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The AI Unbundling

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Re: The AI Unbundling

#61

Post by _aavaa_ »

Jevon23 wrote: post #47
moultano wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.

Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes. I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN…

> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1].

Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant.

Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant.

The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration.

The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant.

> Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.

I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on hands are going to be a long term roadblock?

As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...

Re: The AI Unbundling

#62

Post by simonw »

enord wrote: post #53
gizmo wrote: post #33

Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change. Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant. Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking…

You quite studiously compared every ostensible disruption to the preceding state of the art to (quite convincingly IMO) reveal the material consequeces to be… less than world shattering, shall we say. Your example of Amazon and walmart does the converse. And yet, with «stable diffusion» it is just so. Disruption is declared wholesale, without even passing mention of the preceding state of the art of computer generate…

I don't see it. Can you expand a little more by what you mean here?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#63

Post by gizmo »

mejutoco wrote: post #39
gizmo wrote: post #33

Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change. Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant. Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking…

> People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art. I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these…

I think the sad reality is that modern art is largely trash. Perhaps because painting/drawing/sculpting with excellent technique is too much of a commodified trade already. Perhaps because it's too hard to be original. A new oil painting of a tree, no matter how well executed, won't draw people to an art gallery. So artists take refuge in social commentary: A banana taped to a wall. A naked person holding a trash barrel. Two bicycles welded together upside down. Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall.

But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.

SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#64

Post by dwohnitmok »

Jevon23 wrote: post #47
moultano wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.

Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes. I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN…

> Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.

This seems to be purely an issue of the size of the network. Parti (https://parti.research.google/) demonstrates that as the number of parameters increases, with no change to the underlying architecture, a lot of these problems simply go away. Basically just throw more compute and memory at the problem and everything gets fixed.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#65

Post by ridgered4 »

andreilys wrote: post #21
megaman821 wrote: post #6

I am not sure I see the unbundling here. AI generated art may be a threat to generic stock photography and small jobs for custom blog art, but artists higher up on the food chain now have a new tool for them to use. They can quickly generate a bunch of concepts to tryout ideas, and polish those into a higher quality piece of art than if left to their own devices.

How do you think artists “higher up the food chain” got there? Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up. If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.

Reminds me of COBOL programmer demand. There seems to be plenty of well paid work to do here, but what is left unsaid is no one is hiring junior COBALT programmers and training them up. The work is all of people with 30 years of experience so even if new developers want to enter the field there's nothing for them to do so they'll just end up exiting it for something else. So it seems like the field will have to die with the old programmers, no matter how much you pay them they'll eventually be gone if you don't create new ones.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#67

Post by akavi »

harperlee wrote: post #26
bambax wrote: post #24

Good article, although "unbundling" is an odd choice of word. Before AI, the execution step was necessary, but not necessarily attached to the "coming up with an idea" step. Conceptual artists have for years (centuries?) produced ideas that were executed by others. AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are b…

> If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to. If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order ar…

What could contain information is a book of all 512x512 images that a human being would perceive as being "an image". Ie, the vast majority of possible 512x512 images look like random noise to humans. Excluding those massively shrinks the size of the book.

So that does mean image model AI like dall-e/SD are effectively compression over this space of images that they can generate (which is at least attempting to emulate the space of 'meaningful images' to a human), since given a seed, they'll deterministically produce the same image, and that seed is much smaller than the information needed to describe every pixel in the image.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#68

Post by pclmulqdq »

moultano wrote: post #42
Jevon23 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet? I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Some art, technical and scientific illustration in particular, requires a great deal of precision, and ability to interpret information. That work isn't going away any time soon, and is similar to what is required of professional translation. A lot of art does not require that.

I recently went to stable diffusion for some art for a D&D campaign guide, to make the thing more immersive. While the pictures are impressive, there are a lot of things about the generated art that just don't make sense: In one picture, a tower had a staircase down 1/3rd of the way from the door to the ground, just stopping at that point. Most had issues like this. Several other pictures I wanted were impossible to generate.

The field of "art that needs human communication skills" seems to be a lot broader than just scientific illustration.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#69

Post by cerol »

Jevon23 wrote: post #40
gizmo wrote: post #33

Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change. Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant. Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking…

>It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet? I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Just another chapter of the whole automation shtick.

> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Any time now.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#70

Post by malauxyeux »

umeshunni wrote: post #50
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s highly likely that machine translation will still put human translators out of work. We’re probably very close to the point where machine translation is about as good as an average human translator.

My guess is that something like 90% of translation - e.g product manuals, websites etc are now machine translated. Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.

> Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.

Yes and with luck, at least one language you know how to read will make sense and not be off-the-wall bonkers or simply incomprehensible.

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