[HN Gopher] As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation
___________________________________________________________________
As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation
Author : valgaze
Score : 90 points
Date : 2022-08-14 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| acadapter wrote:
| Mail couriers had to teach themselves to drive after many years
| of using horses.
|
| Artists will have to learn how to stimulate AI models in
| effective ways and perform suitable post-processing.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| The corporate automation of creative work is not comparable to
| the choice between different modes of transportation for a
| courier job.
|
| I would gladly trade less efficiency in art generation for more
| artists being employed. "AI stimulation" is not a 1:1 swap for
| being an actual artist.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I think a more 1:1 comparison would be self-driving delivery
| vehicles - which we haven't figured out yet.
|
| and
|
| I imagine a primary motivation for investing in art-generating
| AI is cost savings.
|
| disclaimer: By default, I tend to be less sympathetic to
| artists here. It's due to their communities' collective silence
| about decades of ever-ratcheting (and typically purchased)
| copyright laws.
| whateveracct wrote:
| People are still gonna draw with pencils lol. That's not going
| anywhere. No time like the present to pick one up if you have a
| reason to need to render images imo.
| npteljes wrote:
| Artists will have to find people who pay for the genuine thing.
| We can all buy cheap mass-produced tableware, accessories, and
| so on, yet many thrived on Etsy.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I'm watching an artist play with DALL-E for the past few days;
| it's proving to be a useful tool for inspiring concepts and
| leading her to her own visualizations and execution of things
| that she had not gotten to "gel" previously.
|
| I can recall a little bit of the fuss at the beginning of digital
| art, "is that even real art?" I don't think this fuss has as much
| to stand on. It's a tool for making art; whether it's really art
| or not is a judgement only the individual viewer can make.
| superchroma wrote:
| The linked reaction is probably slightly too alarmist but I am
| also still surprised that this was the field that some manager
| decided to devote millions of dollars of research and development
| funds to automate.
|
| I've read in advice for technical founders that programmers tend
| to want to jump and automate the wrong problems, and this feels a
| bit like one of those cases in retrospect.
| status200 wrote:
| I think the tweet author is missing the meat and focusing on the
| gravy - they themselves indicate that the AI just replicates
| existing styles, so it will only ever produce existing art styles
| with the signature AI blurry weirdness on the details.
|
| A main hallmark of breakthrough artists is inventing new styles
| and making them their own, a feat that AI has yet to perform very
| well (unless you include the aforementioned blurry telltales of
| generation and scrambled letters). Otherwise artists are just
| borrowing ideas from each other anyway so AI removes the need to
| learn someone else's style to replicate it.
|
| In my opinion it will hurt the bottom tier of artists, but the
| ones who create new styles along with their own works will
| continue to thrive.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Let's someone creates an AI where you describe your program and
| it writes it using only existing code snippets. It might put
| 90% or more of software engineers out of work. Saying "but
| software engineers who create truly innovative systems, design
| patterns, languages and approaches will continue to thrive" is
| very limiting.
|
| I fully grasp the concern here. It's not unlike what happened
| during industrialization, but on an intellectual level. I don't
| know what the solution is. Basic income has been floated, but
| I'm having a hard time evaluating all the arguments for and
| against.
| dcow wrote:
| What you describe sounds ideal for the software industry.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Automated trucking, rail and ocean transportation sound
| ideal for the cargo industry, except for the millions of
| truck drivers. You put those people out of a job and you
| have a societal problem that needs to be solved. I'm not
| against progress in any way, but it comes with problems in
| need of a solution
| dcow wrote:
| Of course it does! We'll figure it out.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Technology is _supposed_ to put us out of jobs! But I 'd
| argue it's been doing a pretty terrible job of it in the
| last few decades - we're all still working as much as we
| ever have been. Personally I'd love to have a tool that
| meant I only needed to spend half as long working to be
| just as productive. But it requires more than just
| technology to make that result feasible for the wider
| population.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Has anyone ever tried asking DALL-E to come up with something
| in a style that's unlike any other?
| flipbrad wrote:
| We'll want to be a little careful with how society responds to
| this. Basquiat put it well ( http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html)
|
| Excerpt follows:
|
| "We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who
| apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for
| the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market
| with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears,
| our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of
| French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at
| once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none
| other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect
| he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent
| diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that
| haughty island a respect that he does not show for us
|
| .
|
| We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing
| of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters,
| curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds -- in
| short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which
| the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of
| the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have
| endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying
| ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."
| upwardbound wrote:
| Just to avoid confusion, the page & excerpts you cite are from
| an 1800's French economist named Bastiat, not from the
| legendary 1980's neo-expressionist painter Basquiat.
|
| Since this thread is about art, I figured people might read the
| name Basquiat in your comment and think that he wrote the quote
| you cite, which would in my mind give it greater relevance to
| this discussion than it has.
| throwaway82388 wrote:
| I think it's telling that the primary ethical concerns around AI
| development (at least at OpenAI, if not others) are that AI tools
| not be used to enable propagandists, or to generate violent or
| sexual imagery.
|
| I see comparatively few ethical concerns about the economic
| fallout professional artists and illustrators will experience as
| a result.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Why no sexual imagery?
| chaps wrote:
| (Illegal stuff)
| bdw5204 wrote:
| AI generated art seems like a good way to open up solo game dev
| to people who can't draw. Just run the AI over and over again
| until you get artwork close to what you want.
|
| There are already tools out there for people who want to automate
| the programming part of game dev. I don't see how that's any
| different in principle from an AI that generates art. This seems
| like a better solution to the problem of making a game without
| being any good at art than buying assets since your assets should
| be unique.
| Kiro wrote:
| In case anyone wonders, this is not about DALL-E or Midjourney.
| He's referring to https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-
| announcement
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Transfer learning to emulate artistic style [0] has been around
| for the better part of a decade and has had zero impact on
| artists' livelihoods.
|
| People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent
| that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of
| extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of.
| It's the same reason people watch sports--they enjoy admiring the
| top echelon of human physical ability. Very few people would
| watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids.
|
| I do agree that tools like this could eliminate mediocre graphic
| designers, or anyone else creating visual products that are so
| mundane that their viewers never bother to consider the artist.
| Corporate Memphis [1] designers' days are numbered.
|
| [0] https://blog.paperspace.com/art-style-transfer-neural-
| networ...
