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The AI Unbundling

stratechery.com

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Re: The AI Unbundling

#131

Post by rpdillon »

clankyclanker wrote: post #119
sinenomine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This makes me wonder what the costs of training an actual human artist are. Are AIs less efficient?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#132

Post by clankyclanker »

visarga wrote: post #126
clankyclanker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gebru doesn't have anything good to say about AI, it's only downsides. She's biased being an activist and all.

Her position doesn’t invalidate her arguments. How good is a product that can’t stand up to criticism?

Edit: to tie it back to the original criticism: what’s the maximum training cost we’re willing to accept for the model? How can we guarantee return greater than the increased training cost?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#133

Post by cthalupa »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #68
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.

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…

A significant chunk of what you're describing can be solved by a combination of better prompt engineering and repeated inpainting.

SD obviously doesn't understand language in the same way we do, so it can be tricky to describe things in a way that will match your expectations. Once you start to understand the tricks here, it gets easier and easier.

Inpainting will let you fix a lot of the rest. Staircase stops? Select the area where it stopped, get the AI to generate more. People are already doing this to create very complex artwork where there are issues with faces, hands, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9u8qh/img... is a great example of how you can quickly iterate over a scene.

One of the other things people struggle with is consistent characters and settings, but people have found ways to improve this with Midjourney - https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRahIr3-h_V3...

There's more of a learning curve to these tools than most people think, but it's also still miles and miles away from the learning curve required to actually be proficient at the technical aspects of making art.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#134

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

A lot of the discussion around AI now is about the transition of AI from tool to tool-user. Very few are considering how close we might be to the tool-user to tool-maker transition and how much more world changing that will be. We are at the cusp. https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...

Re: The AI Unbundling

#135

Post by tsupiroti »

karaterobot wrote: post #107
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…

This comment is right on the money in making the distinction between illustration/stock images, and fine art, let alone installation or performance art. It's a distinction not made often enough in these conversations. These functions are performed by different people, for different reasons, and they're used in different ways. Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively sma…

> You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.

I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.

It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.

This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#136

Post by ben_w »

rco8786 wrote: post #60
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…

Worth noting that this is also currently on the HN front page: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin...

Huh, was not expecting Fur Affinity to be a poster child for such a ban.

The surprise is not because it’s furry — the art scene is such a large fraction of the furry economy that the introduction of AI art is approximately equivalent to introducing modern farming to, IDK, the 1850s or something — but rather because of that site’s lack of reputation with regards to technology.

Although, perhaps that explains why the quotation is “That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.” rather than the billions in the training sets.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#137

Post by monkeynotes »

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…

Art isn't about skilfully painting a tree. That's artistry. Art is more than that, it's about feeling, evoking thoughts, and yeah, commenting on society.

> It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal.

This is simply untrue, modern art is not "always" anything. And who are you to judge what is going on in the mind of an artist?

I don't know what decade you deem to be "modern" art, but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop. You are the same as generations and generations of people who have been wrong and stuck in the comfort of the status quo. I hate to refer back to Van Gough, but you are a version of the people who missed the point there. And I suppose the social commentary of Pop Art is just trash too?

AI art will hang in a gallery if it evokes a feeling, not because it's a bloody good execution of a painting of a tree. This is how ALL art has been since we moved beyond painting wealthy people. It has to capture an emotion, thought, idea, or whatever else is intangible. Being able to get that intangible feeling across to the viewer is what is special. Not the quality of the craft, that's artistry.

I truly feel sorry for you not having been moved by something more than a beautiful oil painting.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#138

Post by evancoop »

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…

Why does this simply threaten artists? At what point is code a type of creative expression? When are the IDEA for a novel technology and the chops to implement equally viable applications of AI?

Artists are losing today, but why are they in any way more vulnerable? They just seem to be next on the chopping block.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#139

Post by enord »

sinenomine wrote: post #97
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…

Trash, but trash minted through an entrenched network of art curators, directors and connoisseurs - this is what makes trashy modern art scarce and valuable, not to mention the tax breaks! What I and some insiders consider the real art - that is, applying rare well-developed talent to production of unapologetically high-quality sensual artifacts of art - is mostly commercialized by now, with best people employed by t…

What the… do you think the artist you and your clique dismiss as not making «the real art» are peddling in trash? Wasting their efforts clamoring for recognitiom from «an entrenched network art curators, directors and connoseurs»?

That the gilded creators of «the real art» want your pity? To be construed as without agency in all of this?

You elitist buffoon, you know not of what you speak. You know what you like, but you dislike and question the motives of that which you do not know nor care to. Keep it to yourself.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#140

Post by inkcapmushroom »

> This image, like the first two in this Article, was created by AI (Midjourney, specifically). It is, like those two images, not quite right: I wanted “A door that is slightly open with light flooding through the crack”, but I ended up with a door with a crack of light down the middle and a literal flood of water;

I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.

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