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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

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Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#111
post #10

After using SD heavily for a week, I half agree with this. It is incredibly disruptive, and it's wild how much it accelerates the creative process. I'll give you that. But two things I've noticed: First, artists will still have a massive advantage over non-artists with this tool. A photographer who intimately knows the different lenses and cameras and industry terms will get to a representation of their idea much fas…

What about using this tech for ideation and artists for production? You could use Stable Diffusion et al to create new characters based on a prompt, then farm the concept out to artists to produce individual works. Kind of like hiring a super expensive agency to design your new logo or brand identity, then using a stable of in-house designers to translate the concept into UI, ads, etc.

This is useless, you still have humans in the loop.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#114

Maybe this current explosion in the relevance and visibility of this kind of AI model will finally lead us to rethink how insanely nonsensical our IP systems are. I'm not holding my breath, but there's hope that this sort of thing will (combined with situations like the HBO debacle) clarify the need for massive IP reform in the cultural zeitgeist. The problem here isn't that the model was trained on copyrighted works…

What will happen is AI will be fed IP legal corpus as part of training. It will only show images that can't be linked (in a justice setting) to any particular work. Which will be interesting because it will produce media culturally alien but still appealing and probably addictive. It will literally be the engine of advancement of human culture. I'm not the conservative type, but I'm still slightly concerned as much as fascinated.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#115

One day, images generated with these AIs will become ubiquitous online, and new AIs training on data will wind up with feedback problems because they got trained on photos that are AI generated, possibly even ones they themselves generated! This tech is a huge deal. Huge. Ubiquitous unique, beautiful art. Entire movies made by machines. Too many to even watch them all. Actor models that aren't real people owned by th…

Expect hit actors from today to become digitized and immortalized on the screen. Eventually there will be a cannon of standard "actors" (customized per movie of course) that will never change once they settle in on the appropriate archetypes.

This is the premise of the film The Congress, based loosely on Stanisław Lem's The Futurological Congress.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#117
post #50

I am a contrarian by nature. Wearing my investor hat, I continue to be unimpressed with AI tools, including the latest image generation enhancements. I do find stable diffusion interesting, but I don't see the disruption. Similarly, I don't see the disruption from Github Copilot considering I run a company full of highly paid and extremely skilled developers and not one of them uses copilot. How often have you wanted…

We're using it for marketing images - e.g. blog post thumbnails.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#118

After using SD heavily for a week, I half agree with this. It is incredibly disruptive, and it's wild how much it accelerates the creative process. I'll give you that. But two things I've noticed: First, artists will still have a massive advantage over non-artists with this tool. A photographer who intimately knows the different lenses and cameras and industry terms will get to a representation of their idea much fas…

> A photographer who intimately knows the different lenses and cameras and industry terms will get to a representation of their idea much faster than someone without that experience

There are already websites which sells tailored "professional" prompts for dall-e, GPT3, etc

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#119
post #58

Stabile diffusion is most of all a waste of resources! 20 billion parameters trained, using I dont know how many CPU hours, all for making better artistic images than what an amateur would do and on par with professionals. Art is nice, but not important for survival, contrary to smartly using the resources of the planet. Do you want to see a future way to live on or "the rest of Mona Lisa"?

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