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
| kimi wrote:
| > Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by
| realistic androids.
|
| Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It
| would just be different, more like F1.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| People celebrate F1 drivers a lot more than the automakers.
| Senna and Schumacher are far more famous as individuals than
| the teams they drove for.
|
| I guarantee that if there is ever a self-driving cup, people
| will be mostly focused on the human engineering talent.
| kimi wrote:
| Definitely - they would watch androids play because they'd
| root for a team and the people involved.
| marc_io wrote:
| > Why not? a cyclist is a "realistic android" to a runner. It
| would just be different, more like F1.
|
| But the human element is the main thing. This is the crucial
| part. Take us out of the picture and there's nothing very
| meaningful left for other humans to see.
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| best comment.
| morelisp wrote:
| It won't get rid of the bad ones, it'll hollow out the middle
| just like similar processes have everywhere else. There will be
| a few superstar concept artists making ridiculous amounts of
| money, a lump of often barely-competent copypasters/LLM-
| prompters doing it for $5, and no more space at all for people
| to have a career to comfortably grow and train their skills.
| superchroma wrote:
| Presumably many remarkable artists did or maybe even still do
| have unremarkable day jobs where they can get paid to refine
| their skills.
| phi-y wrote:
| The danger of tools like this is eliminating those margins.
| This type of automation will eliminate junior graphic designer
| roles and add new requirements for the experienced graphic
| designers. Both of these affect the job market by making it
| harder to get started and stay. There will always be the high
| end and boutique jobs. The picassos and rembrandts will
| continue to find work.
|
| The starving artist who sells out to create ads or create
| content for commercial entities will find those opportunities
| dried up
|
| A single agency using this tool effectively could "in theory"
| produce 500 times the artistic output from a single artist.
| Vastly shrinking the market for a decent paying career.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Yes. The journey to master artist begins with finding a place
| to crank out a lot of apprentice/journeyman level art. You
| get a little bit better at _some_ aspect of the craft with
| every piece you make; eventually this makes a very visible
| difference from your early work. Regular critique from your
| peers and mentors helps a lot too.
|
| Rembrandt started out as an apprentice, with about four years
| starting around 13 before he opened his own studio. Picasso
| was trained by his art professor father from the age of seven
| in what sounds like a very traditionally hardcore fashion.
| prox wrote:
| Not only that, but your average person is not able to asses
| the quality of an image. Just like the average person could
| not discern your code (or it's quality)
| Thiez wrote:
| Why would that be a problem? They can either pay an expert
| (if they want someone to assess the "quality", whatever
| that may be) or just be happy with their pretty picture.
| alexashka wrote:
| It'll be just another tool in an artist's toolkit. The jump in
| quality among artists since tablets (pens to draw on a computer
| screen) and stock photography became widely available 15-20 years
| ago, has been astronomical.
|
| Not to mention the 3D graphics of the past 2 decades, oh ma gawd!
| It's artist paradise compared to what people had 50 years ago.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Speaking as a professional digital artist, I am not very
| concerned by this. Images created by AI without comparable human
| experience (and therefore meaning), is not the same as art,
| although it can of course look like it. People who are more than
| casual appreciators of images follow and admire artists, and
| their translation of human meaning into an artwork.
|
| I can see this eating into the commercial artwork market, which
| is bad news for the artists that rely on that for income, but
| it's not an existential threat to the meaning of art.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Can I get an "Amen, Brother"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break
|
| Not saying AI/ML won't be damaging and cause negative effects,
| just pointing out that other uncompensated prior art has been
| used to create transformative works before we ever had DALL-E.
| api wrote:
| I get the sense that the same thing is about to happen to many
| forms of creative work as happened to hand crafting during the
| industrial revolution, and if so the fallout may not be pretty.
|
| People still buy hand crafted items of course, but they tend to
| be relegated to high-end or niche markets. The same would apply
| here. The larger number of people employed churning out
| relatively uncreative material would be displaced just like
| weavers and seamstresses were by textile mills.
| adamhi wrote:
| I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for
| digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.
|
| One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've
| generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-
| trivial work to make them "good".
|
| There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the
| hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should
| _not_ look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks ".
|
| There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give
| you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the
| relationships between elements in a composition, or _why_ things
| are the way they are. It 's never exactly right.
|
| It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a
| trained painter to get the _second_ 90%.
|
| But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me
| wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy
| whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me,
| _will_ ) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a
| copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a
| lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it
| anymore.
|
| If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just
| not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Have you seen Stable Diffusion, the AI in question in the
| tweet? The images are astoundingly good, much better than
| DALL-E 2 even.
|
| https://twitter.com/StableDiffusion/
| Thiez wrote:
| Seems the account got suspended.
