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The AI Unbundling

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Re: The AI Unbundling

#91

Post by echelon »

lambdaloop wrote: post #82
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.…

We're in month one of these tools, so I think your predictions are incredibly short sighted.

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

And the new workflows will be as well.

> Professional illustrators will always have work

They're in work because the job takes 10,000 hours to learn and individual pieces take 2-10 hours to create. Not anymore. The dam got busted.

> 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.

You tell the illustrator, "I don't like the arm". They come back the next day with something new.

You tell FancyIllustrator.AI or whatever the same and you can draw a squiggly and have ten new concepts to refine from. Game over.

> 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.

This is month one. Everything is about to be disrupted. Even the big tech companies.

This is the biggest singular moment of Innovator's Dilemma in human history.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#92

Post by echelon »

simiones wrote: post #84
echelon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not sarcasm. I'm working in this space and you can check my bio.

If you're not excited by these rapidly improving results, then I don't know what to tell you. I think you can extrapolate what lies just ahead if you think about it.

I've been a tech pessimist for the last two decades of my life, and I can strangely now state that this is the most important and exciting time of my entire life and career. Everything we know is about to change.

I can't believe that this is the timeline we're in and that it's actively unfolding now. It's like a dream. It's hard to grasp and come to terms with.

Just think for a second about what these models are doing. This is going to happen to every product category.

Think too about Carmack's recent claims.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#93

Post by riskable »

mr_mitm wrote: post #77

These recent developments make wonder whether in 30 years we aren't streaming movies anymore, and instead entire personalized movies will be generated for us on demand, based on a few keywords and our past history of rating movies, browser activity, search terms, or whatever else the machines will know about us.

Looking a little further, we will be generated on demand when AI deems it necessary; based on what the machines know about us. With the specific keywords/features it deemed best.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#94

Post by mejutoco »

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…

> Or your example of undocumented people holding up a wall.

I remember this specific example because the artist was paying the workers to do a pointless job. Technically, she was breaking the law. If only for that I thought it was interesting. I am not saying I always like this kind of performance art, but sometimes it reaches you in a way that a painting could not.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#95

Post by simiones »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #87
simiones wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Changing the prompt until it generates what I want is not that different from changing my search terms until the result I want is closer to the top.

Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#96

Post by tonightstoast »

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.

You guys hiring? I don’t see anything regarding careers on the storyteller.io site.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#97

Post by sinenomine »

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…

Trash, but trash minted through an entrenched network of art curators, directors and connoisseurs - this is what makes trashy modern art scarce and valuable, not to mention the tax breaks!

What I and some insiders consider the real art - that is, applying rare well-developed talent to production of unapologetically high-quality sensual artifacts of art - is mostly commercialized by now, with best people employed by the media corporations to produce assets for high-value games and movies. I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network), and feel a tinge of sadness seeing that SD will move the equilibrium here.

The real crux of the matter is that we should provide artists with some decent UBI guarantee, and this should be a humane solution to impending poverty, for each of the professions that are going to cease being commercially viable in the near future.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#98

Post by 0xa2 »

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 is disruptive but only to one type of art - flat. So yes, since we are in front of screens most of the time flat will disrupt some. But art is more than that.

Re: The AI Unbundling

#99

Post by echelon »

tonightstoast wrote: post #96
echelon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You guys hiring? I don’t see anything regarding careers on the storyteller.io site.

Yes!! Email me, jobs@storyteller.io, or join the Discord.

ML and Rust +++

Re: The AI Unbundling

#100

Post by mejutoco »

rco8786 wrote: post #60
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…

Worth noting that this is also currently on the HN front page: https://waxy.org/2022/09/online-art-communities-begin-bannin...

Interesting one, thanks. By the nature of it that art community excludes huge areas of art (concept art, performance art, land art, …). Basically anything that is not a 2d image (sometimes animated) on a screen. To me it matches exactly what I meant with the first type of art, although I admit it is a crude categorisation.

If they charged a small amount per submission probably the would stop users submitting 40 images per second.

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