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No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

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321–330 of 373 posts

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#321
post #34

It's interesting to hear people side with the artists when in previous discussions on this forum I've gotten significant approval/agreement arguing that copyright is far too long. As I've argued in the past, I think copyright should last maybe five years: in this modern era, monetizing your work doesn't (usually) have to take more than a short time. I'd happily concede to some sort of renewal process to extend that p…

> I think copyright should last maybe five years: in this modern era, monetizing your work doesn't (usually) have to take more than a short time. I funny how people who say this kind of stuff are never content creators (in the monetization sense).

The entitlement of the modern artist/musician is unprecedented. Never have I seen so many people expect to be handed a living because they've posted some "content". Musicians and artists now have global distribution with a plethora of platforms. You have to harness that and then work and grind it out. You have to travel and play gigs and set up a booth at art shows.

There's this new expectation that you should just be able to post some music on Spotify or set up an Etsy shop and get significant passive income. It has never ever worked that way and I feel this new expectation comes from the hustle/influencer types selling it.

Most art is crap and most music isn't worth listening to. In the modern age, it's easy for anyone to be a band or artist and the ability to do this has led to a ton of choice, the market is absolutely flooded. If anyone can do a thing (for very loose values of "do") it's inherently worth less. Only the very best make it and it will always be that way.

Source: made a living as a musician for 20 years. The ones who make it are relentlessly marketing themselves in person. You have to leave the house, be a part of a scene, and be constantly looking for opportunities. No one comes knocking on your door, you must drive your product and make yourself stand out in some way. You make money on merch and gigs, and it's always been that way.

This is all to say that copyright law only affects the top 0.1%. The avg struggling artist will never have to worry about any of this. It's like Bob the mechanic worrying about inheritance taxes. Pipe dream at best.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#322
post #32

Each generation follows the prompt a little bit better than the last, but I don't see any revolutions. Fingers are still messed up, eyes are wonky and legs sometimes still fork into two. Fundamentally it's still the same diffusion technique, with the same limitations.

Not only that, but the people working in this space still aren't reading the room, which is not encouraging.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#323
post #184
post #3

This is a before/after moment for image generation. A simple example is the background images on a ton of (mediocre) music youtube channels. They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. I bet all of that disappears over the next few months. On another note, and perhaps other…

> I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff I think this will change as more practical use cases begin to emerge as this is all brand new. For example, the photos you take with your smartphone can tell a story or be annotated so you can see things in the photos you didn't think about but your profile thinks you might. Things will get more sophisticated soon.

I have absolutely no use for my photos being annotated by an AI.

I have had use for LLMs and previous era image gens. I haven't got around to trying the last iterations that this article is about yet.

That use I have had of it is very esoteric, an art mostly forgotten in the digital modernity, it's called "HAVING FUN", by myself, for curiosities, for sharing with friends.

That is by far the greatest usage area and severely underrated. AI for having fun, enjoyment that feels meaningful.

If you're a spam-producer or scam artist, or industrial digi-slop manufacturer or merchant of hype, or some other flavor of paid liar(journalist, influencer, spokesperson, diplomat or politician) then sure, AI will also earn you money. And the facade for this money making enterprises will look shinier for every year that passes but it will be all rotting organics and slops behind that veneer, as it have since many years before my birth.

I'm in the game for the fun part, and that part is noticably improving.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Which service do you use please? I'm wanting to try a paid service, just want to know which ones people recommend.

I've used Midjourney and chatGPT. Midjourney is better for rapid iteration, cycling through options faster, and to a large extent getting "weirder". It's easier to tweak using parameters. ChatGPT is far, far superior (especially now) when you want something more specific that you've already imagined. But it's slower, and unlike Midjourney you don't get four versions to choose to build and iterate on, you get a single…

    > four versions to choose to build and iterate on
How does this work? How do you ask a model to produce four different variations? Or do they have four different models run the same inference?

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#325
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use this technology, you're actively harming creative labor.

Creative labor is going the way of manual labor.

No, I disagree. If anything, all of the (mostly rich) STEM people that I know spend a large portion of their disposable income on things and experiences that creative people make: Music, film, restaurants, art, books/magazines, etc. Image and video generation via LLMs will become one more tool for creative people to make new & cool stuff.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#326
post #193

There is circumstantial evidence out there that 4o image manipulation isn't done within the 4o image generator in one shot but is a workflow done by an agentic system. Meaning this, user inputs prompt "create an image with no elephants in the room" > prompt goes to an llm which preprocesses the human prompt > outputs a a prompt that it knows works withing this image generator well > create an image of a room > and th…

> There is circumstantial evidence out there that 4o image manipulation isn't done within the 4o image generator in one shot I thought this was obvious? At least from the first time (and only time) I used it, you can clearly see that it's not just creating one image based on the prompt, but instead it first creates a canvas for everything to fit into, then it generates piece by piece, with some coordinator deciding t…

I mean, it could very well be that it generates image patches autoregressively, but in a pyramidal way (first a very low resolution version, the "canvas", and then each individual patch). This is very similar to VAR [1]

We can't really be sure until OpenAI tells us.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02905

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#327
post #3

This is a before/after moment for image generation. A simple example is the background images on a ton of (mediocre) music youtube channels. They almost all use AI generated images that are full of nonsense the closer you look. Jazz channels will feature coffee shops with garbled text on the menu and furniture blending together. I bet all of that disappears over the next few months. On another note, and perhaps other…

Its because all those projects and ideas you had- where AI could do the fun work and you would be the middle manager- just became a job.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#328
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>in reality a lot of artists are saying they're getting less work these days Good. That means we as a society get more art cheaper. I've long since grown tired of sponsoring greed of artists.

We'll get more art from AI, but less from humans.

Yeah that fuckin sucks.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#329
post #34

It's interesting to hear people side with the artists when in previous discussions on this forum I've gotten significant approval/agreement arguing that copyright is far too long. As I've argued in the past, I think copyright should last maybe five years: in this modern era, monetizing your work doesn't (usually) have to take more than a short time. I'd happily concede to some sort of renewal process to extend that p…

Finally a reasonable take.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#330
post #23

> Is it okay to reproduce the hard-won style of other artists using AI? Who owns the resulting art? Who profits from it? Which artists are in the training data for AI, and what is the legal and ethical status of using copyrighted work for training? These were important questions before multimodal AI, but now developing answers to them is increasingly urgent. I have to disagree with the conclusion. This was an importa…

> it's unfair for artists to have their works sucked up I never thought it was unfair to artists for others to look at their work and imitate it. That seems to me to be what artists have been doing since the second caveman looked at a hand painting on a cave wall and thought, ‘huh, that’s pretty neat! I’d like to try my hand at that!’

False, copyism as a career has been always looked down at in the arts community. Learning and reinterpreting is a qualitatively different process.
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