| a_f wrote:
| Also woth checking out the submissions on the subreddit,
| https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/
|
| Some of them really are outstandingly good. Beyond what I
| expected, and I have had access to Dalle2.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The shadow was wrong in the man-tree-beach-sea image. I guess
| it might be artistically wrong, but I'm sceptical of what
| that even means in this context.
| exitb wrote:
| Oh, that just drives the point home. Any flaw you can find in
| these models to build your hope on will just get corrected in
| the next iteration, only a couple months down the line.
| Aransentin wrote:
| Considering the staggering speed that image generation is
| improving, that 10% gap will only continue to close.
|
| Starting e.g. an art education right now seems likely to be
| extremely nerve-wracking as your talents may very well be
| woefully obsolete by the time you graduate; the exception
| perhaps being those top-0.1% talents that will feed the models
| of the future with new material.
| p1esk wrote:
| So an art training will become more like pro sports training
| where "success" means to be top 100 or so in the world. Note
| it does not prevent one to do arts (or sports) as a hobby.
| People didn't stop playing chess after Kasparov lost to Deep
| Blue.
| bambax wrote:
| > _If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it 's
| just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about
| it._
|
| That is absolutely not what the OP is complaining about.
| They're not saying that because AI is good, they won't find
| work. They are complaining that in training AI for art
| generation, builders took works from living artists, without
| consent from them, and that in so doing allowed generators to
| make new art in the style of said artists.
|
| The example given is that Stable Diffusion even tries to
| reproduce logos/signatures of living artists.
|
| If I produced a rubbish search engine that bore a malformed
| "gigggle" logo using Google colors, how long do you thing I
| would survive before being sued out of existence by an army of
| Google lawyers?
|
| But that's exactly what many AI generators are doing here.
|
| Edit: the first version of this comment confused Stable
| Diffusion with OpenAI, and stated that OpenAI was owned by
| Google. OpenAI has a strong partnership with Microsoft. Stable
| Diffusion is not OpenAI. Sorry for the errors.
| Kiro wrote:
| Not only is your rant about Google misplaced considering
| Dall-E is OpenAI, not Google, but the thread is also not
| complaining about Dall-E. It's about Stable Diffusion
| (https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement)
| which is explicitly trained on working artists. That's why it
| tries to reproduce the logo.
| v64 wrote:
| Dall-E has also been trained on watermarked art. Here [1]
| [2] are some examples from images I've generated exhibiting
| that.
|
| [1] https://ibb.co/Q86zDSw
|
| [2] https://ibb.co/njvLMQ2
| bambax wrote:
| You're right of course! I don't know what I was thinking.
| Dall-e is MS. I will edit.
| alex_young wrote:
| Still wrong. DALL-E is Open AI
| bambax wrote:
| Yes, that's what the edited comment says. Dall-e is
| OpenAI; OpenAI has strong links with MS.
| Kiro wrote:
| Thanks! Good edit. For the record I agree with your
| comment but got distracted by the error.
| WASDx wrote:
| This is frankly what humans have always done, learning and
| taking inspiration from other artists. Now we have made a
| machine that can do the same thing.
|
| In the case of exact reproductions, we have copyright and IP
| laws.
| ThisIsMyAltFace wrote:
| No. This argument comes up over and over and over again and
| it is wrong.
|
| These models are not learning or being inspired in the same
| sense humans are. The laws tgat apply to humans should not
| be applied to them.
| greysphere wrote:
| It feels like a big stretch to consider an algorithm to be
| 'inspired'. Where are the bits that correspond to
| 'inspiration'? Seems like that would answer a lot of big
| questions in philosophy.
| hbosch wrote:
| > and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about
| 5 about degrees"
|
| Actually, I think you can.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| MidJourney is a lot better at making very convincing and usable
| output in one shot.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _It 's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you
| need a trained painter to get the second 90%._
|
| Call me a doomer, but I think this makes the possible
| consequences even worse.
|
| Remember the 80/20 rule.
|
| A lot of modern product innovation is not really about
| improving quality - rather, its about introducing _lower_
| -quality versions of existing products which are significantly
| cheaper than the original but still "good enough".
|
| Dalle2 and friends could fall into the same bucket. If they
| produce artwork that is objectively worse than a human-painted
| version would be, but still "good enough" for many mundane
| usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we might still see
| a wide adoption and displacement of human artists from those
| usecases - along with an overall drop in quality of artworks.
| notahacker wrote:
| > If they produce artwork that is objectively worse than a
| human-painted version would be, but still "good enough" for
| many mundane usecases - stock photos, concept art, etc - we
| might still see a wide adoption and displacement of human
| artists from those usecases - along with an overall drop in
| quality of artworks.
|
| If people are happy with "good enough" they generally don't
| hire a digital artist in the first place (the whole reason
| DALL-E can exist is because there's a _lot_ of digital
| imagery on relevant subjects /objects available to it to
| train, and there's even more an internet search away) or if
| they do, they get one off Fiverr.
|
| For mocking up quick concepts, that might be different, but
| that's a workflow improvement.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >but still "good enough" for many mundane usecases - stock
| photos, concept art, etc - we might still see a wide adoption
| and displacement of human artists
|
| you're not afraid of DALL-E, you're afraid of an army of
| fiverr workers stealing your job. Stock photos and low
| quality art have already been commodified. Very few people go
| and commission bespoke stock art from the individual working
| artist, they get a subscription from one of the gazillion
| content stock photo factories for a few cents.
| saurik wrote:
| Ugh... I somehow hadn't yet even considered the part where we
| all have to tolerate almost every single image we see during
| the day being generated by some creepy AI model; but OF
| COURSE that's how this is going to play out :( :(. I mean,
| mant of the products I purchase on Amazon don't even spell
| check their product marketing images as it stands...
