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The AI Unbundling

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Re: The AI Unbundling

#111

Post by vineyardmike »

gizmo wrote: post #63
mejutoco wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bar…

> 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.

If the art made you think about a deeper meaning, is it better the artist put it there for you to find, or that it enabled you to freely think? I think too many people have “High school English class” syndrome. There’s no single right answer to extract from looking at art to give you that A+. It’s about self reflection, reflection on the experience and context of the art, and learning about the world around you. Everyone has a different experience and a different perspective and everyone gets something else out of it.

Can this be accomplished with SD art? Yes, but the curation of the model, or exact wording put into the model is still needed to provide some expected output that evoked the emotion. Artists may even modify an output as a starting point or inspiration, but “gallery” type art isn’t consumed for simple entertainment value like an Instagram photo feed, but as a destination experience (for sufficient expense to fund human artists too).

Re: The AI Unbundling

#112

Post by evrydayhustling »

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…

OP characterizes the disruption as "unbundling idea creation from substantiation". In the modern art world, this actually happened a long time ago! Warhol made famous the ancient notion that popular artisans could have their work produced by an army of assistants, rather than making it themselves, which allowed artists to focus on concept (and marketing).

Digital technology has already accelerated this process a lot, allowing artists to communicate prototypes efficiently and supervise implementations of their work on the other side of the world. What's new is how AI makes this dirt cheap and accessible, not just folks who can earn the admiration of assistants. People are focused on the plight of the artist-creator, but I also wonder what will happen to the legions of substantiators already out there in the world.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#113

Post by robertlagrant »

enord wrote: post #85
gizmo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bar…

You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer. If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.

You're not justifying your premise, so those two sentences are essentially free of content.

Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#114

Post by DisjointedHunt »

Anything this guy writes gets gobbled up and worshipped mindlessly to no end. The opening here was so crass i didn't bother reading the rest (yet) until i find a better time to do so and have put my strong feelings aside.

The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line.

Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#115

Post by idontpost »

ljp_206 wrote: post #110
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.

I am becoming more and more convinced that many techy folks near the AI scene saw that SD et alia can create an image that convincingly (and perhaps even indistinguishably) looks like a very nice digital painting, and based on that data point alone are calling artists obsolete.

I've played around with Dall-E a bit and based on trying to create weird ideas like an army of toddlers in plate armor riding corgis into a medieval battle or a bear riding a bicycle pulling a semi truck, I'm fully convinced that it's over-blown.

It can recreate data close to what it has already seen, just like all neural network techniques. It does poorly outside that domain.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#116

Post by enord »

echelon wrote: post #91
lambdaloop wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for. Professional illustrators will always have work, but their work may be in a different shape than current one, relying on AI as an additional tool to generate images for their clients. In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way.…

We're in month one of these tools, so I think your predictions are incredibly short sighted. > Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for. And the new workflows will be as well. > Professional illustrators will always have work They're in work because the job takes 10,000 hours to learn and individual pieces take 2-10 hours to create. Not anymore. The dam got bust…

Ok captain cocksure, this being month one:

What was practitioners in the field of computer generated art able to do in month minus one, how has this changed subtstantively, and do they offer any experience, criticism or understanding of the practice that might still apply? If not, which and why?

I’m as bedazzled by the blinkenlichten of prompts and generated images as the next guy, but I must confess I don’t have the foggiest what those guys were (and probably still are) doing before Dall-E. If the needle really is bending against the post I would take their word for it.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#117

Post by idontpost »

echelon wrote: post #81
simiones wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a k…

My startup can make you sing as Taylor Swift. Not like Taylor Swift. As Taylor Swift. We'll have our new product out very very shortly. We're at end times.

Why would I want that?

Even if I like Taylor Swift, what would be the point?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#118

Post by usehackernews »

mr_mitm wrote: post #77

These recent developments make wonder whether in 30 years we aren't streaming movies anymore, and instead entire personalized movies will be generated for us on demand, based on a few keywords and our past history of rating movies, browser activity, search terms, or whatever else the machines will know about us.

The combination of recommended media (TikTok) and generated media (SD) makes me believe this future is inevitable.

Content will be created specifically for you.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#119

Post by clankyclanker »

sinenomine wrote: post #105
Jevon23 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we’ll see how it performs, if it’s ever made public. The 20B images don’t look that much more impressive than what SD is already doing (aside from the ability to render text), and in some cases they look worse. It’s hard to tell because the resolution is so small, but even in the 20B “astronaut riding a horse through a pond” image, it looks like his hands are still nonsensical.

This nitpick about hands sounds desperate. Here we are, with a tech so powerful that it overshadows the default hype it's surrounded by (no small feat, most technologies fail to live up to the hype as you know) ... and the critics merely move the goalpost a tiny bit further, even if the tech scales so well as to make their new goalpost irrelevant in a year.

Sure, but eventually we’re going to hit on environmental and cost-effective power limits of training, and it’s not worth the cost to train the model.

AFAIUI, that’s part of the point that Gebru was trying to make before she was fired.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#120

Post by unity1001 »

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…

> In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things.

Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies.

Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies.

Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages.

AI won't be any different.

The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.

Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler.

Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art.

That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.

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