[HN Gopher] Don't fire your illustrator
___________________________________________________________________
Don't fire your illustrator
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 305 points
Date : 2023-08-21 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sambleckley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sambleckley.com)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Has there always been this much debate/discussion any time a new
| technology disrupts an industry? Or is this a particularly unique
| case because it touches on what we perceive much more as
| "creative" works?
|
| When audio recording became a consumer product, was there huge
| resistance from live performers? I would imagine so, but I just
| don't know much on the subject.
| laddershoe wrote:
| I can highly recommend an episode of 99% Invisible [1] about
| the musician's strike of 1942, which was a fight about
| royalties from recorded music, but was in large part actually
| about the the loss of livelihood from music recordings. Very
| little new music was recorded for over a year, and the
| president of the musician's union was pushing for record labels
| to pay into a fund that would benefit unemployed musicians in
| order to end the strike. I didn't make the connection when I
| heard this, but yeah, it does feel analogous to what we're
| facing now.
|
| [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/one-year-the-day-
| the-...
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Actually, it was only instrumental musicians being prohibited
| to record. So singers weren't affected and that strike hugely
| contributed music shifting from primarily instrumental
| (earlier jazz, swing) to vocal-focused (jump blues, rock and
| roll and so on...)
|
| It's interesting because it's something which is around us
| every day but most of us don't know about it.:)
| raincole wrote:
| > huge resistance
|
| So far I'd consider the resistance from artists against AI
| "small" to "practically none".
|
| If artists go on street and demain copyright law changes then
| I'll say it's moderate amount of resistance. Luddites did smash
| down machines.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > Luddites did smash down machines.
|
| I feel like I barely knew this and now need to go read up on
| that whole era. Thanks!
| arvidkahl wrote:
| Ive tried letting AI write my articles. It was horrible. I tried
| ignoring AI-powered tools (such as grammar checkers, summarizers,
| rewriters, speech-to-text apps), and the writing process felt
| sluggish.
|
| The middle ground is what works best for me. I use generative AI
| exlusively mid-process, but neither for input (ideas) nor output
| (actual drafts.)
|
| Here's how I write:
|
| - I source my ideas from contemplation or conversations on social
| media. Topics discussed there have at least some pre-validated
| relevance - I sit down for ten minutes and dictate my thoughts
| into a tool like AudioPen (no affiliation, just a fan) which
| summarizes my 10 minutes in 5 or 6 paragraphs. THIS is the AI
| step. The tool suggests a few paragraph structures that I cycle
| through until I find a good one. - From there, I write my draft,
| following that outline. No more AI tools here other than grammar
| checking at the end.
|
| AI is a great writing partner. It's a horrible writer.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > Producing a compelling image with generative AI is pretty easy;
| maybe one in ten images it generates will make you say, "Wow,
| cool!" But producing a specific image with generative AI is
| sometimes almost impossible.
|
| I think this is the meat of the argument and a pretty compelling
| point. I have definitely struggled to get mijourney to create
| certain images that I had in my head and eventually just gave up.
| grncdr wrote:
| Completely off-topic, but if the author happens to be here:
|
| What is the system you are using to justify text? The "hanging"
| parenthesis on "(Understand that what I'm about to describe, ..."
| caught my eye, and it appears that every _line_ of text has it's
| own padding and word spacing to arrange it "just so". I can't
| imagine it was done by hand, but I've never seen it before.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| I didn't look at the code but it looks like they are using the
| Knuth-Plass algorithm.
| zauguin wrote:
| The site uses [unjustifiable] together with [Hypher].
|
| [unjustifiable]:
| https://www.npmjs.com/package/unjustifiable?activeTab=readme
| [Hypher]: https://github.com/bramstein/hypher
| diiq wrote:
| Author here! As noted in another reply, I'm using a custom
| justification tool I built almost a decade ago called
| unjustifiable.
|
| The way it goes about it very silly; you can read more about it
| at https://sambleckley.com/writing/text-justification.html
| choppaface wrote:
| I wish the article quantified the amount of SEO and 'irrelevant'
| content procured in the wild--- it's a large number but also a
| dark art for creators to produce cheaply. The author seems
| somewhat content with the idea of using AI to generate garbage
| content, but this essay might underestimate the profits of
| leveraging existing art to train said AI. It strikes me in the
| current Writer's Strike, studios probably have an estimate of how
| profitable AI could be and aren't sharing that number.
|
| The essay focuses mainly on prompt-slot-machine-based generative
| AI but there's a large suite of work that uses the same research
| to more directly support the artist. Stuff like in-painting,
| controlled diffusion, and re-stylizing.. as long as it's free
| (compared to more expensive art equipment) it should have a
| beneficial impact on artists.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Post seems very biased towards the now. Stable diffusion et al
| are very successful with a certain technique but it is foolish to
| think that is a method which will simply be improved
| indefinitely.
|
| Generative "AI" will take many forms. Ultimately it will likely
| remove much of the "technique" element to creation, depriving
| artists and content owners of income and relevance.
|
| Will this happen overnight? No. I suspect over the next, say,
| decade, AI will be a beneficial tool more than a threat.
|
| At some point, I expect generative AI to become multi-
| sensory(sight, sound, touch). Such systems will work from
| physical models of subjects/environments to produce novel and
| accurate representations based on rich descriptions and deep
| contextual awareness of culture. These systems will not think in
| pixels but in objects and relationships which are then simulated,
| rendered and filtered to match the desires of the users.
|
| I do applaud efforts of the writers and actors to protect
| themselves from competition but I believe it will ultimately be
| in vain. It will be interesting to watch the legal developments
| in this space. It may be necessary for future generative systems
| to provide an audit trail showing how they gained an
| understanding of the world to prove no unauthorized training was
| performed. This merely raises the bar slightly and does not
| prevent future generative systems from deriving important
| relationships via other means, such as 'clean room', high-level
| descriptions being given(perhaps by other automated processes).
|
| For example, while it may be illegal to train an AI to reproduce
| Harrison Ford using his copyrighted works or even images captured
| in a public space, I can reduce Harrison Ford to a set of
| characteristics which can be passed to a generative system to
| produce something indistinguishable from the real Harrison Ford.
| If I am able to document this procedure I see few ways for the
| legal system to prevent it but then again I am no expert in this
| area.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of current "AI". I have found
| LLMs to be particularly unreliable and mostly useless. I also
| find most "AI" generated art to be either boring, inaccurate, or
| in some way not compelling. That said, I think the trend is
| becoming clearer.
| [deleted]
| justrealist wrote:
| These posts are all written with this insane premise that the
| moment in time the post was published, will continue to be the
| status quo for more than a couple months.
|
| > If you've ever used a generative system, I can pretty much
| guarantee that you spent an embarrassing amount of time making
| tiny adjustments to your prompt and retrying. Producing a
| compelling image with generative AI is pretty easy; maybe one in
| ten images it generates will make you say, "Wow, cool!" But
| producing a specific image with generative AI is sometimes almost
| impossible.
|
| Who could possibly think this will be the case six months from
| now? I mean, maybe some of the the content and warnings here is
| fleetingly accurate, but it's truly not a hill to die on. You
| could fire your illustrator and be inconvenienced for a couple
| months until the next stablediffusion update. It's a disservice
| to illustrators to make them feel safe.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Why are AI people always trying to convince me to do something
| now based on an argument that it will work later? Regardless of
| whether you're right a working model six months from now is not
| a working model now. Wouldn't your hypothetical person be much
| better off firing their illustrator in six months?
| jononor wrote:
| Of course. But what should the illustrator do today?
| Considering that there might be a higher risk of getting
| fired in N months/years from now. Probably refine their
| business skills. Maybe also get familiar with the
| capabilities/weaknesses of the latest tools, and how they can
| use them to be more competitive than before?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Six months isn't a long time. People were saying ChatGPT would
| be replicated within that time frame (it wasn't).
|
| I'd bet more along the lines of 1 year. As for six months,
| tweaky prompts might be here to stay.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I think firing your illustrator to replace them with Midjourney
| is like firing your developers and replacing them with Copilot.
| You still need someone to do the job, but now you got rid of
| the person who knew whether the result is actually good. We
| might as well get rid of photographers and illustrate our news
| with cell phone pictures while we're at it.
|
| If a company needs to generate illustrations at a big enough
| pace to require an employee they'd only be replacing their
| illustrator with a worse one. We all know what happens to GUIs
| when programmers develop them, so why would this case be any
| different?
| jononor wrote:
| > We might as well get rid of photographers and illustrate
| our news with cell phone pictures while we're at it.
|
| Wait... Hasn't this already happened?
| Professional/specialized press photography seems way down
| compared to pre-smartphone era? Now a journalist/reporter is
| expected to do a passable photo job on their own. Or a random
| member of the public
| hospitalJail wrote:
| HN users are so strange with their AI denialism.
|
| You have total doomers aware of the AI potential. Horrified at
| the long term consequences of these LLMs. Then on the other
| side you have users saying "Its just another crypto bubble",
| and when pressed, they admit that they never used it.
|
| There is just such a vocal population here that says 'Well its
| not always 100% perfect, so its useless", and they are burying
| their head in the sand that companies are already using the
| OpenAI API to reduce the cost of business.
|
| I genuinely don't understand these people. They don't use the
| technology and they deny how useful it is. There is news and
| real world examples of its usefulness. I can only imagine these
| people manage (money) terribly.
| ska wrote:
| History tells us that both the doomers and naysayers are
| probably wrong.
|
| It seems to be pretty solidly demonstrated now to have some
| limited efficacy across a broad range of areas today, and is
| very effective in some niches (like the articles mention of
| producing SEO fodder cheaply).
|
| Growth from that state though? The only thing you can bank on
| is that nobody really knows.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I don't understand people who think an imperfect product
| provides linearly less value when it obviously provides
| exponentially less in most use cases.
|
| If ChatGPT can replace a team of software engineers why
| didn't you replace that team with four times as many college
| interns years ago? Because you can't combine people capable
| of doing easy coding and get someone who can do moderately
| hard things.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| This is more or less my opinion as well. This is a list of
| current weaknesses of generative AI. No, right now I cannot
| replace my graphic designers. I bet I can in a few years,
| though.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > It's a disservice to illustrators to make them feel safe.
|
| It is also a disservice to encourage managers to make their
| illustrators redundant when we don't yet _know_ that, in six
| months, AI image generators will equal a human illustrator in
| being able to create adequate pictures. This kind of article
| has an important role, namely that of countering hype (often
| based on PR from machine learning companies). That hype is why
| more ignorant people think that AI can _already_ replace crowds
| of employees, when the reality is more nuanced.
| jefftk wrote:
| I'd bet on this being true six months from now. DALL-E 2 came
| out in 2021-01 (19mo ago) and Midjourney in 2022-07 (13mo ago).
| While the quality of images has improved a lot, if you have
| something specific and moderately complex in mind it's still
| very hard to get there just from a textual prompt.
| raincole wrote:
| But the tech did improve a lot in the past year.
|
| One year ago we had textual inversion. Now we have LoRA and
| control net. I know it might not be a scientific
| breakthrough, but in practice it's day and night.