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| the only group that should seriously be concerned is maybe the
| stock photo industry
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I'm still not sure where the line is. Human artists steal style
| all the time. Maybe they eventually evolve into their own unique
| style. But any great artist could definitely imitate many other
| great artists' style.
|
| I'm not sure where the line is for machines. Copying the
| signature is funny, but also fixable. Is copying the style
| fundamentally wrong? If yes, is it wrong when humans do as well?
|
| Feels like an impossible line to define.
| madelyn wrote:
| I think my heuristic is Magic: the Gathering card artwork.
|
| Can DALL-E make set defining breathtaking high res promo art,
| with fantastic composition, style and proportion? Maybe, but
| probably not as well as ex. Raymond Swanland right now.
|
| Can DALL-E crank out the 50x lands and commons needed for the
| set? Almost certainly.
|
| Superstar artists will be fine but I fear the bottom will fall
| out of the craft.
| [deleted]
| kiernanmcgowan wrote:
| A friend and I experimented with using it to generate images
| for DnD items. It's a quick way to get a visual for something
| that doesn't exist, and therefore, does not need to be totally
| accurate.
| digitalsushi wrote:
| Hire a human and "pick any two: fast, cheap, or good".
|
| Or hire the computer and you can have all three.
|
| You're telling me I don't appreciate the genuine artifact? Well,
| tell me how realist painters survived film photography, and how
| film photographers survived digital photography. I'd ask but I
| don't know any anymore.
|
| Subjectivity defines what is good. This thing makes art as
| reliably as 9 bucks gets you fries, a coke, and a burger. Talk
| about disruptive technology.
| vanadium1st wrote:
| I am a working digital artist, my personal feed is filled with
| takes like this. I understand the crisis that artists go through
| currently and I understand their emotions. I've personally made
| peace with it already, but it will take time for everyone and
| there will be a lot of concern, rage and bargaining in the
| process.
|
| All of us artists woke up in the world where the thing we were
| learning to produce all of our lives became 100x cheaper. I've
| been kinda waiting for this to happen for truck drivers or
| translators and was honestly surprised that it got to the artists
| first. But, there's nothing to do now.
|
| There will be a lot of takes trying different ways to deny this
| reality. Like if we agree that this thing is immoral or anti-
| cultural it will go away and our potential customers will forget
| about it. I think that it's a waste of time The industry is not
| completely gone, but it will go though a massive transformation.
| The basic hierarchy of artists will probably stay the same -
| people who were good in the pre-ai era will still be good working
| with the ai. If you've learned your basic skills right - they
| will still work.
|
| I've personally already changed my workflow to use ai art for the
| sketches, ideas and references. And then polish them to
| commercial level using my old experience and skills. It's funny
| how this thing is so new, but I've gotten so used to it that it's
| already hard for me to come back to my old set of tools. And I do
| recommend all other artists to do the same and to try to find
| their place in the new reality - it really seems like there's no
| other way.
| p1esk wrote:
| Do you think the AI will become better than the best human
| artist? In the foreseeable future?
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| As a hobbyist artist my main concern is less the automation will
| replace artist as much as that 99% of that automation will come
| from the 3 companies with deep enough coffers to train and run
| the most complex AIs, and 2 of those companies will be FAANGs.
| Ultimately it will be a future where instead of paying an artist
| X amount for decent art with the artist getting a ~7% margin, it
| will be paying 90% of X to a monopolistic tech company for almost
| decent art with the company's CEO getting a 70% margin
| fleddr wrote:
| I think the concern is fully justified. Those still being
| skeptical of AI art fail to understand exponential progress.
| Usage of various algorithms is about to explode, feeding back
| billions of signals to correct the model.
|
| A second or third generation model may really understand
| relations between objects, depth, lighting, etc.
|
| It's both amazing and scary. A little behind the curve, but
| expect similar developments in music generation.
|
| Given the speed of all of this, the socio-economic discussion on
| AI should really get prioritized, as very little cognitive work
| is going to be safe.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| "A girl in a red dress throwing a Molotov cocktail in a field of
| flowers in the style of Banksy"
|
| "An obese politician smoking a cigar being held up by a crowd of
| starving people wearing American flag pants in the style of
| Norman Rockwell"
|
| "A web page sign up form in the style of Uber"
|
| Content violation or ??. Heck, any cartoon in the New Yorker
| would probably be a content violation.
|
| The hard part, I think, is art making an "on the edge" statement.
| If they allowed this, it could easily - and would - be taken too
| far (depending on what your version of too far is).
|
| I just don't think human art and all the subtleties behind it can
| be algorithmically replaced. They weren't algorithmically
| created.
|
| Corporate soda ads... that'll probably get replaced (but will
| still need layout and mixing)
|
| UI design and video game art (not concept art in game art) seems
| too precise. And meaningful art seems to have too much in baked
| human judgments.
|
| I am as afraid of this as I am of Github copilot. Meaning, not
| much.
|
| DALL-E is super cool, but like AI becoming conscious, I am not
| holding my breath.
| kradeelav wrote:
| It's odd as a design manager, I feel like people focus on the
| wrong things to be alarmed about with DALL-E, and _aren 't_
| alarmed enough about others.
|
| * feels like there will be a subtle shift from (corporate)
| designers as creators to designers as technical sheepherders and
| retouchers. senior designers who have a real nose for art
| direction and understanding the fundementals will be fine.
| interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of blindly
| using these tools without understanding why the "base"
| styles/logos look good. the act of creation is a learning
| experience that this removes.
