Ask HN: What creative field will be safe from AI?

I thought the same thing after seeing the Dall-E productions. As others have noted, they look good enough for a lot of commercial purposes—book and album covers, magazine and website illustrations, advertisements. My daughter is a professional illustrator, and I wondered how safe her career will be in the years ahead.

My tentative guess is that creators whose individual personality and identity are an important part of their appeal will be protected from obsolescence for the time being. Some commercial artists, like many “serious” artists, have public identities and distinctive styles that are part of their appeal; they should be able to continue charging decent rates for their work. But a lot of commercial art is anonymous, without the creators even being credited by name. Content producers will be happy to replace their work with cheaper, faster, easily customizable AI-generated work when they can.

A person starting out now as an artist, musician, or writer, in order to succeed, probably needs to put as much effort into creating a distinctive and attractive public personality as into honing their skills and producing superior work. Some creative people will be able and willing to do that, but it will be difficult for a lot of others.

Garry Kasparov said he was the first knowledge worker who lost his job to AI. At the time, we defined chess as a sign of intelligence, practically an IQ test. But now, it's seen more as a series of patterns. I think we'll keep redefining intelligence to something that makes us feel special.

I'm hugely interested in field of VR/AR education. I see a lot of potential for two reasons. First, VR offers amazing opportunities for content engagement, enabling high levels of interactivity and hands-on experimentation. Second, VR headsets shut off distractions, allowing for deeper and more sustained focus (compared to, for example, tablet "multimedia" textbooks).

The field comes with many challenges though. Accessibility is not yet figured out. Reading text in 3D with current tech is painful. And the technology is far from wide spread among target population.

I'd appreciate being pointed to any community or project wanting to advance the field. Especially ones trying to democratize the education in an open-source fashion.

This really isn't going to change much. DALLE-2 has and will likely for a long time have a lot of imperfections that will never be fixed. Due to the inherit way that these GANs work it's not going to force anyone really out of business. At most it could help artists with their day to day tasks but not really much more. You in effect have to create the proper datasets to even generate proper images itself. Even if the sample size required is getting substantially lower, increasing the barrier to entry. It will probably take hundred of thousands of images at the least to create a decent looking image. Each of which mind you is copyrighted. The quality of the images will be a new requirement for the field.

As Machine Learning Models are intellectual property we will likely see the unionification of artists as they work towards protecting the industry. Honestly the majority of these algorithms are going in the complete wrong direction and companies that use this will likely go bankrupt if google follows anything similar to amazon's business model.

There is also something cool and interesting about AI generated art currently because it is new and fresh. At some point though that will wear off.

Personally, I love hyperrealism when it comes to painting. Of course, a child could basically take a photograph now and be on par with a master hyperrealist compared to hundreds of years ago but the output in isolation is not what matters. The display of human skill is what is interesting about hyperrealism.

Most art people love is a display of human skill and/or the personality of the artist that can't be separated from the output.

Almost anyone can get a quality piano sampler, midi sequencer and then output classical piano virtuoso music at a tempo only Yuja Wang could currently play. You could even speed it up 10X if you wanted to complete inhuman tempos. No one cares about that output though. Exactly what makes this interesting is Yuja Wang's playing that seems inhuman.

This idea that AI is going to replace all human activity is transhumanist nonsense and a simpleton view of the world IMO.