| jefftk wrote:
| I'd be happy to bet that the tech will continue to improve.
| But "producing a specific image with generative AI is
| sometimes almost impossible" seems very likely to still be
| true in February 2024.
| raincole wrote:
| Depending on your definition of "specific".
|
| Of course an AI can not produce an image that matches
| what's on your mind 100%. Because by definition it will
| require you to provide all the information, a.k.a. you
| need to make the image by yourself first.
|
| But I really don't think illustrators are as safe as the
| article implies. Yes, the jobs won't disappear overnight,
| but are there that much demands for illustration to
| support a future where every illustrator becomes 10x more
| productive than before?
|
| (I've done illustration commercially before, while it's
| not my main source of income and I'm junior level at
| best.)
| jefftk wrote:
| Want to try to turn this into something concrete enough
| that we can bet on?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I wonder why people take random internet bets, I've seen
| this on Twitter as well from some prominent people in the
| tech world, who just like betting on outcomes I guess. I
| saw it most recently with the LK-99 "is it a real room
| temp superconductor or not?" bets.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I think often someone tries to frame things into bets to
| pierce the layers of instinctual contrarianism and "have
| strong opinions weakly held" that often pervades internet
| discussion.
|
| More charitably, reframing into a bet gives a relatively
| neutral opportunity of re-stating the discussion/argument
| to more clearly identify areas of agreement/disagreement
| (since a clear definition of the disagreement is crucial
| for forming a bet).
| raincole wrote:
| I was kinda tempted, but I don't think there is such a
| good metric to measure it. (Since the job market is
| heavily influenced by interest rate etc... and if I were
| confident at predicting macro economics I would just bet
| on stock)
| jefftk wrote:
| What if we picked 10 prompts that it seems like an AI
| should be able to depict well, but it can't yet? And then
| iff the best AI tool in February can do the majority of
| them you win?
| raincole wrote:
| I'll bet against it tho. I don't actually believe pure
| text-prompt-to-image will improve much (not in a few
| months at least). I just believe there will be more non-
| text tools to guide AI, like LoRA and control net, and
| they will be more accessible.
|
| Control net kinda did what you said but in a different
| timeframe: it was quite difficult to tell AI to generate
| a person "sitting with their legs cross". Today, it's
| relatively easy to do this with control net, but still
| hard with text prompt only.
|
| Edit: and the sibling comment made me question myself why
| I would ever take a random bet on the internet.
| jefftk wrote:
| We started this thread with:
|
| _sambleckley > producing a specific image with
| generative AI is sometimes almost impossible_
|
| _justrealist > Who could possibly think this will be the
| case six months from now?_
|
| _me > I'd bet on this being true six months from now_
|
| I thought you disagreed with me on this, but it sounds
| like maybe not?
| raincole wrote:
| I was just stating the improvement on SD we've seen since
| DELL-E 2 and Midjourney came out wasn't just about
| "quality of image", but also about "have something
| specific and moderately complex in mind". Thus I
| mentioned textual inversion vs LoRA/ControlNet.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Dalle 2 was out April 2022.
|
| I don't think it will be true six months from now. OpenAI has
| been red teaming a new version for months that goes way
| beyond anything we've seen today. You can see some leaks from
| this video: https://youtu.be/koR1_JBe2j0
| gwern wrote:
| I don't know if that's 'way beyond'. Those samples look
| similar to Imagen and Parti in terms of quality and
| following complicated text prompts. (Look at the
| PartiPrompts for the absurd prompts Parti can execute
| accurately.)
|
| I'm glad to see OA does have a successor for DALL-E 2,
| though: the service seems to have somehow gotten _worse_
| since release.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I shouldn't have said "goes way beyond anything we've
| seen today", but probably it goes way beyond anything we
| will be able to try in this 6 months period. Parti 20B is
| really good at language understanding, more meh Imagen.
|
| >the service seems to have somehow gotten worse since
| release.
|
| Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that they probably
| lowered the number of steps or used a similar strategy to
| reduce the computation.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Dalle 2 was out April 2022_
|
| Sorry, thanks! I accidentally gave the date for the first
| DALL-E.
|
| _> OpenAI has been red teaming a new version for months
| that goes way beyond anything we 've seen today._
|
| Any sign that it's better at understanding complex textual
| prompts, and not just at making high-quality images?
| GaggiX wrote:
| >Any sign that it's better at understanding complex
| textual prompts, and not just at making high-quality
| images?
|
| The video I have linked.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| But in general the better something is the harder it is to
| improve.
|
| From an outsiders' perspective it looks like we've had a
| series of achievements where AI worked impressively well
| considering it isn't a human. But afterwards we got an
| incremental grind that never got close to an AI that's just
| good, period.
|
| I'm very impressed people got self-driving car demos working.
| I couldn't do that. But year after year self-driving cars
| remained a demo, albeit an incrementally improving one.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> year after year self-driving cars remained a demo,
| albeit an incrementally improving one_
|
| You can get a ride in Phoenix today. Order a Waymo from
| your phone, it shows up with no driver.
| https://waymo.com/waymo-one-phoenix/
|
| The number of cities is still small, but it's not a demo
| anymore.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| It's limited to a small number of cities with optimal
| conditions and every ride has a human supervising.
| They're still spending R&D, rather than making a profit.
| That's a demo.
| gedy wrote:
| > While the quality of images has improved a lot, if you have
| something specific and moderately complex in mind it's still
| very hard to get there just from a textual prompt.
|
| I think this gets to an important point. If whoever is paying
| the bills has something very specific in mind, they won't be
| happy with AI (or frankly many artists) at this point. But as
| a creative interpretation of something more general, it's
| actually really good, and I think with many low-importance
| works like the author describes as "furniture" - we really
| don't need to be that exact.
| tasogare wrote:
| [dead]
| samsartor wrote:
| Overall this post is a pretty fair take, but I'm not sure
| intuitive the "latent space" explanation is. I work with
| diffusion models full time and really appreciate how easy they
| are to explain at an introductory level (assuming you don't get
| distracted by the mathematical derivations). But I don't feel
| like I've seen that many good explanations online. I made my own
| attempt in a presentation last year
| (https://youtu.be/c-eIa8QuB24?t=86) but haven't had time to clean
| it up. I keep hoping I'll see a better series from a real
| communicator pop up in my feed but I'm not sure this is it.
| catgary wrote:
| Honestly, as a mathematician-turned-ml-researcher, Song and
| Ermon's mathematical derivations based on SDEs are what sold me
| on diffusion/score-based generative models. This
| (https://youtu.be/wMmqCMwuM2Q?si=fvujznGDHjKH2yUi) is probably
| the best ML seminar talk I've ever seen.
| samsartor wrote:
| Oh definitely. I think that 2021 paper was what sold me as
| well! But I don't think it is very approachable to non-
| technical audiences, and there are a number of other was to
| interpret diffusion models which are pretty intuitive. That
| is also why I like the alpha-(de)blending paper from this
| year.
| csours wrote:
| I don't want any more Disney live-action remakes, but I'd like to
| see more variety in art styles, like the latest animated
| Spiderman and Ninja Turtles movies, which I understand are made
| with the assistance of generative models.
| duckmasterflexy wrote:
| I have been using stable diffusion for my web designs and it's
| been working great for me but I always build my figma designs
| separately. I use the generated designs as a palette where I
| sample from. It's a glorified Behance or Pinterest vision board.
| Chat GPT is similar with code as it's a glorified stack overflow
| where I get inspiration or quick fixes. The AI tools haven't as
| of yet been so cohesive enough to replace the aggregator of these
| pieces of inspiration. Being classical trained in not CS and
| design will always be needed to filter AI suggestions. AI will
| eventually get proficient enough to reach that stage, but as it
| is now, it's not even close.
| kwertyops wrote:
| I wonder if you could elaborate on how you use ChatGPT to
| generate web designs? I'm about to teach a course on web
| technologies and I want to integrate ChatGPT into the
| curriculum.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Yeah, you can create stuff, but the work to do editorial review
| or clean up is still huge.
| asutekku wrote:
| And editioral review would not be huge work on generative art?
| seeknotfind wrote:
| It's about the details. You need to iterate a lot or fix
| pieces to get a cohesive whole.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Evergreen:
|
| Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that
| contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved
| upon.
|
| Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to
| preclude some feature from future realization is false.
|
| As the Magic Eightball says, ask again later.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that
| contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved
| upon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
|
| I wonder why...
| jononor wrote:
| What are you saying? That those that claim critical
| improvements won't happen are well justified? Or that they
| are not and just stuck in the 90ies? Or that a hype cycle
| will happen, but massive impact on trades/jobs will still be
| had? Or something else?
| nottorp wrote:
| Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
| it.
| jononor wrote:
| That does not clarify your claim about what will happen
| much. Are you predicting a 20 year pause in AI RnD
| funding? When will it start?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Very pragmatic view from Sam, he is missing that the "gacha"
| nature will go away
|
| People will prime their image generation with a specific series
| of image and combine them with new prompts, packages will be made
| to prime their AI and then they'll go from there
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > People will prime their image generation with a specific
| series of image and combine them with new prompts, packages
| will be made to prime their AI and then they'll go from there
|
| Whether its finetuning checkpoints, creating
| LoRa/Hypernetworks/TIs, etc., that's already the status quo.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Finally, an opinion popular with no one: Commercial
| illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn
| to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace
| of work.
|
| > This doesn't mean illustrators will stop drawing and become
| prompt engineers. That will waste an immense amount of training
| and gain very little. Instead, I foresee illustrators
| concentrating even more on capturing the core features of an
| image, letting generative AI fill in details, and then correcting
| those details as necessary.
|
| I'm not sure why they think this is unpopular with no one. This
| seems like the logical path forward. In the same way that CoPilot
| isn't going to replace me but it's makes certain boilerplate much
| less painful and avoids the "blank page"/"writers lock" that can
| happen when I go to write a function sometimes. It's just nicer
| to start from something then modify it until I have what I need
| (even if I end up replacing 80-99% of it).
|
| In the same way I imagine it would be nice for an artist to see a
| couple of examples of what their line drawing could be which will
| spark some creativity and then they can do what they want.
| simonw wrote:
| Right, that opinion is popular with me: I love the idea that
| commercial illustrators can add generative AI to their toolbox.
| Those are the illustrators I most want to work with: people who
| can produce the best possible images using the whole suite of
| tools available to them.
| Animats wrote:
| If your idea of illustration is some irrelevant piece of clip
| art, it hardly matters. If the illustration actually illustrates
| the content, you probably can't generate it with current AI
| anyway.
| thelazyone wrote:
| Well put. Big fan of the "Commercial illustrators will keep their
| jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a part of their
| workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" part.
|
| I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what
| Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game
| manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a
| "proper" illustrator because the MDJ images lack character, but
| it's also true that in a few months from now this might change:
| I'll stick with the illustrator to have more consistency in the
| images, but probably the AI could do a fancier job there.
|
| Besides, the "things will change in 2 months" point is a good
| one, but it's been used since a year and a half and things
| haven't changed yet. Sure, the quality of the produced images
| improved, but not in a qualitative scale.
