. (Although GPT-3.5 was a horrific F# plagiarist... I don't like LLM codegen but it is far more defensible than music generation) This is not the case with art or music generators: it makes no sense to describe them as "English to song" translators, and the only "optimal" solutions are the plagiarized / interpolated stuff the human raters most preferred. They clearly don't understand what they are drawing, nor do they understand what melodies are. Their output is either depressing content slop or suspiciously familiar. And their creators have filled the tech community with insultingly stupid propaganda like "they learn art just like human artists do." No wonder artists are mad!

rahimnathwani 2y ago
What you say may be true about the simplest workflow: enter a prompt and get one or more finished images. But many people use diffusion models in a much more interactive way, doing much more of the editing by hand. The simplest case is to erase part of a generated image, and prompt to infill. But there are people who spend hours to get a single image where they want it.
- eropple 2y ago
  This is true, and there's some really cool stuff there, but that's not who most of this is marketed at. Small wonder there's backlash from artists and people who appreciate artists when the stated value proposition is "render artists unemployed".

tcdent 2y ago

It's just gatekeeping. Artists put a ton of time into education and refining their vision inside the craft. Amateur efforts to produce compelling work always look amateur. With augmentation, suddenly the "real" artists aren't as differentiated. The whole conversation is obviously extremely skewed toward digital art, and the ones talking about it most visibly are the digital artists. No abstract painter thinks AI is coming for their occupation or cares wether it is easier to create anime dreamscapes this year or the next.

denizener 2y ago

I love art and code, IMO is because Cursor is really good and AI art is not that good. There isn't a good metaphor for the problem with AI art. I would say it is like some kind of chocolate cake that the first few bites seem like the best cake you have ever had and then progressive bites become more and more shit until you stop even considering eating it. Then at some point even the thought of the cake makes you want to puke. I say this as someone who thought we reached the art singularity in December 2022. I have no philosophical or moral problem with AI art. It just kind of sucks. Cursor/Sonnet on the other hand just blew my mind earlier today.

GaggiX 2y ago
There are really good models for AI art, if people care. I think that AI is better at making an image from start to finish than making some software from start to finish. And I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet myself.
datavirtue 2y ago
AI art is an oxymoron. It will never give me chills or make me cry.