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The AI Unbundling

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Re: The AI Unbundling

#81

Post by echelon »

simiones wrote: post #78
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…

> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a k…

My startup can make you sing as Taylor Swift.

Not like Taylor Swift. As Taylor Swift.

We'll have our new product out very very shortly.

We're at end times.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#82

Post by lambdaloop »

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…

Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for.

Professional illustrators will always have work, but their work may be in a different shape than current one, relying on AI as an additional tool to generate images for their clients. In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way. This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.

As for art more broadly, it is much greater than visual art. It will be interesting to see the new ways people find to express themselves with these new tools.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#83

Post by cerol »

nemothekid wrote: post #72
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…

> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. I'll believe it when I see it. How many self sufficient, independent digital…

> I'll believe it when I see it.

I'll second that.

Hell. Even ATMs haven't automated bank tellers yet. Nor has Kindle replaced physical books.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#84

Post by simiones »

echelon wrote: post #81
simiones wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a k…

My startup can make you sing as Taylor Swift. Not like Taylor Swift. As Taylor Swift. We'll have our new product out very very shortly. We're at end times.

Is this sarcasm, or do you think this is somehow impressive?

Re: The AI Unbundling

#85

Post by enord »

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…

You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer.

If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#86

Post by sebzim4500 »

simiones wrote: post #78
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…

> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a k…

>there are relatively few illustration problem you could have where DALL-E/SD/... would help more than searching for an existing image

This is probably true if you want a single image, but if you want many images that look consistent with each other then google images will be little help. Stable diffusion with textual inversion can just about do it though. I would imagine in a few years it will be able to do that better than it can currently generate a single image.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#87

Post by _aavaa_ »

simiones wrote: post #73
_aavaa_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1]. Is it…

But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB. Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.

And you are free to search through the whole catalog of google results until you find an owl that looks exactly like you want. Though this is going to get harder as you want something more specific than a simple owl.

But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"

Re: The AI Unbundling

#88

Post by slowmovintarget »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #64
Jevon23 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This seems to be purely an issue of the size of the network. Parti ( https://parti.research.google/ ) demonstrates that as the number of parameters increases, with no change to the underlying architecture, a lot of these problems simply go away. Basical…

Doesn't "the AI" train on art produced by people? "Just expand the dataset, just increase the parameters" seems like it should hit a wall fairly quickly... and still not be very good, because deep learning systems have no insight.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#89

Post by simiones »

andreilys wrote: post #34
wpietri wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t see why AI generation would be restricted to stock art. There are plenty of very impressive results already that will displace artists further down the chain. I think of it more like, If an artist can support themselves doing commissions of low quality art so they can support their high quality art, that’s better than if they had to drive Uber. https://mobile.twitter.com/xsteenbrugge/status/1558508866463...

The tweet you shared looks like low-effort stock art with a "deep" idea that I have already seen thousands of renditions of. It looks quite similar to a PowerPoint of 36 images picked from stock sites with (slightly fancier) fade transitions between them, and a background soundtrack.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#90

Post by neovive »

simiones wrote: post #78
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…

> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a k…

Very true. It will be a while before the high-end art market is at risk - if ever. Quality human-made art will likely rise in value with the influx of AI art, due to perceived scarcity. The major disruption in the short term will likely be in the stock photo/art market.
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