|
| Side note: the link civitai to leads to
| https://sambleckley.com/writing/civitai.com/images which is a
| dead link.
| rcarr wrote:
| > I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from
| what Generative AI is doing)
|
| Why not train your own personal AI on your artwork? Corridor
| Digital did this in the latest attempt to automatise animation,
| they hired an illustrator to create an animation style for
| them, then trained the AI on their drawings.
|
| Link: https://youtu.be/FQ6z90MuURM?t=329
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Seems kind of shady imo. I know businesses is businesses but
| that's seems a bit too mean for my tastes.
| rahkiin wrote:
| This could have been all with consent and adjusted
| payments. AI does not just replace an artist, it can also
| speed up the work tremendously. It gives new possibilities
| using volume.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Ethics of the use of generative AI in the first place
| aside, I'm pretty sure the illustrator was aware of what
| they were intending to do with their work (they even were
| interviewed about it in the behind the scenes video)
| __loam wrote:
| I view this in the same way I view the use of an actor's
| voice for ai generations. Even if the person knows what
| you're doing with their data, it still feels really
| scummy and unethical. The idea that we can sample someone
| else's labor and be able to own that and generate shit
| from it in perpetuity (probably without paying them)
| feels very alienating.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Like being employed to write some code which then is
| owned by someone else?
| Bjartr wrote:
| The illustrator was aware their work was going to be used
| in that way.
| breischl wrote:
| I'm not in illustration, but isn't it already common to
| hire someone to create a "style book" of what it should
| look like, and then have other illustrators follow that?
| eg, I recall animated shows working that way.
|
| Doesn't seem so incredibly different from that.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Care to expand? I have no idea what you're on about.
| woolion wrote:
| I've actually done it [0], I'd like to have an AI assistant
| that I could directly use the results from, and the results
| were really terrible, mostly laughably terrible. I think it
| was too far from what the models handled correctly at the
| time, and given that issue it was not enough training images.
| Although I had also tried with a model that was better at
| handling stylised 2D. I'd like it to work, but I don't think
| it's viable for most people.
|
| [0] https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The question is, since commercial illustrators can be more
| efficient using AI, will the total number of jobs in the space
| lower, or will the expectation for commercial illustration
| increase, thus increasing the workload and keeping the number
| of jobs the same.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| In all of human history, work has always increased. This is
| akin to Parkinson's Law, where work expands to fill the time
| (and now resources) available.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| In most of human history, the type of jobs available were
| relatively stable century to century; today, the types of
| jobs aren't even stable decade to decade.
|
| The automation of physical labor let us turn to
| intellectual labor and creative labor. The coming
| automation of intellectual and creative labor is _not like_
| the previous automations of physical labor, because it
| leaves human jobs _no where else to turn to._
|
| CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video[1,2] covered this
| almost a decade ago:
|
| > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about
| technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles
| will make horses unnecessary.
|
| > The other reminds him that everything so far has made
| their lives easier -- remember all that farm work? Remember
| running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding
| into battle? All terrible. These city jobs are pretty cushy
| -- and with so many humans in the cities there are more
| jobs for horses than ever.
|
| > Even if this car thingy takes off you might say, there
| will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine.
|
| > But you, dear viewer, from beyond 2000 know what happened
| -- there are still working horses, but nothing like before.
| The horse population peaked in 1915 -- from that point on
| it was nothing but down.
|
| > There isn't a rule of economics that says better
| technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds
| shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses
| for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [2]
| (transcript) https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-
| apply
| bsder wrote:
| > In all of human history, work has always increased.
|
| _Production_ has increased. It 's not clear that _work_
| has increased.
|
| Mills and factories used to employ people by the hundreds
| of thousands and maintain people in a blue-collar standard
| of living. Now, no manufacturer even exists in the top 25
| employers in the US--it's all service industry.
|
| The vast majority of the decendants of the people working
| those manufacturing jobs are _not_ working in better jobs
| than those were.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Work has always increased, but work in a specific
| profession doesn't necessarily increase. There are
| certainly fewer phone switchboard operators today than
| there were 100 years ago.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Indeed, but that just means that humans will have to find
| new jobs, not that jobs will become obsolete. How well
| they will find new jobs, though, is another story, based
| on socio-politico-economic conditions of the country they
| reside in.
| singlow wrote:
| I don't disagree, but concerning particular trades this is
| not true. In the mid-19th century there were more than
| seven thousand blacksmith shops in the US, which employed
| over fifteen thousand people, but today there are fewer
| than one thousand professional blacksmiths. Many of the
| products they produced either have lower demand or are
| produced by other means. If you consider the entire
| metalworking industry, we have many more total workers, but
| very few have the skills of a blacksmith.
|
| The number of people who do the current work of an
| illustrator might go down eventually due to AI, but there
| will likely be more total people employed in the process of
| producing illustrations. It is just likely that fewer of
| them will have the skills that today's illustrators need,
| and also likely that fewer of them will command
| extraordinary wages. Many of the jobs that replace it will
| likely be closer to the median wage than today.
|
| Also we will eventually turn the corner and start having
| population decline. For the US this might be just a few
| decades away. And some time after that, work would
| eventually decrease.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| This is completely false; working hours per worker have
| declined after the Industrial Revolution [0].
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#are-we-
| working-more...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That does not say anything about how much work exists in
| aggregate. The human population has gone up, so it can be
| simultaneously be true that the amount of work being done
| increases even as each worker works fewer hours. As well,
| this also says nothing about the quality of work, as GDP
| is going up, so it can also be simultaneously true that
| the quality of work increases even as each worker works
| fewer hours.
| pizzaknife wrote:
| Sam, your character arc reads similar to my own. Thanks for
| putting yourself and your experience (and emotion) into this
| write up. It gives me peace of mind to know others share both the
| haphazard education -> career lineage and the existential
| concerns which maybe are part and parcel with said lineage. FWIW,
| I was a budding pen and ink illustrator when "desktop publishing"
| was tipping past "expensive novelty." Love the write up - thank
| you again, sincerely.
| IKantRead wrote:
| AI will only replace the work of creatives who have _already_
| turned themselves into AIs long ago.
|
| There are plenty of writers and illustrators out there who have
| trained themselves to churn out reproducible garbage over the
| years in order to fulfill the demands of content marketing. These
| jobs will be replaced by AI soon, but by creating content from a
| formula they've already be using a crude form of AI.
|
| I really love Stable Diffusion, but, as a means of creating art
| (including the most common forms of popular art), it can only
| supplement existing work not replace it. I pay for plenty of real
| art in my home and the best works on my walls could never be
| replicated by an AI because what makes them beautiful is
| precisely the human touches that I have yet to see AI generate
| (and suspect it can't). Latent Diffusion Models also have a
| pretty poor imagination.
|
| At the same time Stable Diffusion has gotten me thinking about
| creative projects I could undertake that would have been
| impossible years ago. But it's obvious that all of these projects
| will take plenty of work to create, and SD will ultimately just
| be another tool in the creative process.
|
| I vividly remember when photoshop started to gain major
| acceptance and there was a similar anti-photoshop sentiment among
| "real" designers and artists. What's funny is how many webcomic
| authors I see critiquing AI art, when I remember quite well pen
| and ink comic artist similarly scoffing at web artists that used
| digital tools to create their work.
|
| Hopefully we'll see SD and similar tools accepted as more tools
| to create cool art, rather than a misplaced focus of peoples
| career anxiety.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What are the artist names and descriptions of the art? Would
| you care to share a few? I am curious as to whether your claim
| that they can't be reproduced by an SD model can be shown.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Posts like that nearly always assume the text-to-image and
| "prompt engineering" being used, usually due to the lack of
| experience with those models. This is categorically _not_ the way
| to do it outside of having fun. The way it 's done for
| predictability and control looks much more like "draw the rest of
| the owl, in a manner similar to my other hand-drawn owl" combined
| with photobashing and manual fixing/compositing. It's a hybrid
| area similar to 3D CGI that requires both artistic and technical
| skills if you want to create something non-boring.
|
| This has nothing to do with the model's poor understanding of
| natural language, and will not change until we have something
| that could reasonably pass for AGI, and likely not even then.
| Your text prompts simply don't have enough semantic capacity.
| jefftk wrote:
| You might be interested in the "Commercial illustrators will
| keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a
| part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace of work"
| section of the article, which gets into this more.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| You're right! I've stumbled upon the prompt engineering part
| and rolled my eyes, which was clearly too soon.
| florbo wrote:
| The post actually goes into a bit of detail on that process.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| This was essentially my post
|
| Its like you take your AI to school, or do a Matrix-style data
| upload into your AI so its up to speed on a new concept
|
| Professionals will learn how to do that, the market will cater
| to people that want to do that
| danenania wrote:
| "This has nothing to do with the model's poor understanding of
| natural language, and will not change until we have something
| that could reasonably pass for AGI, and likely not even then.
| Your text prompts simply don't have enough semantic capacity."
|
| I don't think it's going to take AGI to get to this point. It's
| 'just' going to take a top-tier model adding robust multi-modal
| input imho. A detailed prompt plus a bunch of examples of the
| style you're looking for seems like it would be enough.
|
| That's not to say it isn't really hard, but it doesn't seem
| like it requires fundamental innovations to do this. The
| building blocks that are needed already exist.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| There are two problems with this: a) natural language is
| inherently poor at giving artistic directions compared to
| higher-order ways like sketching and references, even if you
| got a human on the other end of the wire, and b) to create
| something conceptually appealing/novel, the model has to have
| much better conceptualizing ability than is currently
| possible with the best LLMs, and those already need some
| mighty hardware to run. Besides, tweaking the prompt will
| probably never be stable, partly due to the reasons outlined
| in the OP; although you could optimize for that, I guess.
|
| That said, better understanding is always welcome. DeepFloyd
| IF tried to pair a full-fledged transformer with a diffusion
| part (albeit with only 11B parameters). It improved the
| understanding of complex prompts like "koi fish doing a
| handstand on a skateboard", but also pushed the hardware
| requirements way up, and haven't solved the fundamental
| issues above.
| danenania wrote:
| I think you're right about the current limitations, but
| imagine a trillion or ten trillion parameter model trained
| and RLHF'd for this specific use case. It may take a year
| or two, but I see no reason to think it isn't coming.
|
| Yes, hardware requirements will be steep, but it will still
| be cheap compared to equivalent human illustrators. And
| compute costs will go down in the long run.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The biggest problem I see with LLM-generated imagery is a
| near total inability to get details right, which makes
| perfect sense when one considers how they work.
|
| LLMs pick out patterns in the data they're trained on and
| then regurgitates them. This works great for broad strokes,
| because those have relatively little variance between
| training pieces and have distinct visual signatures that act
| as anchors.
|
| Details on the other hand differ _dramatically_ between
| pieces and have no such consistent visual anchor. Take limbs
| for example, which are notoriously problematic for LLMs:
| there are so many different ways that arms, legs, and
| especially hands and fingers can look between their
| innumerable possible articulations, positions relative to the
| rest of the body, clothing, objects obscuring them, etc etc
| and the LLM, not actually _understanding_ the subject matter,
| is predictably terrible at drawing the connections between
| all of these disparate states and struggles to draw them
| without human guidance.
