Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 79 posts

Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#1

Post by Mabusto »

Hello HN!

I have a group of friends who are professional artists and they are not big fans of generative AI. I've tried my best to explain what it is and isn't and a few of them are interested in taking a more serious course on the subject.

Most of the learning material is either very technical and geared towards programmers or too vague and hand wavy to be practical to someone who wants to incorporate generative AI into their artistic workflow.

Most of them are familiar with text2img models, but ideally I'd like something that explains _how_ diffusion models work, their probabilistic nature, how they're trained on images/text and maybe even a high level description of what the different parts of a setup in, say, ComfyUI are doing (LoRA, VAE, CLIP, UNet models).

I admittedly have a tough time judging the technical expertise of people, but I think some of the resources I've personally found great for explaining the basics (3blue1Brown, Andrew Ngs course, ComputerPhile videos) are still too technical and impractical.

What resources would you point your friends to who both want to learn about generative AI and assuage their fears that AI will make artists obsolete?

Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#4

Post by ilaksh »

The technical explanations are going to be technical. Based on what you said it sounds like you want to search through ComfyUI tutorials to find the one that seems just right to you.

AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job. You should focus on the creative possibilities of the present. Things like tools or ComfyUI nodes or whatever that allow you to do things like "auto complete" digital paintings based on live sketches, change a style, generate variations, etc. Focus on the capabilities of the tools in terms of enhancing or producing art or testing ideas. Show how an artist can train a Lora on their art and then use a scribble ControlNet to instantly go from sketch to a manifestation of a finished digital painting in their own style and evolve it with each stroke.

Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#5

Post by freeone3000 »

That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. No amount of explanation of vector math will change the fact that article headers can now be generated from the article, or you can say “give me a spaceman on a planet looking at twin moons” and a Steam game header is generated with some basic cropping. Incidental and corporate art, which is how a lot of professional artists make a living, is in real danger of being automated away.

Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#7

Post by spacecadet »

I stumbled on this, I think here on hacker news, and appreciate the amount of effort the author put into providing visualizations. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/

Whats the goal here? Do your friends express interest in using AI within their practice? Technical or not, an artist doesn't need to understand it to achieve that... Many years ago before I better understood it, myself and other artist used generative AI to create elements of our works and no one knew or cared that we did.

Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#8

Post by echelon »

Banodoco Discord is ground zero for AI film and focuses on open source models and resources. Their results are a year ahead of SOTA models as a result of their workflows and effort.

https://banodoco.ai/

Invoke AI has incredible open source image editing tooling and a fantastic YouTube and Discord that pair with it.

https://youtube.com/@invokeai

Curious Refuge (paid) has a great community and paid lessons for AI filmmaking.

https://curiousrefuge.com/

Reddit is overflowing with AI art communities, many of them technical in nature.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comfyui/

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/

There are a lot of offshoots of these, and Discord will provide the best resources once you get plugged in.

Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#9

Post by echelon »

freeone3000 wrote: post #5

That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor. No amount of explanation of vector math will change the fact that article headers can now be generated from the article, or you can say “give me a spaceman on a planet looking at twin moons” and a Steam game header is generated with some basic cropping. Incidental and corporate a…

> That’s the point of generative AI, though, isn’t it? You put in text, you get out an image, no more need for discernment or skill or labor.

The best tools in this space are spatial editors and node editors. Text is weak sauce.

Also, you can't use text modalities for film and 3D. It has to be art tooling to get good results.

Artists will always have a job. They'll just be doing way more than they were before.

Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists

#10

Post by echelon »

ilaksh wrote: post #4

The technical explanations are going to be technical. Based on what you said it sounds like you want to search through ComfyUI tutorials to find the one that seems just right to you. AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job. You should focus on the creative possibilities of the present. Things like tools or ComfyUI nodes or whatever that allow you to do things like "auto complete"…

> AI will eventually basically make artists obsolete just like every other job.

No it won't. We've hit a wall and the low hanging fruit are gone. OpenAI hit a wall and is searching for enterprise customers to maintain their valuation, and Google and Facebook are calling them out on it. Meanwhile, text is entirely inadequate for manipulating visual things effectively.

AI will supercharge artists that embrace it. Text-to-art is not good enough and real artists will be working with layers, node editors, and in 3D/video modalities.

Post reply on HN