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Stable Diffusion is a big deal

simonwillison.net

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Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#181

Post by SilverBirch »

seibelj wrote: 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…

I think you're viewing this the wrong way entirely. Don't view AI as something unique, it's just a class of algorithms. View it in the same way that as the anti-lock brakes on your car. Did anti-lock braking systems entirely remove your need to operate the brakes? No. But its net effect was to massively reduce the number and severity of crashes.

All that these algorithms are going to do is slightly bump up the productivity of some people. But that's amazing. Productivity is basically the free money tool. If people are more productive, they get richer for doing less, and the single best thing we can do to improve people's lives is make them richer. Poor people? Make them richer and they'll be happier and healthier. Rich people? Make them richer and tax the hell out of them, make the world better for everyone. Productivity is the best tool we have for making some people richer without making others poorer.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#183

Post by trention »

solumunus wrote: post #106
trention wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is for the sake of humans producing said art. I don't give a flying f*ck about "art" (it's not art) generated by a neural net using statistical patterns.

This is such a strange position to hold. At some point in the future may be confronted with an image that is emotionally stimulating, and you will have no idea whether a human or AI created it. Are you suddenly going to dismiss and discard it just because you subsequently learn it was AI generated? You must see how silly that is. Your "logic" for making AI art illegal is basically "don't like it". Your personal and s…

My position is perfectly logically consistent. Art is distilled human experience and human emotions emerging in a particular context after a chain of events. None of this is true of AI "art".

What is not logically consistent is to claim that a black box utilizing statistical relationships between pixels in a giant dataset is an "artist" and that its products create "value".

The compiler is not a programmer, AI can never be an artist.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#184

Post by orbital-decay »

astrange wrote: post #75
seibelj wrote: 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…

> It's September 2022 - where is my self driving car? Nearly impossible because logic doesn’t work in the real world like it does to make pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://metarationality.com/rationalism I can think of two good businesses you could build with SD right now. Neither of them are text to image models or necessarily "art", both involve using it to visualize other kinds of…

Moravec's paradox is actually an observation only relevant to 80's state of robotics and AI. I don't think it holds true, and low-level stuff does absolutely not cost more than high-level stuff. What holds full self driving back is the vast amount of rare edge cases that can't be dealt with by current methods. (largely because the system is only trained on available data and doesn't understand first principles)

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#185

Post by guelo »

greggman3 wrote: post #168
seibelj wrote: 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…

What affect will it have on kids? Every kid can now just stick figure draw into painting or else ask Siri "draw me a picture of Trogdor holding up a sword" etc... I can imagine that having some kind of large influence on creativity (not sure negative or positive)

I suspect negative, it steals the reward of effort

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#186

Post by TulliusCicero »

abigail95 wrote: post #177
choeger wrote: post #56

> No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are! Maybe that's because we never really thought about it. In hindsight, it's only logical. For an artistic rendering, correctness doesn't matter much nor does understanding the model. For flying a plane or driving a car or just transforming code from one language to another, it very much does.

Surely the best people to create new art from models like this would be artists themselves? Wouldn't this create more jobs for artists? It's just a different tool

That depends on how easy it is to use the new tools.

Getting higher level languages and various libraries/frameworks didn't make coders obsolete, because there was still tons of work to do at a "higher level" that required algorithmic/engineering-style thinking. Yes, previously difficult tasks got a lot easier, but that just meant that even more ambitious projects could be tackled, and that was useful.

In contrast, it may be the case with art that the things a relative newbie can spit out with the help of image generation models are "good enough" for most use cases. Yes, a real artist would be able to squeeze out even more, but many companies may be willing to go with the option that's enormously cheaper and still seems to produce okay results.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#188

Post by frameset »

michaelt wrote: post #129
madiator wrote: post #110

Regarding the ethics. Thought experiment: I look at a copyrighted image, get inspiration, and then draw a new image (which is not the same as the copyrighted image). Is that ethical? But if I do this millions of times, after looking at millions of copyrighted images, is it still ethical (as long as I don't recreated copyrighted images)? Tough questions!

The ethics partly depends on the analogy you choose. I can write a book about a boy wizard's adventures wizard school and that's legal, but if I call them Harry Potter it isn't. I can create Harry Potter fanart and distribute it online pretty freely - but slap it on a mug and sell it, and that's illegal. I can record an audio description of a painting that's as detailed as I like and it's legal to distribute - but ta…

Is your third example correct? Andy Warhol was famous for using photographs of existing art and transforming them only slightly. Roy Lichenstein literally took panels from DC comic books and magnified them and became celebrated in the art world for it.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#189

Post by noneeeed »

choeger wrote: post #56

> No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are! Maybe that's because we never really thought about it. In hindsight, it's only logical. For an artistic rendering, correctness doesn't matter much nor does understanding the model. For flying a plane or driving a car or just transforming code from one language to another, it very much does.

I don't know about that. A lot of the images I've seen SD generate have been interesting but "incorrect" in really important ways that indicate it doesn't _understand_. Things like people's limbs not being connected correctly, or three legs, or a wheel on a car not being in the right place, or elements of perspective that are just off. All things a real artist would never do unless it was intentional.

It's like some of the stuff that GPT-3 generates, it sounds extrememly plausible and realistic but then you read it properly and realise that parts just don't make any sense.

However I don't think these things are show-stoppers, I think we'll see a lot of artists getting good at providing the "feedstock" and guidance to these systems to deal with those quirks and generating some really interesing work.

Re: Stable Diffusion is a big deal

#190

Post by spaniard89277 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #6

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…

I've tried too, and honestly I'll hire artists again (I did several times). It's easy to come up with nonsense, so in the end I think this is a tool in the hands of artists more than anything else.

For threatening artists it should be much better. Maybe it's not the model, maybe it's the interface human-computer that fails, but in the end it's what we have.

Maybe someone with a lot of time in their hands can iterate enough times to come up with something nice and depicting what they wanted. Not for me.

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