|
| You see this effect in other fine details, too. Jewelry,
| chain-link fences, fishing nets, chainmail, lace, etc are all
| near-guaranteed disasters for these things.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| It's mostly a problem of resolution, model size, and
| dataset quality, which can be mitigated with compositing.
| Larger models don't have problems with hands, and if they
| do, it can be solved by higher-order guidance (e.g.
| controlnets) and doing multiple supersampled passes on
| regions to avoid to fit too much detail in one generation.
| Even SD 1.5 (a notoriously tiny model) issues with faces
| and hands can be solved with multiple passes, which is what
| everyone does.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Author conflates legal and ethical options for preventing
| copyrighted work from being used to train ML image generators.
|
| There's nothing _legally_ inconsistent about passing a law
| saying, e.g., "ML training is not fair use". Doing so will not
| even reduce existing fair use rights being exercised by actual
| people.
|
| The author's argument is that doing so is philosophically
| analogous to human creative processes, but those are--and I can't
| underline this enough--human. And the law is not (and cannot be,
| should not be?) consistent in such a way.
| diiq wrote:
| I absolutely agree that an arbitrary line can be drawn; I _don
| 't_ see that that line can be clear and bright enough that
| forms the kind of precedence that can be relied upon by folks
| who don't have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court.
|
| But would be overjoyed to be proven wrong.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Can you give an example of a "clear and bright" line in
| copyright law that does protect "folks who don't have the
| money to fight an uncertain battle in court"?
|
| For context, I'm in the process of translating a work that I
| know for a fact is in the public domain (sole author died 90+
| years ago) and I've still got legal questions that I'm going
| to have to hire a lawyer to solve.
| msla wrote:
| > There's nothing legally inconsistent about passing a law
| saying, e.g., "ML training is not fair use".
|
| Is it still fair use to take inspiration from another artist's
| work? How can the courts necessarily tell if the art was made
| using AI or if it's just someone stealing another artist's
| style? Theft of style isn't currently recognized under the law,
| but it could be.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| 1. Yes. Always has been, within the ambiguous limits of fair
| use.
|
| 2. Discovery. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_educa
| tion/resource...
|
| Some variants of "theft of style" are recognized by some
| courts already, please see the legal literature on music
| copyright and the recent 7-2 SCOTUS decision on Warhol's
| Prince series.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| People in the US forget that passing new laws is even an option
| because Congress is dysfunctional.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _Commercial illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly
| need to learn to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a
| higher pace of work._
|
| This is exactly what I've found to be the case too. People
| outside of this AI media generation community still think it's
| entering some text and getting some output. In reality, there are
| entire workflows constructed to get the exact type of image one
| wants.
|
| Look at:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/14ye2eg/co...
|
| The second image is the output image, but the first is even more
| interesting. It is a node based interface more commonly seen in
| game development tools like Unreal Engine which has a similar
| interface [0]. It is akin to hooking up APIs together to get the
| resultant image. I see the future of image generation being more
| akin to backend programming than actually drawing anything, which
| is to be expected as the actual drawing part is getting automated
| while the creativity now rests in the workflow itself (at least
| until we automate the workflow part too, but that's a far ways
| off as computers can't read minds yet to even know what the user
| wants).
|
| [0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/nodes-in-unreal-
| engi...
| larodi wrote:
| I've been using MJ and dalle to create actually used print
| content for some posters. This process of ai assisted illustrator
| work is very fast. More than 7 works so far, and I'm not a
| designer, just know basic principles .
| canvascritic wrote:
| My partner and I run a handful of small internet side businesses.
| One of our content-driven D2C businesses heavily relied on
| bespoke illustrations for our display ad creatives. we found that
| our ctr was decent, pretty average, but the CPC was killing us
| and ROAS really sucked.
|
| Several months ago we decided to A/B test SD against our usual
| illustrators. In our case the results were pretty dramatic, we
| actually found that the ctr shot up by almost 20% and cvr showed
| a consistent uptick. I don't agree with the blog post's claim
| that AI generated images work best in businesses where the
| content doesn't actually matter; this particular venture is a
| fantastic counter example. In our case the AI-generated images
| seemed to resonate _more_ with our target audience, as we were
| able to achieve much more granular personalization at lower cost
| than before. not only did it reduce the CPA significantly, but
| the tight control we had over creative variations meant we could
| optimize in realtime based on audience segmentation.
|
| Not to mention that our time-to-market for launching new
| campaigns went down by half. no more back-and-forths over design
| nuances, missed deadlines, or creative blocks.
|
| And I do feel a bit mixed about the diminishing role of human
| touch in creative processes. But from a purely growth-hacking
| POV, this was a gamechanger, and we have the numbers to prove it.
|
| Overall I think this is a net win, especially because I don't
| think this needs to be the end of the road for human
| illustrators, but this will force them to adapt and bring more
| sensitivity to the needs of their clients. It makes no sense for
| even a content business to be subject to so much friction in the
| procurement of creatives, and this forces more consideration to
| our needs
|
| Anywho there's efficiency, and then there's soul. Hats off to the
| robots for (mostly) nailing the former, and sometimes surprising
| with the latter.
| thwarted wrote:
| _no more back-and-forths over design nuances, missed deadlines,
| or creative blocks._
|
| This evoked, for me, the "can I get the icon on cornflower
| blue" scene in Fight Club.
|
| How much of this reduction in back-and-forth is influenced by
| the immediate/interactive response (dealing with fewer humans)
| and how much is due to a level of trust-of/delegation-to the
| machine? "A machine generated this icon based on my
| description, there's no need for me to question its choice of
| colors." -- really the classic problem of considering machines
| as infallible and more expert than humans.
|
| It's probably some of both.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What is your type of business and what kinds of images did you
| generate? Curious as I was thinking of doing something similar
| for mine.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| > Overall I think this is a net win, especially because I don't
| think this needs to be the end of the road for human
| illustrators, but this will force them to adapt and bring more
| sensitivity to the needs of their clients.
|
| The advantages of AI that you crow over simply can't be met by
| any human professional artist. A human can't do hundreds of
| revisions profitably. There's increased "sensitivity" and then
| there's needing to read the client's mind.
|
| If you think this isn't a death knell for human illustrators in
| this particular market, you're deluding yourself.
| jononor wrote:
| A professional artist that is proficient in the latest
| generative image models can increase their ability to attend
| to client needs.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| The client "needs" in question here are low cost overall,
| low marginal cost for each revision, and a totally-
| interactive "do what I mean" interface.
|
| Shoving a human artist in the middle is a liability on each
| front.
| jononor wrote:
| Your definition of the needs does not have any
| requirements on the fitness of the output, nor on time
| spent on customer side. That does not seem realistic.
| [deleted]
| chefandy wrote:
| I think your usage of "matter" and theirs is different. It's
| furniture. Furniture "matters" in a restaurant and having the
| wrong furniture can hurt your business-- but compared to the
| food, it's essentially inconsequential.
|
| There's a spectrum of how much furniture matters in any given
| place ranging from very short stay waiting areas to architect's
| offices, and commercial art is no different. If that image was
| truly inconsequential, you wouldn't need one there. Non-
| informational graphics on most non-professionally designed
| power point decks likely matter less. I'd say there's about a
| zero percent chance of a two page spread opening a feature
| article in a magazine being ai-generated unless it's an article
| about ai-generated images, and even then, it probably took
| professionals longer to massage it into shape than all of the
| rest of them. Specificity and per-pixel control is just so
| important in professional graphics workflows and despite what a
| huge stack of people who aren't professional designers will
| tell you, they are simply the wrong tool for the job. It's
| fundamentally the wrong interface. Maybe what Adobe or another
| player who knows what the industry needs will nail it, but it
| won't look like Midjourney-- that's for sure.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm more interested in how this "cross attention" part works.
|
| Being able to combine two different kinds of AI sounds too good
| to be true. It sounds like AGI. Why does it work for SD? Why
| aren't we trying to combine more AIs to create a super AI? Or
| we're already doing this?
| samsartor wrote:
| Cross attention is not really a way to "combine multiple AI
| models" but there are many ways to do that, and actually
| diffusion models are really good at being combined with stuff.
| Especially thanks to tricks like score distillation (see
| dreamfusion3d.github.io). But it isn't anything like AGI
| because the AI is not inventing the combinations itself, and
| even if you could, there is no clear way to make it self-
| directed. These are still processes that require lots of
| programmers being very clever.
|
| Edit: typo
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Another opinion popular with no one: AI will have on artists the
| same impact that Spotify had on the music industry that is, it
| will kill any revenue flow for anyone outside of the publishers
| and big artists/players.
|
| Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical
| distribution - Worse than piracy, which was inevitable too at the
| time, but at least you didn't have to pay your lawyers to
| renegotiate with your label on top of NOT getting any money.
|
| Adobe, OpenAI, whatever: they want artists to draw for them for
| peanuts to train their model, sign a waiver saying "I'm ok not
| getting any money from any AI art made from this", and then
| resell the output for $$$ on something like Splice[1], at the
| same time overtraining such models in ways that make extremely
| obvious whose artist made them in first place.
|
| At the end of the day the model itself is going to be basically
| irrelevant, while knowing whose works were actually used to train
| it being the truly differentiating feature.
|
| But you know, "the AI did this picture, so we don't have to pay
| you."
|
| [1] https://splice.com/features/sounds
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| The music industry has always had a long tail. Its very much a
| go big or go home industry. Do you have any data around revenue
| change for small artists before and after spotify?