|
| * I feel like phi-y in a different comment has the most accurate
| read on the situation, given how this will not replace the
| superstar artists who've already gone through the years of
| training and sweat-shop work to refine their craft, but the
| beginner artists who "need" the sweatshop years to get a real-
| world sense of their craft and the money from the more easily
| reproducible works.
|
| * there is a difference from using digital art as a tool (say, an
| apple pencil) to digital art as a resource-crutch (photobashing)
| when crunched for time or resources. I have mixed feelings about
| photo bashing as an art but those who rely on the resource-crutch
| sign may get hit hardest versus the ones that already have the
| raw illustration skills and can adapt/art-direct on the spot.
|
| * copyright laws are gonna be interesting when people start
| trying to "base" results on logos like disney and coca-cola and
| get lawyers sent after them if it's too obvious. My fear is this
| creates yet another power imbalance between those who have the
| money to sic lawyers on others versus not.
|
| * I'm mixed on DALL-E because on one hand and to be perfectly
| blunt, I feel like the most easily reproduced work is ugly/same-y
| as sin, and lacks all originality compared with the more
| creative/taboo-art circles who are the first ones to push
| stylistic and thematic boundaries. I'm not worried about DALL-E
| replacing styles that are inherently harder to reproduce.
|
| On the other hand ... a sense of grace should be extended to
| artists who are affected. Being slowly replaced/treated as
| obsolete is a hard thing to experience, much like how natural age
| is rough on people's emotional states to the point where it's a
| type of trauma. It's messy, and it's hard, and I acknowledge
| there's going to be casualties.
| notahacker wrote:
| Agree with most of what you're saying, but a bit perplexed by
| this
|
| >interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of
| blindly using these tools without understanding why the "base"
| styles/logos look good. the act of creation is a learning
| experience that this removes
|
| Surely with digital art more than most professions the
| understanding of why the end product works is pretty orthogonal
| to the actual technical implementation details anyway? You
| don't understand composition or style or taste or brand
| identity or proportions by creating textures and shapes from
| scratch or knowing your way around a tool. To that extent,
| spending their days filtering mediocre compositions _not_
| created by them and fixing their flaws might give them a much
| keener sense of what isn 't quite working than trying to judge
| mediocre compositions they've put a lot of effort into
| themselves objectively. I can see bigger issues with the
| thought that might be comparatively _dull_ work for a lot of
| people.
| morelisp wrote:
| https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/ didn't predict
| precisely this step of the process, but it's still the solution.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Can you offer up a synopsis?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Title should be more like, artists concerned about Stable
| Diffusion AI model that makes images look human-made.
| antiterra wrote:
| It also apparently copies the artist's logo.
|
| In a way, the "it just does what humans do but faster" argument
| is starting to follow the "a number can't be illegal"
| trajectory.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Either way I support AI art and AI in other fields. Just
| because artists are mad it's gonna take their jobs does not
| seem like a legitimate reason to halt human progress. It's
| just inevitable the way things are going.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Stealing people's work to serve as your training set is not
| human progress.
|
| Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to
| every affected artist for the right to sample their work.
| luckylion wrote:
| What do you think the artists "trained on"? Didn't they
| ever see anyone else's art? Don't you think it influenced
| their art?
|
| If it's a 1:1 copy, I agree. If it's a "that looks
| vaguely like the style that xyz likes to use", I
| disagree.
|
| And I assume you'd run into plenty of situations where
| multiple people would discover that it's their unique
| style that is being imitated. Kind of like that story
| about a hipster threatening to sue a magazine for using
| his image in an article only to find out that he's a
| hipster and dresses and styles himself like countless
| other people, so much so that he himself wasn't able to
| tell himself apart from another guy.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Your entire point hinges on a false assumption;
| "training" a human artist (or programmer) is the same as
| training an AI model.
|
| It is not.
|
| The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of
| other people's work.
|
| _Everything_ it produces is trivially derivative of the
| work it has consumed.
|
| Where it succeeds, it succeeds because it successfully
| correlated stolen human-written descriptions to stolen
| human-produced images.
|
| Where it fails, it does so because it cannot understand
| what it's regurgitating, and it regurgitates the wrong
| stolen images for the given prompt.
|
| AI models are incapable of producing anything but purely
| derivative stolen works, and the (often unwillingly)
| contributors to their training dataset should be entitled
| to copyright protections that extend to the derivative
| works.
|
| That's true whether we're discussing dall-e or GitHub
| copilot.
| cercatrova wrote:
| The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons
| apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses
| first before giving their work a permissive license.
| [deleted]
| teakettle42 wrote:
| All CC licenses, other than the "CC0 public domain
| dedication", require attribution, but CC themselves have
| taken what I'd consider to be an ass-backwards position
| on the matter:
|
| > At CC, we believe that, as a matter of copyright law,
| the use of works to train AI should be considered non-
| infringing by default, assuming that access to the
| copyright works was lawful at the point of input.
|
| https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-
| licensed-co...
| charcircuit wrote:
| >backwards position
|
| It's not backwards. It's the same as if a human artist
| studied it.
|
| Backwards would be thinking that any creative work you
| make is a derivative work of many creative works that
| you've seen in the past which you aren't copying from.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > It's the same as if a human artist studied it.
|
| It's not a human artist, and it can only regurgitate
| mash-ups of work stolen from others.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Where is this said? I'm looking at the collection of
| artists this site is happily offering to rip off (https:/
| /twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo...)
| and there's a lot of people with long careers making
| copyrighted work. I really can't imagine finding a ton of
| CC work by Bernie Wrightson or Wayne Barlowe or Brom or
| Junji Ito, for instance.
