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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

#101

Post by fleddr »

I think the concern is fully justified. Those still being skeptical of AI art fail to understand exponential progress. Usage of various algorithms is about to explode, feeding back billions of signals to correct the model.

A second or third generation model may really understand relations between objects, depth, lighting, etc.

It's both amazing and scary. A little behind the curve, but expect similar developments in music generation.

Given the speed of all of this, the socio-economic discussion on AI should really get prioritized, as very little cognitive work is going to be safe.

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

#102

Post by thejohnconway »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #82

I'm pretty unimpressed with the stuff coming out of Dall-E etc (I know, controversial opinion on HN, but bear with me). It's technically impressive, but imho, it still hasn't closed an essential gap need to make AI truly compelling, and still feels like just a modern ELIZA: simultaneously impressive given the technology and a parlor trick. That said, I'm also not too impressed with many contemporary "artists", especi…

Ha, yes, I feel many artists have been hacking away at styles that look good pretty much whatever you throw at them. There's a few tricks, and one you get it, you can produce stuff that looks great quickly and easily. It's not surprising these can be imitated by AI.

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

#103

Post by yanderekko »

egypturnash wrote: post #36
cercatrova wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way I support AI art and AI in other fields. Just because artists are mad it's gonna take their jobs does not seem like a legitimate reason to halt human progress. It's just inevitable the way things are going.

Please save this comment to refer to when an iteration of Copilot starts to make you truly worried for the future of your career. Thanks in advance.

Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards.

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

#104

Post by yanderekko »

t_mann wrote: post #52
Bjorkbat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because some trend feels inevitable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t oppose it. We shouldn’t be beholden to the march of technology like it’s some force of nature that we are powerless to resist.

Can you give examples of when technology was successfully rolled back for social reasons (not because it was found to have dramatic side effects, like asbestos eg) and that didn't coincide with a massive drop in HDI (like the fall of the Roman empire)?

Anti-WMD proliferation comes to mind, but perhaps that's a special case.

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

#105

Post by xor99 »

thejohnconway wrote: post #93
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…

> Digital art is not permanently interesting. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Reproducibility has virtually nothing to do with interest in my opinion. I was an admirer of plenty of artists before I'd ever seen their work in person. Perhaps I am missing the point.

I mean it in the sense that using digital technologies to produce art is not always going to be interesting. I don't mean that I will never find any digital art interesting though. Distilled to one point: DALL-E does not wholesale capture any rational definition of art reflecting actual art history.

I think DALL-E is a win-win by pushing digital art to some further extreme and forcing people who are open to art beyond the digital to try new things. Digital art had reached a point of maximum inertia before this imo.

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

#106

Post by tmslnz »

Like I suppose many of us, I had a conversation with an artist friend about this very topic. They are concerned about it. Some of the generated results are impressive and surely can sufficiently replace some subset of the current human output.

But! Seeing DALL-E artwork from a bird’s eye view, I am more and more convinced that it’s just another tool, not a replacement: It is amazing good at producing unexpected results, and just like GPT3, it does so by regurgitating what is already out there, remixing it in somewhat interesting ways. This is an especially useful tool to quickly produce mood boards, or communicate an artistic intent. However it is not a replacement for the kind of thinking required to produce good artwork.

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

#107

Post by yanderekko »

CSSer wrote: post #10
cercatrova wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way I support AI art and AI in other fields. Just because artists are mad it's gonna take their jobs does not seem like a legitimate reason to halt human progress. It's just inevitable the way things are going.

What progress? We’re bruteforcing solutions without any way to learn from then. ML eliminates serendipity. I’m not strictly anti-ML. Horses for courses and all that, but I’ve got to admit I get weird, “The humans stopped learned and the computers started,” sci-fi vibes sometimes.

>ML eliminates serendipity.

This is a statement that is pretty quickly disproven if you actually pay attention to the generated art. Lately I've been seeing TikTok videos where people are using DALL-E to create "new aesthetics" - "vampwave", "neon apocalypse", etc.

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

#108

Post by notahacker »

kradeelav wrote: post #70

It's odd as a design manager, I feel like people focus on the wrong things to be alarmed about with DALL-E, and aren't alarmed enough about others. * feels like there will be a subtle shift from (corporate) designers as creators to designers as technical sheepherders and retouchers. senior designers who have a real nose for art direction and understanding the fundementals will be fine. interns and juniors may get hit…

Agree with most of what you're saying, but a bit perplexed by this

>interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of blindly using these tools without understanding why the "base" styles/logos look good. the act of creation is a learning experience that this removes

Surely with digital art more than most professions the understanding of why the end product works is pretty orthogonal to the actual technical implementation details anyway? You don't understand composition or style or taste or brand identity or proportions by creating textures and shapes from scratch or knowing your way around a tool. To that extent, spending their days filtering mediocre compositions not created by them and fixing their flaws might give them a much keener sense of what isn't quite working than trying to judge mediocre compositions they've put a lot of effort into themselves objectively. I can see bigger issues with the thought that might be comparatively dull work for a lot of people.

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

#109

Post by bambax »

Kiro wrote: post #85
bambax wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 generator…

Not only is your rant about Google misplaced considering Dall-E is OpenAI, not Google, but the thread is also not complaining about Dall-E. It's about Stable Diffusion ( https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement ) which is explicitly trained on working artists. That's why it tries to reproduce the logo.

You're right of course! I don't know what I was thinking. Dall-e is MS. I will edit.

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

#110

Post by WASDx »

bambax wrote: post #71
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 generator…

This is frankly what humans have always done, learning and taking inspiration from other artists. Now we have made a machine that can do the same thing.

In the case of exact reproductions, we have copyright and IP laws.

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