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Sorry, no hard data. Mostly the perception of the industry at
| the time. Lots of tales of people quitting, moving, or going
| on "indefinite hiatus".
|
| TBH "Fly or Die" was way more common on the US side of the
| industry. And even in the USA by the late '90s to the end of
| the 2010 it was somewhat doable if you were skilled enough to
| make a living solo (we're talking 60-80K/year max) as a
| "jobber" opening for bigger acts on local venues.
|
| Like, the entire NYC indie scene got a start from this
| premise. If you get a chance, give a look to "Meet Me in the
| Bathroom"[1], which is a documentary specifically of this
| timeframe.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n71c1Szjv08&themeRefresh=1
| deskamess wrote:
| > "the AI did this picture, so we don't have to pay you."
|
| If the court rulings hold and AI works cannot be copyrighted
| then us end users do not have to pay for it either... but that
| seems like a race to the bottom. Like the end of a craft. Why
| would anyone create art if it has no/minimal downstream value?
|
| Artists need to band together in some sort of union or not
| agree to do art with that AI clause or perhaps only do art with
| a no-AI use clause. And have an allowed AI-clause that is
| prohibitively expensive (like in the multi hundred millions per
| piece). That way 'accidents that happen' have a prescribed
| recovery amount plus other requirements like pulling the
| generated artwork. "Hey, we understand it may have been
| accidental, but here is the bill."
| staunton wrote:
| It's not the end of a craft, it just means that the prestige
| of "made by human" will increase even more and _be pushed by
| by companies_ as a means of making money through copyright.
| That means that the few artists at the top will be rich while
| the niche between "art" and "craft" disappears. Professions
| involving visual art become like the music business.
| biogene wrote:
| Whenever there are implications to people's lively hood, its
| always a serious matter - but I hope people are able to
| transition to other roles.
|
| I think Gen AI will commoditize the mundane and "typical", and
| heavily push people into creating something extraordinarily
| unique. I think there is the same pressure even without AI,
| when as a creator you have to standout amongst the sea of
| people vying for people's attention.
|
| I believe GenAI can be useful in a way too. For e.g. If I'm an
| artist looking for inspiration, I can have a GenAI tool create
| some "random" works that I can get inspired from.
| karaterobot wrote:
| No offense, I don't think this is an unpopular opinion. The
| comparison to Spotify is apt though.
| bandrami wrote:
| One thing that will really matter is that the output of AI
| cannot be copyrighted. If producers really go all-in on
| generation we're going to rapidly see a situation where huge
| amounts of material will enter the public domain all at once,
| and we don't really have a precedent for what happens then.
| soligern wrote:
| A human looking at someone's artwork is "training a model".
| It's bullshit and anti progressive to say someone or something
| that is creating derivative works is stealing.
| leeoniya wrote:
| not stealing the work, just stealing the revenue...for very
| little investment.
|
| > A human looking at someone's artwork is "training a model
|
| sure, except that model often takes months or years to train
| (wall clock years, not 1000-core cpu-years). and the end
| result is not a human that can stamp out new/competing
| artwork every 100ms.
|
| for any kind of creative/performance/art work, these are
| watershed times. us coders are not super far behind.
| Retric wrote:
| The second half of derivative worlds is creating an imitation
| of the original not just looking at it, but this isn't some
| grey area.
|
| Even just training the model _requires someone to copy the
| original work_ from somewhere and store it into a database to
| use to train the model. If they don't have permission to make
| _that_ copy then it's commercial copyright infringement
| independent of anything done by the model after that point.
|
| Thus the companies themselves are frequently breaking the
| sale even if nobody ever uses these systems.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Recorded music was going this way whether it was Spotify or
| someone else that drove the final nail into the coffin.
|
| I remember when I was a child, on a Sunday afternoon, my dad
| would put on an album and listen to it. Just listen. Very, very
| few people do that now.
|
| Now we have a lot of demand for "incidental music". Something
| you listen to while you do something else. Driving, reading,
| surfing the net, coding, cleaning...
|
| There was a fundamental shift in how people consumed music that
| started around the time music became portable. Spotify won the
| race, but if it hadn't been Spotify, it would have been someone
| else.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| No no. Incidental music and "music you listen to while doing
| something" are not the same.
|
| Listening to incidental music all the time devalues music.
| And we do it not because we wanted it but because Spotify,
| Apple music etc promote it. Until then "just play random
| stuff that this ML thinks is similar" was not a thing. But
| subscriptions make them more money than if they just let you
| buy albums and stream what you bought. I wish more artists
| didn't sign up for this but unfortunately big labels did.
|
| But you can listen to non incidental music that you have
| specifically chosen while doing something. Even your dad
| could be doing something while listening to music (thinking).
| btilly wrote:
| An example of "music you listen to while doing something"
| that is not incidental music are many sea shanties.
|
| The music had a purpose.
| btilly wrote:
| I'm curious. When do you think music became portable?
|
| The transistor radio was invented in the 1950s. And quickly
| became used as background music as life progressed.
|
| Also incidental music is not a new thing. Tavern musicians as
| background music have been around for centuries. It is hard
| to prove, but likely for thousands of years.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Fair, I should perhaps have clarified that I meant music
| chosen by the listener. Roughly I would say around the time
| the Walkman was invented.
| _glass wrote:
| A positive effect for performers is that people still want to
| go to concerts, but less and less people know how to play an
| instrument. The market is really much better now than even 10
| years ago.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Also, if you're wondering "Well, I could get better terms for
| my art" - Like I said, when Spotify arrived and you were signed
| on a label you HAD to sign the part that said "Yes, you can put
| my music online on Spotify and I will get paid peanuts" or
| else, unless you were Madonna or Taylor Swift.
|
| Or, sure, you can also terminate your record deal. Hope you
| have 500 grands around just for that.
|
| Frankly I don't see it ending much better for visual artists.
| munk-a wrote:
| There was another path here - collective bargaining. When
| small individuals are bullied by large corporations it's
| because those corporations want something from the small
| individuals... they certainly don't care about one or two
| small artists walking away from the platform - but if artists
| can organize and bargain as a group they can ensure a fair
| outcome.
|
| I think the modern world has become too complacent in terms
| of labor organization - the time of plenty left a lot of
| people content to take whatever was given to them because
| there was such a glut of excess that it was freely shared.
| That sharing is coming to an end and we're returning to a
| time when we need to demand fair and equitable treatment.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Freelancers in the united states are not allowed to bargain
| collectively for better prices, as that's considered market
| manipulation/price fixing. ["Independent Contractors" are
| literally banned from forming a union in the USA.]
| Buildstarted wrote:
| Serious question: Are actors, writers, etc not considered
| "Independent Contractors" in the US?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I agree completely, and I have been constantly speaking about
| how AI will be a wealth concentrator, replacing a mass of jobs
| more diverse than previously seen. Unlike previous machines
| which can take 1-2 jobs, when humans get REALLY efficient at
| training AI, it will replacing hundreds en masse.
|
| AI will also have an additional effect: it will be isolating in
| the sense that the need for other humans will decrease.
|
| These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have led
| me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI and
| that tech companies are ruining the world with their
| abominations.
| hnhg wrote:
| Another side effect: the wealth will be concentrated in rich
| tax-avoiding corporations and elites, meaning that the tax
| burden for society will fall even harder on the remaining
| middle and working classes, who will have to pay for the
| upkeep of everything.
| blibble wrote:
| > Unlike previous machines which can take 1-2 jobs, when
| humans get REALLY efficient at training AI, it will replacing
| hundreds en masse.
|
| more like hundreds of millions
|
| > AI will also have an additional effect: it will be
| isolating in the sense that the need for other humans will
| decrease.
|
| unless there's a complete restructuring of our society then a
| repeat of the late 18th century seems to be the likely
| outcome
|
| with their stake in society gone: the peasant class get fed
| up of eating dirt and storm the bastille
|
| (I really, really hope the AI revolution turns out to be just
| hype)
| tivert wrote:
| > These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have
| led me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI
| and that tech companies are ruining the world with their
| abominations.
|
| Do you mean "world is MUCH better off with _out_ AI. "
|
| What you wrote doesn't make much sense withing the context of
| your comment, but I have to ask because there are some
| software engineers that find abominations appealing for some
| reason, or just lack the ability to tell the difference
| between desirable technology and a technological abomination.
| I think a big component of the latter is many software
| engineers' overconfidence in their abilities that makes them
| easy marks, and the willingness of many kinds of hype men to
| exploit that to con them with propaganda.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I am not a software engineer. When (for my work) I/we need
| a decent chunk of development done, we get the pros.
|
| BUT, sometimes I want something that will automate the
| fudge out of my PC (imagine command prompt on overdrive). I
| usually DDG for the solution and end up in some 10yo
| solution in StackExchange, which doesn't do the thing.
|
| My friends have all forgotten their DOS skills.. so I turn
| to ChatGPT and boom! I get me 2 paragraphs script in
| 30secs.
|
| Do I hire devs? Hell yeah and we pay well, and we will
| continue to do so for many years. Do I use ChatGPT for the
| small (personal) stuff? Hell yeah too.
|
| Now, if a company wants to outsource everything to an
| LLM/AI then I wish them the best of luck, coz when
| something will break (and oh IT WILL), Tthe contractor they
| screwed over should charge them x50!!!!
| ceroxylon wrote:
| Definitely agree, LLMs are only as useful as the person
| interpreting and implementing the output; if someone
| doesn't have enough knowledge or context about the thing
| they are trying to solve/create then copy & pasting
| blindly while asking the wrong questions will lead
| projects to disaster.
|
| I have witnessed this firsthand when I dove into the deep
| end on something over my head, GPT-4 Code Interpreter
| went into an error loop and I had to learn all of the
| background knowledge I was foolishly trying to avoid.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| There has to be UBI for A(G)I. Period.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Should it say ,,without AI"? Makes no sense like this..
| badpun wrote:
| > Unlike previous machines which can take 1-2 jobs
|
| There are many machines replacing hundreds or even thousands
| of people- farm equipment, trains, tunnel boring machines
| etc.
| lancesells wrote:
| Not a real equivalent. Those machines are made by many,
| many people along the way. Industries exist from those
| machines.
|
| With software you could say chip makers, developers, and
| energy companies will get stronger but I don't think
| there's a comparison. The keyholders will be a much smaller
| group with a greater power if we stay onboard the AI train.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I meant KINDS of jobs.
| wwweston wrote:
| > Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical
| distribution - Worse than piracy, which was inevitable too at
| the time, but at least you didn't have to pay your lawyers to
| renegotiate with your label on top of NOT getting any money.
|
| It's even worse than you say -- it was murder on digital retail
| too, right at the time when it was on track to compete with or
| exceed old physical sales.
|
| Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them with
| the false veneer of legitimacy.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > > Spotify basically killed any money coming from the
| physical distribution - Worse than piracy, which was
| inevitable too at the time
|
| > Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them
| with the false veneer of legitimacy.
|
| As a side note, in the beginning Spotify used pirated music
| off The Piratebay without asking for permission from the
| copyright holders.
| patwolf wrote:
| I used to purchase mp3s from Amazon, and there was one song
| that had a glitch in it, like it was a bad rip. I always
| wondered if they were using pirated copies as well. I just
| re-downloaded for fun and the glitch is still there.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if e.g. people at Microsoft ran
| pirated copies of Office or whatever. Or like Photoshop
| at Adobe. Getting hold of licenses can be a nightmare,
| and Microsoft products more so in the past. Nowadays,
| every Microsoft license seems handled by some enterprise
| admin account.
| pdntspa wrote:
| It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded
| their library, so while that statement is true it is a
| little disingenuous without further context
|
| There are lots of other examples of this happening too... I
| believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were
| emulators running pirated roms
| ben_w wrote:
| > It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded
| their library, so while that statement is true it is a
| little disingenuous without further context
|
| If anything, that feels even worse.
|
| > I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases
| were emulators running pirated roms
|
| If Nintendo has a licence for the game that the ROM was
| an unlicensed pirate of, while that's weird, it doesn't
| seem fishy in the same way.
| digging wrote:
| That is not at all better.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Fundamentally, neither spotify nor piracy matter. People
| enjoy making music. Today, there are more people able to make
| and publish music then ever, but the day still only has 24
| hours, you can't listen to more music then before. Unlimited
| supply, limited demand.
| ddq wrote:
| Fundamentally, the artists getting paid doesn't matter
| because they enjoy making music? As a musician, your
| comment is completely ignorant, self-centered, and totally
| irrelevant to the discussion of people getting economically
| screwed.
| paulddraper wrote:
| They matter.
|
| Also, like everything in the universe, they are subject
| to supply vs demand.
