Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The AI Unbundling

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 207 posts

Re: The AI Unbundling

#41

Post by cleandreams »

I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists.

The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist.

I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience).

Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#42

Post by moultano »

Jevon23 wrote: post #40
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…

>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.

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.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#43

Post by pyaamb »

cleandreams wrote: post #41

I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists. The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce…

Can Dall-E be extended to generate 3d models?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#44

Post by AbrahamParangi »

Jevon23 wrote: post #40
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…

>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 think it’s highly likely that machine translation will still put human translators out of work. We’re probably very close to the point where machine translation is about as good as an average human translator.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#45

Post by burlesona »

> I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher...

You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around.

In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off.

In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed.

If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#46

Post by [deleted] »

cleandreams wrote: post #41

I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists. The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce…

[deleted]

Re: The AI Unbundling

#47

Post by Jevon23 »

moultano wrote: post #42
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.

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.

Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration?

Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.

I'm concerned that the discussions about AI art on forums like HN get distorted because you have people sharing their views on art here, even though they don't actually have a serious and nuanced appreciation of art and they don't have a good understanding of all the types of work that artists do. Maybe you'd be fine with reading a comic book where everyone has seven melting fingers, but people who take comic books seriously as an artistic medium would not.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#48

Post by AbrahamParangi »

cleandreams wrote: post #41

I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists. The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce…

I think if you dig into the latest research you would find that AI is much closer to what you’re imagining than you think.

One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#49

Post by runnerup »

Jevon23 wrote: post #40
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…

>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.

> machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet?

It's not clear if machine language translation may have:

- Increased "demand" for translation by reducing the price of "basic" translation. - Increased overall globalization -- I use machine translation to communicate with contract manufacturers in China, whereas without it I might avoid using contract manufacturers in China. - Due to increased globalization, increased demand for occasional "advanced" translation via professional translators or bilingual.

So perhaps it does greatly decrease or eliminate the large slice of the pie which reflects translation jobs that would exist at the low end while simultaneously greatly increasing the overall size of the pie.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#50

Post by umeshunni »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #44
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 think it’s highly likely that machine translation will still put human translators out of work. We’re probably very close to the point where machine translation is about as good as an average human translator.

My guess is that something like 90% of translation - e.g product manuals, websites etc are now machine translated. Order a random item from China and take a look at their product manual - it's very likely that it's machine translated and not by a person.
Post reply on HN