Although we talk a lot about disruption, only very few technologies are truly disruptive. You can tell by the panic and awe in the air whether you're dealing with real disruption or incremental change.
Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant.
Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.
Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists.
There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.
> People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose.
When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art.
I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures.
In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues.
I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.
>Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before.
I'll believe it when I see it. How many self sufficient, independent digital artists are actually making a living doing something other than webcomics or furryporn? SD is amazing technology for sure, but this notion that it's going to incredibly disruptive is the latest in a long line of AI hype. It ignores the simple fact that there is already more art produced and uploaded onto the internet, every hour, than can meaningfully be consumed. Independent artists already had to compete with millions of art uploaded very minute, what is a few million more?
You quite studiously compared every ostensible disruption to the preceding state of the art to (quite convincingly IMO) reveal the material consequeces to be… less than world shattering, shall we say. Your example of Amazon and walmart does the converse.
And yet, with «stable diffusion» it is just so. Disruption is declared wholesale, without even passing mention of the preceding state of the art of computer generated art.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you not see the own goal here?
> Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.
>Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Sorry, I’m still not seeing the distinction you’re making between these cases. You say that with Uber, it makes no difference because there are still drivers going from “point A to B” (a pickup to a destination), but it was a huge difference with Walmart because small shops “saw the writing on the wall”.
But … in both cases you have the same service still being provided (rides and retailing) and the unprofitability of smaller providers (small shops vs taxicab companies).
If there is a difference between the two, could you highlight it clearly and in plain language?
Like the other commenters have written here, art is a lot more fluid than you give it credit for.
Professional illustrators will always have work, but their work may be in a different shape than current one, relying on AI as an additional tool to generate images for their clients. In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way. This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.
As for art more broadly, it is much greater than visual art. It will be interesting to see the new ways people find to express themselves with these new tools.
> Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies.
I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a kind of amalgam view of the entire collection at once.
The only significant advantage compared to Google Image Search is that AI-generated art is getting around copyright, allowing you to publish it legally under your own name. This makes it very similar to Uber, which got around taxi regulations that were impeding market access.
Essentially, if we ignore copyright, there are relatively few illustration problem you could have where DALL-E/SD/... would help more than searching for an existing image. Branding is an obvious one, where the need for unique-ness is not only legal, but also practical. The other is that DALL-E/SD/etc can also sometimes produce combinations of unrelated images, thought that is offset by just how bad their results are in other places where there is plenty of existing art to choose from (especially anything involving images of humans).
OP characterizes the disruption as "unbundling idea creation from substantiation". In the modern art world, this actually happened a long time ago! Warhol made famous the ancient notion that popular artisans could have their work produced by an army of assistants, rather than making it themselves, which allowed artists to focus on concept (and marketing).
Digital technology has already accelerated this process a lot, allowing artists to communicate prototypes efficiently and supervise implementations of their work on the other side of the world. What's new is how AI makes this dirt cheap and accessible, not just folks who can earn the admiration of assistants. People are focused on the plight of the artist-creator, but I also wonder what will happen to the legions of substantiators already out there in the world.
For 99.999% of art that is commercially relevant no one cares if it's "real" or not.
The problem here isn't necessarily that these tools change the story for "real" art, it's that they change the story for _commercially relevant_ art which has always tended towards uninspired and formulaic.
There are a lot of artists that have hobbies in art they consider meaningful while making a living with commercial art that can be software-displaced.
Why does this simply threaten artists? At what point is code a type of creative expression? When are the IDEA for a novel technology and the chops to implement equally viable applications of AI?
Artists are losing today, but why are they in any way more vulnerable? They just seem to be next on the chopping block.
Oh, when you are required to use implants to do your job... and you don't want to, because you think your body is sacred and those implants must be returned at the end of your job... well then you are disrupted.
People will be incapable of distinguishing AI art from the “real” thing. Or people will just start claiming AI generated art as their own human made creations. The lines will become indistinguishable.
It is disruptive but only to one type of art - flat. So yes, since we are in front of screens most of the time flat will disrupt some. But art is more than that.
I am not sure I see the unbundling here. AI generated art may be a threat to generic stock photography and small jobs for custom blog art, but artists higher up on the food chain now have a new tool for them to use. They can quickly generate a bunch of concepts to tryout ideas, and polish those into a higher quality piece of art than if left to their own devices.
If it’s a 10x force multiplier, then one person could do the work of 10. There are two possible outcomes:
1) the lower rate per piece enabled by higher productivity unlocks a much larger market for commissioned work. No one has to lose their job, people make up the price difference in volume.
2) there is not a much larger market waiting for cheaper art. The existing pool of artists is too big, and some of them need to find new work.
My guess is lowering the price does grow the market some, but not enough to avoid displacing at least some of the artists. Whether that’s 10% or 99% depends on how good these tools ultimately end up being.
I don't think AI generated art is even a threat to stock photography, but rather clip art... which isn't too disruptive in my view.
I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore thumb.
Just like the clip art ascetic quickly becomes recognizable and somewhat nauseating, so too is AI generated art already starting to feel that way.
As far as aiding experts I don't imagine synthetic art will be nearly as game changing as the Adobe suite. I do a fair bit of writing and find GPT-3 to be completely unnecessary for "quickly generating a bunch of concepts". I assume that visual arts, like writers, already have a bunch of ideas in their head for what to do. That's never the bottle neck. Writers block happens but it's not because you can't think of a general concept, it's because implementing that specific concept into text is what's hard.