|
| And fundamentally the supply exceeds the demand.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Problem is, Spotify is engineered to make sure the supply
| stays concentrated in a very, very small amount of hands.
| developer93 wrote:
| What's your opinion of bandcamp?
| raincole wrote:
| No? You completely misread what he said.
|
| As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper
| tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education,
| etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow
| proportionally, the average income of
| musicians/songwriters would decline.
|
| The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence.
| Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much).
| skinner927 wrote:
| That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in
| price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
|
| You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy
| tables.
|
| People still want to listen to quality music from artists
| who have years of practice and experience. You can't
| reliably get years of experience unless you're getting
| paid to do it.
|
| Sure, there are exceptions, but it's not the rule.
| Michael Jackson would not have existed if there was no
| money in the career. The money is why his father pushed
| so (insanely) hard.
|
| The counter argument is trash music will just be the
| norm. And maybe for a while that would happen, but
| eventually we'll see someone (similar to the private
| search engines we see today) come out with a new platform
| with the selling point that artists get a living wage --
| as long as the people demand it, and I believe they will.
| badpun wrote:
| There's still money in making music, just not in selling
| recordings. Biggest touring artists (the Beyonces etc.)
| bring in millions. They, in turn, require skilled
| producers to make their songs, who are also paid well.
| ilyt wrote:
| >That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in
| price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
|
| >You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy
| tables.
|
| Well, yes, and that's how IKEA and mass production in
| general made many people that would be making furniture
| out of the job.
|
| Even in tailor-made stuff good cheap tools does make work
| of skilled maker far quicker. And you can get more people
| trying to get into that if the tools are cheap.
|
| Hardware is cheap, software is free/near free so there is
| far more people trying, when you no longer need to spend
| small car worth of money just to say play electronic
| music
|
| > People still want to listen to quality music from
| artists who have years of practice and experience. You
| can't reliably get years of experience unless you're
| getting paid to do it.
|
| Most musicians got that by playing in garage bands and
| doing concerts.
|
| And many of them did it entirely for free, out of
| passion, till they were good enough, far before fancy
| computers were in everyone's pockets.
|
| > The counter argument is trash music will just be the
| norm.
|
| It is the norm far before Spotify happened I'm afraid
| [deleted]
| Terr_ wrote:
| > You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy
| tables.
|
| That's only true if you assume all the customers desire
| (or are willing to settle-for) arbitrarily bad tables for
| cheap. That isn't guaranteed, but even then... _why are
| you so certain their decision is wrong_? Maybe they
| simply care about something else more than their tables.
|
| Meanwhile, the section of customers who still desire
| _good_ tables will find those good-tables more affordable
| than before, even if they 're a relatively smaller slice
| of the expanded table-market pie.
|
| Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy
| silk and lace enough to embarrass a king. Terribly an
| artful books exists to come up, but I could still
| accumulate a library in my pocket that would be the envy
| of any ancient monastery or place of learning.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could
| buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king.
|
| Actually I think something has happened to the textiles
| industry whereby demand must have driven a certain band
| of suppliers out of business, and now try as I could I
| can't get polo shirts in the same think quality cotton
| weave I could 30 years ago. There is probably some niche
| source possibly online but I don't know how to discover
| it; the standard "throw money at luxury mall brand" route
| seems to not work any longer as the brick and mortars
| have watered down their materials as well. Sic transit
| gloria mundi
| raincole wrote:
| > That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop
| in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
|
| Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop
| in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't
| change, then they'll become cheaper. How much cheaper is
| another question, as circular saws are already very cheap
| today, compared to hand-made furniture.
|
| So yeah, you're right, it's just like saying that.
|
| > if there was no money in the career
|
| It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify,
| more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all
| these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| How would demand grow proportionately? People have a
| limited attention budget to listen, watch, and read
| things.
| raincole wrote:
| Yes, and that's exactly what the GP was trying to say.
| ghaff wrote:
| Ah yes, didn't read far enough upthread.
|
| Of course, this isn't new. Tim O'Reilly said something
| similar in the context of book publishing probably
| getting on to 20 years ago at this point.
| bombolo wrote:
| People being able to afford professional equipment and
| professional session musicians vs a guy recording himself
| in a bedroom over a MIDI karaoke track is not the same at
| all.
|
| If you can't hear the difference, see a doctor.
| ben_w wrote:
| Most people are not professional music critics, and most
| of their consumption is as a backing track to the rest of
| their life.
|
| You could replace most of this category with a Markov
| chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most
| people even thinking about it, and I know because this is
| exactly how I made music for my shareware video games a
| decade ago.
| bombolo wrote:
| Most people are not professional movie critics and enjoy
| more a hollywood film rather than me recording barbie
| dolls and making them talk.
|
| Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with
| a proper music score.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)
|
| Does your game have a wikipedia entry?
|
| Could I assume that people enjoyed outcast more than your
| hobby game?
| ilyt wrote:
| You can make great sounding music using nothing but free
| or extremely cheap software. But yeah, still need a good
| mic.
|
| Even when you go into hardware you can still get plenty
| for cheap.
| bombolo wrote:
| You need time, which isn't cheap :)
| deadbeeves wrote:
| It sounds like you're saying that because one is more
| expensive than the other it is therefore better.
| bombolo wrote:
| I agree that a 2 million $ guitar isn't better than a 2k$
| guitar.
|
| But a 2k$ guitar is certainly better than a 50$ guitar.
| Not only in how it sounds but in how easy it is to play
| it.
|
| My 1st guitar was bad so I couldn't do barre chords. I
| thought I was bad and pros could do it. Turned out pros
| just had better guitars.
|
| Better guitars also have less noise, better cables are
| shielded.
|
| Yes, more expensive is better (up to a point).
| deadbeeves wrote:
| Yes. However, the _instrument_ being better just means
| the _sound_ it makes will be better, not that the _music_
| the musician makes with it will be better.
| ddq wrote:
| No, I'm sorry but you are ignorant.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Many don't see a difference. Just amount of coolnes.
|
| You can apply this on professional filmmaking or
| vlogging. I guess amount of time consumed audiovisual
| production today is much higher on amateurish production
| thanks to antisocial networks.
| bombolo wrote:
| They might not be able to point exactly the problem, but
| they will most certainly enjoy better produced content.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| If you are used to fast editing, loud music and cheap
| filters, you'll get hard time to watch ie Malicks films,
| listen concertos or go to photography exhibition. No
| doubled about qulity.
|
| Nowadays most valuable is attention. Cheap stimuli is
| easier to consume. That's what technology teach us.
| kouru225 wrote:
| An unlimited supply of unoriginal music because artists
| don't have the luxury to experiment anymore.
| matwood wrote:
| Did you miss a /s? There is more varied music being
| created every day than ever before right now. There are
| sub sub sub genres you can seek out if you want. Contrast
| this with when I was a kid and we basically had what the
| radio played or what cassette we could buy with our $10.
|
| The problem now is that we have so much content (music,
| books, movies, short vids, long vids, etc...), and not
| enough aggregate time to consume it all.
| jononor wrote:
| That is not what is happening? There are soo many niches
| and subgenres these days, and it is evolving year over
| year.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| We're talking about the business side of the whole ordeal.
| It's not just about "enjoying making music". It's about
| paying mixing and mastering. It's about paying NTS, Rinse
| FM, and the constellation of medium-small distribution
| channels. It's about distributing on labels like DFA, !K7
| or whatever. It's about making sure that Fabric, Rex Club
| and Sneaky Pete can keep the lights on so they can play
| your music, so you can get paid, so you can keep making
| music instead of _ahem_ having to become a webdev and write
| angry comments on HN.
|
| It's about keeping an entire industry, live or recorded,
| and their milieu alive.
|
| The truth is that what happened wasn't a liberation. It was
| a methodical purge of the medium-sized side of the music
| industry. Now we're reaching the point of having 5-6
| industry giants taking all the money plus...yes, an
| inordinate amount of people making mostly self-referential
| music in their own bedroom on weekends, music that will
| reach no-one outside whatever local scene they hang around.
| But most of them were making music even before, and were by
| their own choice irrelevant to the industry. (True, now
| they can also become influencers on Twitch and maybe one
| out of thousands can make a living by streaming their life
| 24h/day. One ticket for the lottery, please). Whoever was
| between them and the majors is being squeezed out of the
| game.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Imagine Spotify, rather than paying to musicans, just invest
| and publish AI generated music. Sounds like more profitable
| business to me.
|
| I'm not saying that I agree with this approach.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Without copyright protection anyone could copy their entire
| library and set up a rival streaming service. It certainly
| wouldn't be worth much investing in the AI part of the
| business.
| dsign wrote:
| I honestly wonder if people would consume the music they know
| is AI generated. And by "honestly", I mean "I don't really
| know but I want to."
|
| I've been watching videos of Guy Michelmore in youtube. Not
| because I will ever write any orchestral music, but because I
| like his energy and envy his shed. Would I bother if Guy
| Michelmore were an AI?
| paul_funyun wrote:
| I would. Out of the bands I listen to maybe 5 of them I
| could name a single member. I'm a big reader but I couldn't
| tell you one thing about most of the authors other than
| their names.
| ilyt wrote:
| Entirely depends on how good it would become.
|
| It could also have some interesting avenues, like feeding
| some variables to the AI from say a video game (number and
| type of monsters on screen, mood etc.) to generate music
| reacting to what is happening on screen
| t0bia_s wrote:
| It depends on how you define art. You can play music or
| shoot film or paint a picture. AI could do it as well. But
| the essence of what makes good art comes from soul, from
| experience by living, from relationships between us... that
| is created for stories that inspire.
|
| That is not what AI would ever generate.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| And absent some major technology changes Spotify in your
| example has no way to do credit assignment back to the
| training set for any attempts at royalties should they be so
| inclined.
| notefaker wrote:
| This is factually incorrect. If you own your master recordings,
| you stand to make $3,500 to $5,500 per million streams on
| Spotify. Apple Music and Tidal pay even better. This is why
| Taylor Swift is re-recording her entire Big Machine Records
| catalogue. While Spotify did shift consumers away from buying
| singles and albums as individual items, they also opened a new
| revenue source for independent artists.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Can you point me to a current-day independent artist which
| hasn't been signed to a label that is pulling this amount of
| money just on streaming?
|
| If you're already big enough that, i.e., XL Recordings can
| ask you to make a record without getting rights on the
| master, I wouldn't count it as a good example of "indie
| artist".
| raviparikh wrote:
| I make about $4,000 per million streams on Spotify for the
| tracks I've released independently. For label releases I
| make less, but the label promotes them so that sometimes
| results in more net revenue. I have a bit over 10M Spotify
| streams over the last 3 years.
|
| Also, Spotify promotes my music via editorial playlists and
| algorithmic (eg Radio or Discover Weekly), so I'm probably
| making a lot more total revenue than I would have on
| iTunes.
| franl wrote:
| Russ
|
| EDIT: Not making Taylor Swift money, but not many are
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| are you sure he's doing 5k/month just by streaming? No
| syncs nor shows? Also if Wikipedia is right he's signed
| with Columbia Records. AFAIK the only artists making that
| kind money just by streaming while having no strings
| attached EVER (No label distro, no label A&R, no big tent
| agencies) are Macklemore and Chance The Rapper. Just two
| guys over millions of artists on Spotify.
| franl wrote:
| I can't find the article from before he signed with
| Columbia (might've been a YouTube interview with him,
| can't remember for sure), but yes, I'm fairly certain he
| was doing well over 5k per month with no major label.
|
| Also note the terms of his deal with Columbia are unlike
| most major deals in that he has a 50/50 profit split
| after his advance payment got recouped, retains either
| full control or 50/50 control of masters, etc.
| franl wrote:
| Here you go, he mentions it in the first 30 seconds of
| this video. He says roughly $100k per month before any
| label involvement: https://youtu.be/OebNTkTfzHU
| franl wrote:
| > Another opinion popular with no one: AI will have on artists
| the same impact that Spotify had on the music industry that is,
| it will kill any revenue flow for anyone outside of the
| publishers and big artists/players.
