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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

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Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#71

Post by bambax »

adamhi wrote: post #28

I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not. One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good". There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not loo…

> If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.

That is absolutely not what the OP is complaining about. They're not saying that because AI is good, they won't find work. They are complaining that in training AI for art generation, builders took works from living artists, without consent from them, and that in so doing allowed generators to make new art in the style of said artists.

The example given is that Stable Diffusion even tries to reproduce logos/signatures of living artists.

If I produced a rubbish search engine that bore a malformed "gigggle" logo using Google colors, how long do you thing I would survive before being sued out of existence by an army of Google lawyers?

But that's exactly what many AI generators are doing here.

Edit: the first version of this comment confused Stable Diffusion with OpenAI, and stated that OpenAI was owned by Google. OpenAI has a strong partnership with Microsoft. Stable Diffusion is not OpenAI. Sorry for the errors.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#72

Post by whateveracct »

acadapter wrote: post #11

Mail couriers had to teach themselves to drive after many years of using horses. Artists will have to learn how to stimulate AI models in effective ways and perform suitable post-processing.

People are still gonna draw with pencils lol. That's not going anywhere. No time like the present to pick one up if you have a reason to need to render images imo.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#73

Post by satyrnein »

I wonder what is at the end of this road. Hopefully it's not just that some junior artists get fired and everything else stays the same.

Does the line between novel and graphic novel blur, as more authors "direct" AIs to depict what's in their brains?

Is this how we get to infinite generated worlds in the metaverse?

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#74

Post by Barrin92 »

xg15 wrote: post #46
adamhi wrote: post #28

I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not. One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good". There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not loo…

> It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%. Call me a doomer, but I think this makes the possible consequences even worse. Remember the 80/20 rule. A lot of modern product innovation is not really about improving quality - rather, its about introducing lower -quality versions of existing products which are significantly cheaper than the original but still "…

>but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human artists

you're not afraid of DALL-E, you're afraid of an army of fiverr workers stealing your job. Stock photos and low quality art have already been commodified. Very few people go and commission bespoke stock art from the individual working artist, they get a subscription from one of the gazillion content stock photo factories for a few cents.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#75

Post by nomoreusernames »

marc_io wrote: post #22
kimi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids. Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It would just be different, more like F1.

> Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It would just be different, more like F1. But the human element is the main thing. This is the crucial part. Take us out of the picture and there's nothing very meaningful left for other humans to see.

best comment.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#76

Post by xor99 »

goldenkey wrote: post #61
xor99 wrote: post #47

Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out to people who feel like they will lose some of their business. However, a group of developers has shown what was always true about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always going to be reproducible and remixable. The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it s…

I think you're wrong. Pretty much all human creations can be encoded digitally to a high enough fidelity that the discretization process no longer is distinguishable. And 3D printers for paintings exist, that can replicate brush strokes and other techniques, and they will only get better over time. So there's very little left in the human arsenal as the AI generation and AI painting techniques both improve. https://y…

Oke I see what you mean, but isn't that just a reproduction in physical form? They have Warholised painting with 3D printers by creating a systematic method to reproduce art using a new combination of craft. I like it but it's not a totality.

I can bring up a form of art that is not captured by this conceptual scheme. Carsten Holler's SOMA:

The exhibition Soma was installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2010. Its main element were 12 reindeer in two pens running the length of the former railway station. Half of the reindeer were fed the fly agaric mushrooms in their food, which are part of their customary diet in the wild, and turn their urine into a hallucinogen. The reindeer urine was collected by handlers and then stored in on-site refrigerators for use. The experiment was extended to canaries, which were housed in two hanging cage pieces, to mice, and to flies. A mushroom-shaped Elevator Bed was installed in the middle of the space, and visitors could spend the night on the premise for a fee.

Do you see what I mean by this digital art vis a vis the collapse of all art being an overreaction? Carsten Holler is a real artist, the art is good, and its not reproducible in the way digi-physical stuff is. It's experiential art and presented in a gallery. Conceptually, its about as far away from DALLE-E as possible but its still art and not "captured". I think art is not over and DALL-E is not poison for artists.

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#77

Post by luckylion »

PaulsWallet wrote: post #8

There is a response to this tweet where someone says "stop gatekeeping art" which while I understand the gist of what they mean, seems like a weird thing to say to console someone who is concerned they are about to be automated out of a job.

I guess the context is "as an art seller, I am concerned", not so much "as an artist". Which is understandable, of course, as much as anyone would be concerned if their job is in jeopardy.

But framing it as a matter of art does sound like gatekeeping. It'd be "that cannot be art, because x" when all they mean to say is "please don't stop paying me for this".

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#78

Post by vincnetas »

throwaway82388 wrote: post #55

I think it’s telling that the primary ethical concerns around AI development (at least at OpenAI, if not others) are that AI tools not be used to enable propagandists, or to generate violent or sexual imagery. I see comparatively few ethical concerns about the economic fallout professional artists and illustrators will experience as a result.

Why no sexual imagery?

Re: As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

#80

Post by karamanolev »

dcow wrote: post #67
karamanolev wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's someone creates an AI where you describe your program and it writes it using only existing code snippets. It might put 90% or more of software engineers out of work. Saying "but software engineers who create truly innovative systems, design patterns, languages and approaches will continue to thrive" is very limiting. I fully grasp the concern here. It's not unlike what happened during industrialization, but on…

What you describe sounds ideal for the software industry.

Automated trucking, rail and ocean transportation sound ideal for the cargo industry, except for the millions of truck drivers. You put those people out of a job and you have a societal problem that needs to be solved. I'm not against progress in any way, but it comes with problems in need of a solution
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