I believe the photoshop ai integration will be the most seamless starting point. I personally am waiting to get a 4090 to do more graphical work later locally.
Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#12[flagged]
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris
There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated.
Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore.
Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now.
In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated.
> Why don’t you let the artists maintain their own practice, rather than pressuring your friends to join you in yours?
Artists who get their start in AI early can build recognition and clout within the community. They'll potentially be at a big advantage.
a16z is investing in non-technical artists to bootstrap production and community. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening when you dive in to AI art.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#13> 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?
Step 1 - get them to sign up for AI image tools.
* Midjourney is best for quick images
* Playground AI is good if they need to modify images but the quality doesn't need to be perfect
* Leonardo AI (now owned by Canva) is a good full suite
* Photoshop AI feature is best if they already work in photoshop
Then show them how to use these tools! That might require you signing up for these tools first and learning yourself.
Step 2 - For learning about how AI image generators work here's my video list.
1) AltexSoft - has a low viewcount but it's a great overview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rke0V_VkF3c
2) Jay Alammar - it's technical but also visual and he explains it well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXmacOUJUaw
3) Gonkee - again, technical, but visual, great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFztPP9qPRc
Workflow example: good for seeing the workflow of SD as of May 2023 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ldxCh3cnI
Too technical for what you're looking for: Computerphile, Ari Seff, Jia-Bin Huang
Step 3 - For assuaging their fears about becoming obsolete - I think the following is a great podcast episode. https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs...
But their fears might be valid. A test is perhaps: if their boss spent a few days learning to use AI image generators, would they still need them? For some artists the answer would be no, for many the answer would be yes. It'll change over time as the tools get better, but that's a pretty good proxy. If they're doing things that require more iteration, interacting with users and humans and the physical world, nuanced judgement, in-person work, safer. If they're doing things that are contract based, no iteration, get a request and deliver a result, much less safe.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#14That’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.
You still need a prompt, but the spatial tools and controlnet models are where the magic is.
I think style transfer + pose detection + edge detection gives artists a bunch of new tools to play with.
OP I would look into learning comfyui
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#15I would skip all the tech talk and go to the practical, artist-friendly systems first of all.
This would for instance be the Krita plugin and InvokeAI. Both heavily cater to an user with little interest of getting into the weeds of VAEs and UNet models, and is much more at home using a drawing tablet.
Krita is closer to being artist-targeted since it's primarily a drawing application with an AI add-on.
InvokeAI is more on the opposite side, an AI tool with primitive but still usable ability to guide the AI by sketching stuff on a canvas.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#16[flagged]
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated. Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore. Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now. In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated. > Why don’t you…
For now.
It’s just market forces being unsure about the future of hiring artists.
Companies are like lemmings, they just follow one another.
Artists already know that gen AI is just another tool in the toolbox.
We’re just waiting for MBAs to also realize this.
GenAI making artists obsolete is a dumb idea. No MBA is going to be trying to coax a GenAI model into making an image.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#17That’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…
You should look into the more modern tooling available these days, like the Krita plugin and InvokeAI.
Sure, you still use a prompt in those, but it's not really the focus in many cases -- you just use it to give a very rough guideline of what you're trying to do, then start drawing.
Depending on approach you'd either start sketching your astronaut and see the AI turn the sketch into something polished in real time, or you'd generate an image then polish up the details. I think most artists are more likely to prefer the first approach.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#18The 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-…
There have always been downturns in the velocity of increase in capability of technology like a series of s-curves, but at a zoomed out level it's still an exponential that continues as we constantly innovate.
The trajectory we are on is for AI to be able to do most intellectual jobs in less than ten years and most physical jobs in less than 20. That is speculation but it is based on many decades of increasing performance and capabilities.
Text does have limitations but AI tools and models are not limited to text to image and new models and systems will be created.
I agree that AI will help artists in the short term. But we should anticipate that humans will eventually just be a bottleneck in the creative process.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Obsolete… The fucking hubris There are some real dangers here that need to be navigated. Junior artists who get their start doing commissions are not going to have that path anymore. Reddit's job boards for junior artists are a literal desert now. In a sense, the activation energy gradient to producing good results has lowered such that the economic reward for up and coming artists has deteriorated. > Why don’t you…
For now. It’s just market forces being unsure about the future of hiring artists. Companies are like lemmings, they just follow one another. Artists already know that gen AI is just another tool in the toolbox. We’re just waiting for MBAs to also realize this. GenAI making artists obsolete is a dumb idea. No MBA is going to be trying to coax a GenAI model into making an image.
I don't think I made my argument clear. This isn't about companies not paying artists, it's about peer-to-peer opportunities contracting and the market shrinking at the bottom.
https://www.reddit.com/r/artistforhire/
This is hardly the only community for this, and it's evaporated into a ghost town. Prices have decreased an order of magnitude.
This is one of the ways up and coming artists without professional training get started earning money from their skill set.
You should see also how Fiverr has filled up with GenAI artists that are pricing out traditional artists. Fiverr isn't typically a place for highly skilled work - it's for newbies and developing world opportunities. And now the money is thinning out.
Re: Ask HN: Generative AI Courses for Artists
#20The 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"…
If you make art in postcards, then maybe you will be replaced. Diffusion based AI image generation is limited to a little over 1 megapixel, or double if you use an expander, or you can infinitely grow an initial image with more of the exact same sort of thing. 1 MPx printed at 300 dpi is similar in size to a postcard. Diffusion being able to generate meaningful printed images at 50-200 Mpx is impossible. My art is made at that size (that's 7200 to 14400 pixels per side approximately @ 300 dpi). I don't use AI. I do use my own code.
Try making a Jackson Pollack using AI, AI can only effectively make objective images, given it requiring linking similar images via limited text descriptions.
Making headers for newspaper articles or blog posts on the web might be OK if you don't care much. Check out https://www.quantamagazine.org to see how real artists do things. Their header images are really imaginative given the subject matter, something AI today can't do. It might be instructive to take their articles and try to make header images for them.
If you make videos, then its 1080p which can be done by AI. But video has its own issues with video diffusion generators having limits on continuity. They are getting better, but the longer the clip, the less control you have and the longer it takes to fiddle with the prompt(s). It won't ever replace real movies unless you enjoy the SciFi channel or Sharknado. That would require an entire new kind of AI which we don't have today.