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The AI Unbundling

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Re: The AI Unbundling

#21

Post by andreilys »

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.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#22

Post by time_to_smile »

andreilys wrote: post #19
time_to_smile wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think AI generated art is even a threat to stock photography, but rather clip art... which isn't too disruptive in my view. I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore…

I’m curious why do you think that AI generation will plateau at its current quality level?

Same reason that self driving cars have plateaued. The things that are really important for that last mile are also really hard and we're not really sure how to get there.

The output between all the major AI image synthesis tools, while impressive, is quite clearly very high dimensional interpolation, and it shares the same limitations in that space as it does the 2d space. We've already thrown insane amounts of data and compute resources at the problem and it's made the things that were done well in the past even better but doesn't move us towards solving the hard parts.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#23

Post by ForHackernews »

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.

oh no, all those blue collar arts jobs are going to be lost! They'll have to retrain as classical guitarists.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#24

Post by bambax »

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 being removed as gatekeepers.

A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?

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 we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#25

Post by pessimizer »

mikepurvis wrote: post #10
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.

I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.

But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learning that 10%, plus the new entrants wouldn't be burdened by having to unlearn a lot of things that were now better done in a different way.

Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#26

Post by harperlee »

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 arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format.

In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#28

Post by wpietri »

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.

Do you have some evidence of this being how we are currently getting quality artists? Talking with one digital artist, my impression was that stock art plus the ever-declining ad CPM rate eliminated most of the lower-level work years ago.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#29

Post by Hamcha »

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.

I am by all means not a big client of artists but I commission custom character art all the time and what makes me commission (especially smaller) artists is their signature style. I have never seen an artist grow from doing boring stock art, quite the opposite in fact.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#30

Post by wpietri »

pessimizer wrote: post #25
mikepurvis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.

But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learni…

It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression.

Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.

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