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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

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Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#271

Post by bsenftner »

SyzygistSix wrote: post #257
amelius wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but art school just turned into a one-semester course.

No, it didn't but people who took only one semester of art classes may remain under the delusion that art is about making pretty pictures. People who need illustration or graphics with no particular style can meet their needs with this tool but that is far from art. This replaces commercial illustration, not artists.

Exactly, this replaces general illustrative commercial art. This is great for illustrations at the head intro of fiction stories. However, fine artists that produce art where the object created is merely the totem for their actual art: intellectual conceptualization of an idea, often concerning the finality of life and the immature behaviors we playout within; that type of Fine Art is completely out of reach of modern AIs. I'm sure there are attempts by AI developers to mimic such art, but that mimicking will be gibberish. It requires a sentient being to create Fine Art, because Fine Art is an 360 degree expression of existence, not some pretty picture.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#272

Post by throwawaylinux »

fingerlocks wrote: post #269
throwawaylinux wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gets paid to be a telephone operator or a cobbler or a steeplejack anymore either. If new tools come along that automates and further commoditizes the production of art, I don't see the issue. Automatic driving for trucking, public transport, taxis would economically impact vastly more people, and everyone here seems to be cheering for that. There's nothing special about art. People will still do it as a hobby…

Cobblers still exist. I visit one regularly for shoe repair. https://www.davepagecobbler.com/

Well you got me. I guess chimney sweeps and black smiths and loom weavers and carriage drivers still exist too, not sure about steeplejacks since the passing of Fred Dibnah. But you get what I'm trying to say, hopefully.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#273

Post by jwie »

planb wrote: post #175

> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work.

I think the difference is SD is generating strictly derivative work from inputs where the human is synthesizing and creating from reference.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#274

Post by rebuilder »

stocknoob wrote: post #92
michaelchisari wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s where it’ll be truly disruptive. SD for ideation, humanity for the final product.

Honestly, I don’t even know if we’ll need humanity for the final product. It’s like using a chess computer to get an idea of a good move… and then a human to approve it? Adjust it? Be inspired by it? Any signals humans give (painting x is better than y) is another signal to encode. Take billions of such ratings and improve the AI’s taste to superhuman levels. In short, anything that humans would add to artistically i…

The datasets these tools use don’t include any context. There’s no sense of what the images in the data might mean to the viewer, or how they relate to the time and place they were made. I would argue that means the tools will struggle to produce meaningful works, even if they become great at making beautiful works.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#275

Post by throwaway6977 »

mellavora wrote: post #88
t-3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracing and collage both mechanistically clone elements of the input. Trendfollowing, mimicry, and copying others is standard in any creative area. I don't think computer-generated works will be easily distinguishable from human unless they're desired to be or shipped with metadata. It's already hard enough to distinguish human artists from other human artists without having names attached up front.

> Tracing and collage both mechanistically clone elements of the input. Yes, and tracing counts as art fraud. Collage is a bit different, because you are mixing many clones of many other objects such that you create a new object; additionally the way you assemble the clones may transform them (a photo of the mona lisa has different surface texture than a painted version, even more different if it is clipped from news…

> Yes, and tracing counts as art fraud.

I just spit out my coffee, turns out I'm not a bad artist, I'm actually a fraudster!

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#276

Post by bowsamic »

andybak wrote: post #228
bowsamic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much any ethical discussion about race is suppressed on HN because this is a “Silicon Valley neo rationalist” site Liam Kofi Bright outlines this with the Represser archetype in his new essay “White Psychodrama”

You are exaggerating. HN is fairly broad in it's politics and there's often quite challenging discussions around topics related to diversity. Whilst there is a tendency towards "Silicon Valley neo rationalist" and other voices are sometimes in the minority, you using a term like "suppressed" comes across as slightly overdramatic.

> you using a term like "suppressed" comes across as slightly overdramatic.

I don't think so, because the person I was responding to was flagged. Abusing the flagging functionality to silence difficult opinions about race is not uncommon on this website

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#277

Post by latexr »

planb wrote: post #175

> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work.

Your comment reminded me of Boulet’s “Fuck Peter Pan”: https://english.bouletcorp.com/2007/12/11/fuck-peter-pan/

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#278

Post by fingerlocks »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #272
fingerlocks wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobblers still exist. I visit one regularly for shoe repair. https://www.davepagecobbler.com/

Well you got me. I guess chimney sweeps and black smiths and loom weavers and carriage drivers still exist too, not sure about steeplejacks since the passing of Fred Dibnah. But you get what I'm trying to say, hopefully.

You included “cobbler” only because it sounds old-timey to you, and I was pointing out that it’s not.

Repairing expensive shoes is not an automated process. It’s more like fixing a roof leak, landscaping, or changing a flat tire. Jobs for those things still exist and aren’t going anywhere.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#279

Post by wffurr »

jwie wrote: post #273
planb wrote: post #175

> Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. My brain has been trained on even more copyrighted material. Every book I read, every tv show I watch, the toys I played with as a child. It's hard to imagine that I could come up with anything that is not inspired by copyrighted work.

I think the difference is SD is generating strictly derivative work from inputs where the human is synthesizing and creating from reference.

I'm not sure that distinction is as clear as you're implying.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#280

Post by zulban »

quitit wrote: post #246

I've said this ad nauseam - but people who think this is going to kill an industry clearly have no idea of said industry. It's a fantastically great tool, and a very exciting space, but reducing the function of creatives to people who draw pretty pictures is staggeringly ignorant.

Live music didn't disappear but the industry took a huge permanent culling when any cheap venue could just play a track. The replacement doesn't have to be great to trash an industry. It just has to be good enough for most. This is.
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