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but how much money do you think
| the 7500 creators on Spotify making $100k+ [1] would be making
| without Spotify or other streaming platforms? My guess is
| closer to zero than 100k.
|
| Also 0.09 percent of 8 million creators making 100k+ [1] sounds
| horrible, but my guess is that should be taken with a grain of
| salt. How many folks are included in that 8 million who
| registered, but uploaded nothing? How many uploaded once or
| twice? How many uploaded and did ZERO promo of themselves? How
| many are just plain terrible musicians?
|
| A number of years ago when I stumbled on him, Russ was pulling
| in a few hundred thousand per year from streaming. Looks like
| he's making 100k per week as of a couple of years ago [2]. Yes,
| he's probably an outlier. But he works his butt off on his
| craft, handles production and writing himself, and markets
| himself well.
|
| Headlines like "Big tech and AI destroying the indie music
| industry" get more clicks and attention than "Streaming
| platforms provide income where once there was none" so _shrug_.
|
| [1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/02/24/spotify-
| artist-e... [2]
| https://twitter.com/russdiemon/status/1325853093074923520
| wslh wrote:
| The Spotify example is similar to the Google impact: the last
| mile is the search engine UI that controls your access to
| content. Spotify is another UI as they are streaming services,
| etc.
|
| Seems like a natural iteration in the ordering of complex
| systems. Beyond legal regulations it would be great to start to
| think about new solutions, if they ever exist.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _AI will have on artists the same impact that Spotify had on
| the music industry that is, it will kill any revenue flow for
| anyone outside of the publishers and big artists /players._
|
| _then resell the output for $$$ on something like Splice_
|
| This is silly. The USPTO and Courts have repeatedly stated that
| AI-generated media is not subject to copyright protection, so
| there are no licensing revenue opportunities for the big
| publishers/artists/whatever. This means: AI-generated content
| is not protected by copyright, so anyone can use a piece of AI-
| generated art however they want without a license and unless
| the law changes AI has no value to the content industries.
|
| EDIT: Also, the USPTO has noted that the use of AI-generated
| content in a work will mean that the entire work will be
| presumed AI-generated except for the portions the content owner
| can demonstrate were generated by humans. The backend costs of
| maintaining AI-supplemented works will almost as expensive and
| burdensome as the costs associated with patents.
|
| Also, I think people on HN have a very glorified view of how
| much money musicians make from streaming or cd/album sales:
| basically zilch, unless they're popular enough to be in repeat
| on the radio. Most musicians made their money from performing:
| generally a little bit from ticket sales or venue incentives
| (like % of booze sales) but the real money _for the performers_
| was from the sales of band merch, which is why it gets pushed
| so heavily.
|
| _At the end of the day the model itself is going to be
| basically irrelevant, while knowing whose works were actually
| used to train it being the truly differentiating feature._
|
| Yes, by lawyers, when they sue the owners of the AI model for
| copyright infringement, because this would not be a use
| protected by fair use doctrine. This will actually make human-
| generated works _more valuable_ because now every work used to
| generate an AI work is now worth at least $75,000, even if its
| market value would be significantly less (or even commercially
| worthless) today.
|
| Due to the costs associated with licensing of human works, if
| AI-content becomes a thing, it will probably be more expensive
| than hiring a human to do the same thing, because the model
| will have to account for the cost of paying a license fee for
| every work that was incorporated into a specific output.
| adamc wrote:
| Spotify has been a disaster, but unless the artists walk away
| (very hard to do), I don't see our political system as caring
| enough to do anything about it.
| radley wrote:
| Everyone overlooks the fact that it will still take _someone_
| (i.e. a graphic artist) to produce great AI imagery.
|
| First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll
| get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You
| can't build a campaign on it.
|
| Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff
| competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing images.
|
| At the very least, you can seed the AI with a paid graphic
| artist's work (seed-based AI images can be copyrighted). But
| that artist will do it better than your unpaid intern.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Mmm, I don't know about this. At the very least AI lowers the
| bar for how talented a graphic artist needs to be to produce
| professional work, which means it'll be easier to undercut
| them, which means it'll get much harder to make a living as a
| graphic designer. It amounts to the same thing as killing off
| the profession, as seen from the perspective of someone in
| the profession as opposed to someone without skin in the
| game. It's like saying push-button elevators didn't hurt the
| profession of elevator operator, because somebody's still got
| to push those buttons.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| This is the march of progress. Digital brushes in Procreate
| lowered the bar for how talented an artist needs to be to
| create an oil 'painting'. The camera lowered the bar for
| creating portraits.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| It also raises the bar of what's possible. What counts as
| "professional level" changes each time some new technique
| emerges. A skilled artist will always be better than a
| random person.
|
| The visual entertainment "supply" is not limited by the
| current state of tools. It's always limited by the skills
| of the top crop. Professionals are always ahead and hard to
| come by. The industry's self-regulating mechanism is
| novelty; what is abundant becomes fundamentally
| uninteresting and dies.
| radley wrote:
| > AI lowers the bar for how talented a graphic artist needs
| to be to produce professional work
|
| I think it's a different kind of talent, and not
| automatically a lower bar. The key to being a professional
| artist is being able to offer variants based on given
| direction. Either way, it's much much more than pushing a
| button or holding a lever in place for a period of time.
| danenania wrote:
| I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will
| shift value away from technical proficiency and toward
| creativity and taste. Implementation of an idea/vision will
| be commoditized, but having a great idea, a unique insight,
| the taste and ability to identify top-tier work will still
| be highly valuable. This could well remain true post-AGI.
|
| In graphic arts, the overlap between people with technical
| proficiency and vision/taste is probably quite high, but
| it's not one-to-one. There are people with excellent taste
| who can identify great art or design when they see it, and
| who can perhaps imagine incredible masterpieces in their
| minds, but cannot draw a convincing stick figure. On the
| other side, there are people who can expertly make someone
| else's concept real, but can't come up with a compelling
| concept themselves. AI will be great for the former, and
| bad for the latter (or at least force the latter to adapt).
|
| Whether this will have the effect of concentrating wealth
| or distributing it more widely strikes me as a very
| difficult question. It may be devastating for certain
| professions, but could also enable a whole new class of
| entrepreneurs. I could see it going either way, or the two
| effects may cancel each other out and economic equality
| stays about where it is. We're in the realm of complex
| systems here, so I wouldn't put much stock in anyone's
| prediction.
| bsder wrote:
| > I think AI in general, across almost every industry,
| will shift value away from technical proficiency and
| toward creativity and taste.
|
| The problem is that an artist still needs to eat in the
| 10-20 years it takes to develop "creativity and taste".
|
| What AI will do/is doing is knock out the entry-level
| jobs. If you can't train humans on the entry-level, you
| will eventually have no experienced people.
| prox wrote:
| Also people cannot judge great art or imagery. Unless you
| have had the training. But the average person? Nope. You can
| tell what you LIKE but that's not the same.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I don't have much training but it is not that difficult to
| spot AI arts which is pretty repetitive. The first couple
| are awesome but it gets old really fast.
| soligern wrote:
| AI generated art may be disposable but it certainly is very,
| very good. Midjourney makes plenty of impeccable art and
| photorealistic images that have _no_ flaws. Also, even if
| there are flaws a week with some YouTube videos can teach
| anyone how to fix them, you don't need someone with five
| years of deep experience.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff
| competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing
| images.
|
| No. First off trademarks exist and they found that work done
| solely by the machine couldn't be treated as a work for hire
| copyrighted by the machine and assigned to the operator.
| There is no reason to believe that work couldn't be treated
| directly as copyrighted by the human operator who has
| creative input nor is the matter with the images used to
| train the model truly settled.
|
| >First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes,
| you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then
| what? You can't build a campaign on it.
|
| You can already get variations on a them and text driven
| modification eg make the blank a blank or make the blank
| blanker.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Trademarks are different from copyright.
|
| Random variations aren't interesting, they just make
| something abundant even more abundant and secondary. Unless
| you have a model with sufficient intelligence that can
| create something conceptually original (at which point
| we're all fucked, not just artists or programmers), it's
| not going to fly. Text driven modifications imply
| conceptual human input; besides, they are inherently worse
| than higher-order input, just like text to image alone is
| worthless for anything meaningful.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| There exist systems where you can describe not only
| initial scenes but successive textual modifications to
| existing images and furthermore variations aren't random.
| Successive selections are a way to zero in on a concept.
|
| You are about a year behind the state of the art.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| AKA tell me you haven't spent time with diffusion models,
| without telling it :)
|
| I actually did figure out what works and what doesn't in
| real artistic use. Which is the entire point of the
| article in OP which nobody seem to have read - text
| doesn't work well beyond the basic use or amateur play,
| regardless of it being the initial prompt or editing; you
| need sketching and references (and actual skill) to do
| real work. I don't think anybody's using available
| methods of textual modifications for anything complex -
| they are cumbersome and unreliable, even worse than
| textual prompts. In fact, I haven't seen anyone using
| them at all.
|
| Besides the implementation details, natural language just
| doesn't have enough semantic density and precision to
| give artistic directions, even for a human or AGI. That's
| a fundamental limitation. Higher order guidance, style
| transfer, and compositing is how it's done.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _There is no reason to believe that work couldn 't be
| treated directly as copyrighted by the human operator who
| has creative input nor is the matter with the images used
| to train the model truly settled._
|
| ...Other than the USPTO and the federal court system
| issuing multiple ruling stating the opposite, including a
| decision last week which specifically stated that the
| _output_ of an AI model is not copyrightable, upholding an
| earlier decision by the USPTO...
| (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-
| news/ai-...)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Except for the part where the court didn't find that. It
| found that work only created by the AI didn't qualify.
| Had it asked if a work created by the AI AND the person
| qualified it would no doubt have qualified as is already
| clear from using photoshop not serving to remove your
| ability to produce copyrightable works. The case didn't
| ask that and therefore it wasn't answered in any
| meaningful fashion.
|
| The act of prompting and customizing iteratively
| especially in systems which allow the user to submit a
| prompt that modifies the existing work for example
| "replace the human being with a monkey" "make the monkey
| pink" etc are clearly creative works that USE an AI not
| uncopyrightable.
|
| If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot do
| so on the basis of a case that literally never addressed
| that issue unless you would like to traverse the muddy
| ground between actuality and fiction.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The ruling stated that the Constitutional justification
| for copyright (and other IP) laws was to incentivize
| creators. AI does not need incentives, and thus AI-
| generated content cannot qualify for copyright. Under
| this line of reasoning, _neither can patents_ (though
| note that trademarks derive value from the resources and
| effort spent promoting them, not from their creation, so
| trademarks are unaffected).
|
| _The act of prompting and customizing iteratively
| especially in systems which allow the user to submit a
| prompt ...are clearly creative works that USE an AI not
| uncopyrightable._
|
| _If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot
| do so on the basis of a case that literally never
| addressed that issue unless you would like to traverse
| the muddy ground between actuality and fiction._
|
| The case literally deals with the _output_ of the AI
| model, not the input. But on that note...under existing
| law, code can be copyrighted _but not its output_. Thus,
| it is logical to reason that prompts to an AI model can
| also be copyrighted to the extent they are not strictly
| functional.
|
| But with AI models and content generally, nobody cares
| about the prompts/inputs. The output is what matters.
| (For comparison: Deep Impact and Armaggedon were both the
| results of the same input: disaster movie in which a team
| of astronaughts has to go to the asteroid to blow it up
| before it destroys Earth. The "models" were different
| screenwriters and directors. Compare the outputs: one is
| a blockbuster classic, and most people don't remember the
| other movie.)