| shagie wrote:
| Every time I've been to an art museum (and this is a
| handful, not just SFMOMA), there has been a person or two
| in a room with some, well, art hanging on the wall. They
| had notebook of the appropriate paper medium and art
| supplies and were copying the existing work.
|
| This is not something new.
| https://www.realistartresource.com/the-tradition-of-
| copying
|
| Copying of existing works is part of how an art student
| learns. That this one happens to be a math model at its
| core is an interesting philosophical problem. The other
| people's work to serve as your training set is _exactly_
| what art students do - and the works they copied and the
| works that they have yet to produce are not royalty
| encumbered.
|
| Nor should a mathematical model. It happens that the
| developers working on this problem have gotten it so that
| it can do its learning and creation _many_ times faster
| than an art student in a gallery... but it _still_ can 't
| get hands and faces right.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > The other people's work to serve as your training set
| is exactly what art students do
|
| "Training" an art student and training an AI model are
| vastly different, and your equating the two is, frankly,
| nonsensical and absurd.
|
| An art student isn't a trivial weighted model capable
| only of mapping stolen text prompts to stolen image
| representations of them.
|
| > It happens that the developers working on this problem
| have gotten it so that it can do its learning and
| creation many times faster than an art student in a
| gallery
|
| It hasn't _learned_ anything.
|
| It correlates stolen textual descriptions with stolen
| images, and then regurgitates mash-ups of the same.
|
| This type of AI model cannot produce anything other than
| purely derivative work stolen from others.
| superchroma wrote:
| Whilst automation in textiles, agriculture, etc. brought
| measurable benefits to society, this will have few as it
| stands. I can think of a dozen things that are worth
| automating before this. This leaves me suspecting that
| projects like DALL-E are gunning for Shutterstock's $500
| million annual profit and that's it.
| orangecat wrote:
| _This leaves me suspecting that projects like DALL-E are
| gunning for Shutterstock 's $500 million annual profit
| and that's it._
|
| Do you think AlphaGo was motivated by a burning desire to
| discover better board game strategies?
| egypturnash wrote:
| Please save this comment to refer to when an iteration of
| Copilot starts to make you truly worried for the future of
| your career. Thanks in advance.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation
| starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this
| sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Dude. What the hell kind of anti-life philosophy are you
| subscribing to that calls "being unhappy about people
| trying to automate an entire field of human behavior"
| being a "coward". Geez.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Because automation is generally good, but making an
| exemption for specific cases of automation that
| personally inconvenience you is rooted is
| cowardice/selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism.
| orangecat wrote:
| Yeah, and we should really do something about those
| abominations like Excel and Python that let ordinary
| people create programs without hiring us to do it the
| right way.
| egypturnash wrote:
| There is a big difference between "this is a tool that
| makes some things easier" and "this is definitely
| endangering the skill I spent a lifetime learning".
|
| You will know it when you see it.
| samatman wrote:
| I don't see this as a likely outcome for programming
| assistants.
|
| Software development is heavily labor-constrained, if
| copilot can make everyone a 10x developer, we'll get
| slightly less than 10x the features-per-year on an
| industry-wide basis after contributors shuffle around.
|
| The effect will be most pronounced in application
| development, where a team of 1-5 is about ideal for a
| coherent app made with taste, and that team could produce
| the output of 10-50 developers. Not such a bad thing.
|
| Unfortunately this is unlikely to be true for visiual
| art, I don't predict that making artists ten times as
| productive will meet a latent demand for ten times as
| much art. Could be wrong, but my sense is that about as
| much art is purchased as people want to buy.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Just because some trend feels inevitable doesn't mean we
| shouldn't oppose it. We shouldn't be beholden to the march
| of technology like it's some force of nature that we are
| powerless to resist.
| t_mann wrote:
| Can you give examples of when technology was successfully
| rolled back for social reasons (not because it was found
| to have dramatic side effects, like asbestos eg) and that
| didn't coincide with a massive drop in HDI (like the fall
| of the Roman empire)?
| yanderekko wrote:
| Anti-WMD proliferation comes to mind, but perhaps that's
| a special case.
| t_mann wrote:
| I wouldn't call that a successful roll-back
| unfortunately, they've been somewhat contained at best,
| but they're still being produced and more powerful than
| ever.
|
| Those discussions aside, what I meant by social reasons
| was people wanting to see some tech go away because it's
| automating jobs.
| t_mann wrote:
| This. People thought that photography would make artists
| obsolete, then Picasso came round (simplifying here, ofc).
| Who knows what crazy creative things humans will do in the
| presence of those tools?
| CSSer wrote:
| What progress? We're bruteforcing solutions without any way
| to learn from then. ML eliminates serendipity. I'm not
| strictly anti-ML. Horses for courses and all that, but I've
| got to admit I get weird, "The humans stopped learned and
| the computers started," sci-fi vibes sometimes.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >ML eliminates serendipity.
|
| This is a statement that is pretty quickly disproven if
| you actually pay attention to the generated art. Lately
| I've been seeing TikTok videos where people are using
| DALL-E to create "new aesthetics" - "vampwave", "neon
| apocalypse", etc.
| satyrnein wrote:
| I wonder what is at the end of this road. Hopefully it's not just
| that some junior artists get fired and everything else stays the
| same.
|
| Does the line between novel and graphic novel blur, as more
| authors "direct" AIs to depict what's in their brains?
|
| Is this how we get to infinite generated worlds in the metaverse?
| tmslnz wrote:
| Like I suppose many of us, I had a conversation with an artist
| friend about this very topic. They are concerned about it. Some
| of the generated results are impressive and surely can
| sufficiently replace some subset of the current human output.
