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> Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such
by GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
> Likewise today a graphic artist who is faced with the prospect of his or her career being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways.
look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al).
but... i'm going to talk specifically about this example - whether you can extrapolate this to other fields is a broader conversation. this is such a bafflingly tonedeaf and poorly-thought-out line of thinking.
neal stephenson has been taking money from giant software corporations for so long that he's just parroting the marketing hype.
there is no reason whatsoever to believe that designers will not be made redundant once the quality of "AI generated" design is good enough for the company's bottom line, regardless of how "beneficial" the tool might be to an individual designer.
if they're out of a job, what need does a professional designer have of this tool?
i grew up loving some of Stephenson's books, but in his non-writing career he's disappointingly uncritical of the roles that giant corporations play in shepherding in the dystopian cyberpunk future he's written so much about. Meta money must be nice.
- nottorp 1y ago> look, i'm sure there are very useful things you can use AI for as a designer to reduce some of the toil work (of which there's a LOT in photoshop et al) Hey, has anyone done an "AI" tool that will take the graphics that I inexpertedly pasted together for printing on a tshirt and make the background transparent nicely? Magic wands always leave something on that they shouldn't and I don't have the skill or patience to do it myself.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agothis has been possible in photoshop using the AI prompt tool (just prompt "remove background") for a while but i haven't used it in long enough to tell you exactly how. depending on how you compiled the source image, i think it should be possible to get at least close to what you intend. edit to add: honestly, if you take the old school approach of treating it like you're just cutting it out of a magazine or something, you can use the polygonal lasso tool and zoom in to get pretty decent results that most people will never judge too harshly. i do a lot of "pseudo collage" type stuff that's approximating the look of physical cut-and-paste and this is what i usually do now. you can play around with stroke layer FX with different blending modes to clean up the borders, too.
- nottorp 1y ago> you can play around with stroke layer FX with different blending modes Lost me about there :) I'm involved in custom printed tshirts only a couple times per year at best and in image editing apart from that about zero times.
- mvdtnz 1y agoCanva does this really well. They use a product they purchased called remove-bg which is still mostly free. https://www.remove.bg/ https://www.remove.bg/
- keybored 1y ago> > being obliterated under an AI mushroom cloud might take a dim view of such technologies, without perhaps being aware that AI can be used in less obvious but more beneficial ways. How vivid. Never mind the mushroom cloud in front of your face. Think about the less obvious... more beneficial ways? Of course non-ideologues and people who have to survive in this world will look at the mushroom cloud of giant corporations controlling the technology. Artists don’t. And artists don’t control the companies they work for. So artists are gonna take solace in the fact that they can rent AI to augment their craft for a few months before the mushroom cloud gets them? I mean juxtaposing a nuclear bomb with appreciating the little things in life is weird.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoit's the most "ignoring the forest for the trees" thing i've read in a long time.