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I agree with you, but the main problem is that illustrators
| are under-appreciated. We are in a world where management
| with no technical knowledge are having too much power and
| stealing paychecks.
| radley wrote:
| I totally know. I started as an illustrator:
|
| https://radleymarx.com/work/elemental/
| The_Blade wrote:
| sewing machine
| SnowdustDev wrote:
| > Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical
| distribution - Worse than piracy
|
| Any sources for this?
|
| I'm of the impression physical distribution is on the rise
| compared to the earlier days of digital music. This has nothing
| to do with Spotify, and all about the digitization of music
| itself.
|
| Anecdotally many people I know now purchase merchandise and
| media as a way to support an artist they like, rather than
| listen to the music they make in a physical format.
| greatNespresso wrote:
| Insightful, agree with the fact that AI will help to fill up the
| "furniture" more easily, faster and for a cheaper price than any
| human could. Regarding transparency of training data, this is
| where I see huge opportunities in AI for the near future.
| woolion wrote:
| I used to think that the generative AI impact would be pretty low
| because these images always have some artifacts that I find
| pretty jarring, and that require fairly high artistic skills to
| fix. However that was completely wrong: most people don't care!
| Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming
| it.
|
| The second point, "only spammy garbage content" will be happy
| with AI generated content, is already proved wrong given the
| quantity of high profile blogs that rely on it. They don't have
| the budget for the maybe 5% improvement you can get by paying an
| artist, and 0 of the risks common with artists (difficult to work
| with, missing deadlines, etc etc).
|
| In a way it doesn't even make sense: the artist is also is also a
| generative blackbox. It's better in understanding precise
| prompts, but exactly as in software engineering the problem is
| often that the spec is wrong, the commissioner cannot get exactly
| the image they dream of because they cannot imagine it without
| having pretty high artistic skills. Or a number of iterations are
| needed, making the process quite long and costly.
|
| There are other reasons why artists won't be entirely replaced,
| especially the highest paid, but a good chunk of their potential
| income sources have already been wiped out, and the proportion
| will only increase.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > However that was completely wrong: most people don't care!
| Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming
| it.
|
| For the people making and consuming on Reddit maybe. I think
| that people who want this to replace graphic design work will
| want more attention to detail.
| raincole wrote:
| > I used to think that the generative AI impact would be pretty
| low because these images always have some artifacts that I find
| pretty jarring, and that require fairly high artistic skills to
| fix. However that was completely wrong: most people don't care!
| Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming
| it.
|
| Sometimes I feel professional people are so good at their
| crafts that they're disconnected from general audiences. It's
| kinda like a programmer trying to convice a data scientist that
| Python is not that good of a programming language, while the
| data scientist is perfectly fine with it.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| My takeaway from generative art as a former illustrator and now
| data scientist is never has it been more obvious why artistic
| skill and taste are necessary for making images, while at the
| same time never have those things been more irrelevant because
| of the audience for the work.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I'm hoping that someone comes out with an open source version of
| Imagen or something similar.
|
| https://imagen.research.google/
|
| Or Parti https://sites.research.google/parti/
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is almost exactly how I see GPT and code. I have seen smart
| people who don't write code toss GPT a request and get a working
| thing but going from "hey write me an auto presser for a key on a
| timer" to "The client wants you to update the repo to handle this
| business logic and do this functionality" is a huge leap.
|
| From my perspective, you still need a developer-minded person to
| do the job, AI just kind of makes their lives easier in the
| process.
|
| I agree with the sentiment that it's the same in the art world.
| It's easy to get a compelling image but to get specific
| meaningful images usually requires a lot of post processing that
| a layman wouldn't be capable of doing.
| ilaksh wrote:
| True but I feel like people are assuming these limitations will
| be long term.
|
| But we have seen progress in leaps and bounds. LLM-based coding
| tools are getting better. LLMs are getting better. Context size
| is increasing. And the interest in LLMs is even motivating
| development of new approaches that will be more effective.
|
| Give it a few years, things like Lecun's JEPAs or whatever
| hybrid supercoder DeepMind is working on, or some open-source
| LLM, will blow GPT-4 out of the water for programming.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I agree these things are going to move likely faster than we
| can imagine and become better than we can imagine. That said,
| last week I got a ticket that had no body but a title akin to
| "Add a property for this" with no specifications about the
| system. When I asked for clarity on the ticket the ask was
| very different than the title implied. When I started the
| work it started to look different than was described so I
| went back to the requestor and explained the discrepancy and
| we changed the direction of the change.
|
| I say this to say, one skillset I have as a developer is
| taking the vague requests product owners have and figuring
| out how to turn them into actionable code steps in a massive
| existing codebase with several repos. I don't say this to say
| I'm impossible to replace but to say that half the time
| people don't even know what they want or how to describe it.
| Then from there you have giant codebases that wouldn't fit in
| anything but the biggest (current) context windows.
|
| I agree the accuracy limitations will likely evaporate but
| these things aren't necessarily something an LLM can solve.
| I'm probably going to be proven wrong over time but I use GPT
| for code pretty regularly and right now I'm not too worried
| about my job.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I don't know for sure if an LLM could do it. But
| theoretically one could build a system that sends chat
| messages asking for clarification and also eventually with
| more context or something is able to translate vague or
| stupid "requirements" into ones that make sense.
|
| In five years or so the capabilities may be pretty amazing.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Definitely agreed! I'm both nervous and excited. I fear
| for my livelihood but also if we continue to make even a
| percentage of the progress we've made in the last year,
| the next 5 years are going to be wild!
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I agree with most of this, but I do disgree with the thing about
| producing specific imagery. It's absolubtely a skill one can
| develop. I spend a lot of time helping people leearn to simplify
| their prompts and choose the right language for image generation
| AIs. For some reason people put a lot of unnessacary junk into
| them, I guess a form of superstition (this sentence fragment
| worked well the last few times).
|
| As the article mentions, the hybrid approach (using this as a
| tool in a series of other tools) is the way forward
|
| There are concepts the AI simply will not grasp. For example
| right now midjourney will extremely struggle with "bulldozer",
| "centaur", "fantasy archer" etc. These will inevitably fixed (and
| have in the past) be fixed with new model versions with better
| training data.
|
| The real struggle comes with either small details or semantic
| information. For example, its hard to ask it to make a
| lifelike/photograph scene with everything including the
| background in focus. Even with "focus stacking" type keywords.
| "selfie" is about the best word we came up with but unforunately
| that has significant side effects lol. Perhaps there just isnt
| enough instances of people specifically describing that property
| in the training data, but honestly its difficult to even learn
| english words for these concepts to describe with!
|
| As for small details, it is indeed true that the current approach
| will probably never scale to handle something like "six blue
| cubes with a red triangle on each, arranged in a pyramid shape,
| with a yellow ball balanced on top". But as the author points
| out, such things will likely be handled with a minimum of
| photoshop skill using assets made individually
| ilaksh wrote:
| There are new models such as from Google which work differently
| and handle things like counting etc. much better than open
| source models I don't know if any of them are available yet but
| they have papers. Like Imagen and something better that came
| out afterwards.
| noduerme wrote:
| None of which has anything to do with creativity or the
| original (and visually trained) thought required to conceive of
| imagery that's commercially useful - which is an actual skill
| learned through years of study and experience, and which is so
| routinely ignored by managers and IT people that you completely
| failed to mention it in your take on the technical issues with
| prompts.
|
| The issue with prompts is not stacked cubes. It's more like
| this: Ask 10 software engineers or 10 people from the sales
| department or 3 people from upper management to come up with
| visual ideas for ads, and you will have a bunch of shit on
| black backgrounds, robots, anime, bad copies of things people
| have seen and subconsciously remember, and zero actual visual
| ideas that fundamentally work. Designers and illustrators have
| to fight against and override their unoriginality and terrible
| ideas all the fucking time just to make a decent product.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| That's some real unwarranted hostility. I'm responding to a
| specific point from the article? We can't just go in circles
| having an "is it good or isnt it" argument...
|
| Once again - I agree with most of what the author says,
| including the part about it being a tool in an illustrator's
| kit
| noduerme wrote:
| I mean, I've spent 25+ years as an art director, a.k.a. a
| diffusion model trying to generate what managers and
| salespeople think they see in their heads, and I tell you,
| they have no imagination. None whatsoever. As my brother, a
| photographer, used to say: The problem isn't having a cheap
| camera, it's who's behind it.
|
| Also, the hostility towards a prompt expert adding another
| layer of technical "know how" into the process between
| requests and art in the name of justifying a new job title
| is entirely warranted.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| >Also, the hostility towards a prompt expert adding
| another layer of technical "know how" into the process...
| is entirely warranted
|
| I don't know either of you and I have no stake in this
| but as an outside observer I think you come off pretty
| unreasonable here still. You seem to think your hostility
| was justified because you've basically made this person
| the scapegoat for your frustration about this topic.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Also an outsider - I don't understand how they're being
| hostile here.
|
| They're relaying their experience and saying that there's
| more to creating than describing something to be drawn,
| and that most people lack the training and knowledge of
| what goes into that.
|
| It's not about learning prompts, it's about learning how
| to actually design... and then learning prompts.
|
| I feel like the original comment is taking things
| personally instead of seeing the point they're making
| through example of their frustration working with others.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Interesting! From my view the responder came off as
| attacking unnecessarily and very angry. Honestly not sure
| how else to relay it though. Maybe it's all just how I'm
| reading it. Have a great one!
| RugnirViking wrote:
| whatever man. I am not here to carve out a job title or
| whatever it is you're accusing me of. I commented on a
| post contributing with my experience of helping others.
|
| I feel like you're projecting a whole lot more onto me
| than what i'm actually saying.
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