|
| But! Seeing DALL-E artwork from a bird's eye view, I am more and
| more convinced that it's just another tool, not a replacement: It
| is amazing good at producing unexpected results, and just like
| GPT3, it does so by regurgitating what is already out there,
| remixing it in somewhat interesting ways. This is an especially
| useful tool to quickly produce mood boards, or communicate an
| artistic intent. However it is not a replacement for the kind of
| thinking required to produce good artwork.
| marc_io wrote:
| I sympathize with all artists who are concerned about these new
| tools. Once I thought about being a full time artist, but life
| got in the way.
|
| However, visual art creates a cultural feedback loop that is
| constantly evolving, it is a crucial mirror that shows us stark
| naked. Just read the history of art.
|
| People should not forget that there is no way this technology can
| make such a vital form of collective expression relevant without
| artists participating in it.
|
| Of course it will disrupt a lot of things, and nobody enjoys
| that, but new ways of meaningfully involving humans in it will
| continue to emerge. Otherwise it would just cease to be relevant.
| xor99 wrote:
| Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out
| to people who feel like they will lose some of their business.
| However, a group of developers has shown what was always true
| about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it
| because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always
| going to be reproducible and remixable.
|
| The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it
| shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and
| its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and
| forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way
| and that's just very standard in art history. People went crazy
| when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an
| overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which
| completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g.
| something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing
| digital art in the way that Warhol's practice was a system for
| producing visual art as a commercial product.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, I'll get worried when DALL-E gets sick of everything it
| has seen, and comes up with something that's new, and maybe not
| even very good at first, but perseveres until it's recognized
| as important. All, while earning its living in some soul
| sucking day job.
|
| I'd actually love to see DALL-E take on the greeting card
| industry. Now that would be fun.
| jmfldn wrote:
| I literally just made a greeting card with DALL-E. Generated
| the image I wanted and had the card printed and posted to the
| recepient for no more than buying a pre-exisiting card.
| Advantage here is that this image concept, which was very
| tailored to the person, didn't exist anywhere in any form.
|
| All my friends and family will get AI cards now!
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Same, but I just posted the screenshot with the birthday-
| related-items search string and thumbnails to her timeline.
| Free and she loved it. Done.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| > Digital art is not permanently interesting.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this. Reproducibility has
| virtually nothing to do with interest in my opinion. I was an
| admirer of plenty of artists before I'd ever seen their work in
| person. Perhaps I am missing the point.
| xor99 wrote:
| I mean it in the sense that using digital technologies to
| produce art is not always going to be interesting. I don't
| mean that I will never find any digital art interesting
| though. Distilled to one point: DALL-E does not wholesale
| capture any rational definition of art reflecting actual art
| history.
|
| I think DALL-E is a win-win by pushing digital art to some
| further extreme and forcing people who are open to art beyond
| the digital to try new things. Digital art had reached a
| point of maximum inertia before this imo.
| t_mann wrote:
| Do you _seriously_ want to go down the 'This is not art'
| path? That battle has been lost so many times for different
| forms of art that are much harder to 'get' for most people.
|
| Also, since you like to emphasize the 'digital' part of
| these works, don't forget we're probably not much further
| than one Master-level project for some mechanical
| engineering students from having AI-generated physical
| paintings.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Ah, I see what you mean, as in digital creation is just
| another in a long line of technologies used for art
| creation, and at some point will just be mundane? I agree
| completely with that.
| goldenkey wrote:
| I think you're wrong. Pretty much all human creations can be
| encoded digitally to a high enough fidelity that the
| discretization process no longer is distinguishable.
|
| And 3D printers for paintings exist, that can replicate brush
| strokes and other techniques, and they will only get better
| over time.
|
| So there's very little left in the human arsenal as the AI
| generation and AI painting techniques both improve.
|
| https://youtu.be/j-UGcGV4zzw
| xor99 wrote:
| Oke I see what you mean, but isn't that just a reproduction
| in physical form? They have Warholised painting with 3D
| printers by creating a systematic method to reproduce art
| using a new combination of craft. I like it but it's not a
| totality.
|
| I can bring up a form of art that is not captured by this
| conceptual scheme. Carsten Holler's SOMA:
|
| The exhibition Soma was installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof in
| Berlin in 2010. Its main element were 12 reindeer in two pens
| running the length of the former railway station. Half of the
| reindeer were fed the fly agaric mushrooms in their food,
| which are part of their customary diet in the wild, and turn
| their urine into a hallucinogen. The reindeer urine was
| collected by handlers and then stored in on-site
| refrigerators for use. The experiment was extended to
| canaries, which were housed in two hanging cage pieces, to
| mice, and to flies. A mushroom-shaped Elevator Bed was
| installed in the middle of the space, and visitors could
| spend the night on the premise for a fee.
|
| Do you see what I mean by this digital art vis a vis the
| collapse of all art being an overreaction? Carsten Holler is
| a real artist, the art is good, and its not reproducible in
| the way digi-physical stuff is. It's experiential art and
| presented in a gallery. Conceptually, its about as far away
| from DALLE-E as possible but its still art and not
| "captured". I think art is not over and DALL-E is not poison
| for artists.
| goldenkey wrote:
| The kind of art you're talking about is "high art" and it's
| a luxury item. The majority of artists don't produce that
| type of art, and will instead lose out in this scenario.
| xor99 wrote:
| A Ferrari is a luxury item. The exhibition was free but
| you could pay to stay the night. The guy also designs
| slides and the tone of his exhibition style is not "high
| art".
|
| Ultimately you are talking about art as a product and
| that means you think all art is captured by Warhol's
| system of art. Which is what all digital artists
| overreacting to this also think. It's not the totality of
| what art is. I like DALL-E. Good work, but now what else
| is there beyond digital art? Or by pushing digital art to
| some more extreme outcome?
| goldenkey wrote:
| Technical artists are far different from performance or
| exhibitionist artists. They aren't even in the same
| realm.
|
| Yeah, art is vast. It includes me saying "Kerflaffle!!"
| while I ride a unicycle and fart out a candle in a dimly
| lit room. But that doesn't usually pay bills and most
| artists don't do this type of art. It serves a different
| audience/consumer. It has a different market cap. Let's
| not confuse oranges and grapefruit.
| notahacker wrote:
| Your link shows you can 3D print a "Rembrandt" if you hire a
| team of people to spend 18 months working on custom
| algorithms for it, and I doubt any art experts were as likely
| to actually be fooled by it as they were by a van Meergeren
| forgery.
|
| Not sure the people selling paintings knocked out in an
| afternoon to tourists who visited their studio and chose to
| buy an original instead of the visually indistinguishable
| print for a fraction of the price have much to worry about...
| seydor wrote:
| I suppose they can make a disclaimer that prohibits AI companies
| form using pictures of their work?
| PaulsWallet wrote:
| There is a response to this tweet where someone says "stop
| gatekeeping art" which while I understand the gist of what they
| mean, seems like a weird thing to say to console someone who is
| concerned they are about to be automated out of a job.
| luckylion wrote:
| I guess the context is "as an art seller, I am concerned", not
| so much "as an artist". Which is understandable, of course, as
| much as anyone would be concerned if their job is in jeopardy.
|
| But framing it as a matter of art does sound like gatekeeping.
| It'd be "that cannot be art, because x" when all they mean to
| say is "please don't stop paying me for this".
| PaulsWallet wrote:
| I don't believe they are framing it as if it is not art. The
| problem they are raising and that it is an AI trained on
| other peoples' art down to copying their signature making it
| appear as if it were a genuine piece from that artist and of
| course yes, they are concerned that they are watching their
| career die in real time because of it.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| I'm pretty _unimpressed_ with the stuff coming out of Dall-E etc
| (I know, controversial opinion on HN, but bear with me). It 's
| technically impressive, but imho, it still hasn't closed an
| essential gap need to make AI truly compelling, and still feels
| like just a modern ELIZA: simultaneously impressive given the
| technology and a parlor trick.
|
| That said, I'm also not too impressed with many contemporary
| "artists", especially the type this person is afraid of being
| replaced with AI.
|
| What I see here is that artists that have turned themselves into
| _art making robots_ are vulnerable to being replaced by _robots
| that are making art_.
|
| As a counter example I present the work of Ben Kovach [0], a
| generative artist, who makes art with robots essentially. All of
| his work is generated from computer programs but there are many
| (and certainly not all) pieces that capture a genuine sense of
| art that I have not seen in either the slew of human artists
| churning out robotic work to satisfy customer demand or current
| generation AI generated art.
|
| Kovach's work reminds me of the work of Factory Record's designer
| Peter Saville, probably most famous for the cover of Joy
| Division's _Unknown Pleasures_ [1]. In a sense Saville is pushing
| form the opposite direction of Kovach, trying to use human skills
| to create art that feels somehow robotic and sterile (whereas
| Kovach does the opposite, create something that feels more human
| than your typical machine generated art).
|
| I don't see current generation a threat to art, but rather the
| trend towards the reduction of art towards being a reproducible,
| automatic process. That is the art that can be replaced with AI
| was already art created by an ad hoc "artifical" artist.
|
| 0. https://bendotk.com/
|
| 1. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/812FS2R2v6L._SL1500_.jpg
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Ha, yes, I feel many artists have been hacking away at styles
| that look good pretty much whatever you throw at them. There's
| a few tricks, and one you get it, you can produce stuff that
| looks great quickly and easily. It's not surprising these can
| be imitated by AI.
| ayngg wrote:
| A lot of art created now, especially for film/ media, already
| goes through a similar process that AI just automates and
| accelerates. Several big concept artists I have met have lamented
| on the fact that many artists in the industry basically churn
| compositions out through mashing references they gather on google
| images or asset stores, not to mention just straight
| photobashing, which has made a lot of the concepts produced
| fairly derivative and homogenized since everything is just
| referencing what google images serves or assets that everyone
| else uses.
|
| Even fine artists have likely had their practice influenced by
| the whims of what the algorithms on major social media outlets
| are willing to favor in order to get engagement. It kind of feels
| like many creatives have been incentivized into becoming slaves
| to these processes, which has in turn made them seem replaceable
| with AI.
| [deleted]
| olivertaylor wrote:
| 100% true.
| RobRivera wrote:
| strong concur, evaluating the creative processes requires
| acknowledging influences, and if pop culture referrence go
| beyond inspiration and become a core influence in style then
| the art aspect becomes industrializable, and in this case
| replaceable by AI.
|
| THE FUTURE IS HERE AND ITS AWESOME
| gary_0 wrote:
| This sounds similar to complaints I've heard about music for
| film/TV. Often stock music is used as a placeholder during
| post-production, and then composers are told by producers to
| just rework the stock music instead of being given time to make
| something original. This leads to most shows having very
| "samey" soundtracks.
| prvc wrote:
| >t does not seem that they have any safeguards in place to
| protect artists
|
| From what? Until strong AI comes about, good human artists will
| always be able to compete on originality and relatability, and
| even afterwards, human art could be valued for its "authentic
| flavor", or something like that. Until then, among humans, only
| the hacks need fear these systems.
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