I agree. I see AI-generated art as a force multiplier for skilled individuals, same as better editors, tools, languages, and frameworks have been for developers.
How do you think artists “higher up the food chain” got there?
Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up.
If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.
Having recently watched the Warhol Diaries on Netflix, I can't help but think of the examples of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and think that calls for the death of the artist are premature. The funny thing is that I don't find Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat's work particularly compelling, and from the a technical perspective, I don't think either of them were blazing new paths, but what they (and Andy Warhol) offered was something Stable Diffusion simply cannot offer, that is, something new.
You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring
It seems it is possible to achieve that, but it may look different.
Since we still have to give text prompts to generate images, and these prompts need qualifiers (x subject “oil painting”) it seems possible that a prompt giver could generate images in a specific way to achieve their own unique style.
Difficult now since the tools are new and don’t have a ton of features, but down the road if the tools are built out more and prompts get more nuanced I could see “prompt givers” as “artists with their own unique style”
I think his breakdown of the value chain is a bit redundant, and can more effectively be factored into: Creation, Distribution, and Consumption. With this framing, it is apparent that distribution has almost always been the target of major optimizations until AI came along:
- Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally.
- Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand.
- Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced.
That's not to say that we've ignored creation. We've built hundreds of tools to make producing content easier: word processors, Photoshop, and even TikTok to name a few. It's just that AI has recently taken a huge leap in this area. For that reason, I don't think "unbundling" is the right metaphor here.
I think "Creation" was the wrong word for the first step. "Ideation" gets across the idea better: that first stage is just "thinking of the thing"; "Substantiation" is then actually executing on it ("creating it")
Hottake on skimming the article: people don't yet fully get where this is going (fast).
In the unbundling story, the premise is I gather that what is disruptive atm is that what's left as the god-in-the-gaps human role, is now democratized in the the technological acceleration in the the creation-substantiation phase at the head of the snake.
What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem.
Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some.
What I am saying is, before we are ready, the aspects which remain human-domain in the cybernetic collaboration between humans and AI in what well call "content generation," namely, the agency and the intention—the "idea" which today is, the prompt; the editorial and curatorial functions; the insight and lightbulb and all...
...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well.
What inspires "art" or whatever else?
The filtering of media streams (aka cultural discourse, the zeitgeist) and the identification of symmetries, analogies, serendipity, humor... whatever that is, it like the "substantiation" phase is going to be ceded to the super-human in a few years.
I speculated recently to a friend that the way the fine-art market reacts to this is going to be interesting. We're going to have Wintermute on tap. I wondered if gallerists will represent AIs, or, spin them up long enough for them to emit some stream of work then be ceremoniously destroyed.
Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways.
> I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher...
You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around.
In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off.
In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed.
If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.
These recent developments make wonder whether in 30 years we aren't streaming movies anymore, and instead entire personalized movies will be generated for us on demand, based on a few keywords and our past history of rating movies, browser activity, search terms, or whatever else the machines will know about us.
Looking a little further, we will be generated on demand when AI deems it necessary; based on what the machines know about us. With the specific keywords/features it deemed best.
I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists.
The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist.
I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience).
Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.
I think if you dig into the latest research you would find that AI is much closer to what you’re imagining than you think.
One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.
Welcome to the world where every blog has a vaguely painterly smear of a header image that falls to pieces when you actually look at it. Kinda tacky, really.
Yeah, I really hope people stop just letting AI generate images with no human direction beyond the text prompt. It looks terrible 99% of the time, and Midjourney especially is so same-y.
There are good uses for human guided AI, but I fear most people are down for accepting whatever the algorithm happens to crap out at you
Anything this guy writes gets gobbled up and worshipped mindlessly to no end. The opening here was so crass i didn't bother reading the rest (yet) until i find a better time to do so and have put my strong feelings aside.
The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line.
Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.
They aren't publishers. Me posting a link to the NYTimes on facebook is not the same as writing a NYTimes article. That fact that NYTimes articles get more boost from the algorithm than a sketchy right wing site does not make facebook a publisher
I am very, very excited about Stable Diffusion and similar technologies. I do see a ton of pushback from human artists who seem fairly venomous in their attacks. But I tend to believe that this will pass once we have a new normal and they will use these AI assisted techniques to enhance their abilities.
A lot of the discussion around AI now is about the transition of AI from tool to tool-user. Very few are considering how close we might be to the tool-user to tool-maker transition and how much more world changing that will be. We are at the cusp. https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...
> This image, like the first two in this Article, was created by AI (Midjourney, specifically). It is, like those two images, not quite right: I wanted “A door that is slightly open with light flooding through the crack”, but I ended up with a door with a crack of light down the middle and a literal flood of water;
I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.
Good article, although "unbundling" is an odd choice of word. Before AI, the execution step was necessary, but not necessarily attached to the "coming up with an idea" step. Conceptual artists have for years (centuries?) produced ideas that were executed by others.
AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are being removed as gatekeepers.
A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?
If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to.
If we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?
> If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to.
If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format.
In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.
does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?
That would depend largely on what kinds of non-linearities the model is using, particularly towards the later steps. It's entirely possible for there to exist spaces that a given trained model cannot output. It's unlikely those spaces are particularly interesting: perhaps a pixel-by-pixel checkerboard of pure black and white, for example.
A perfectly linear model with linearly-independent matrix columns could generate any possible value, but would be exactly equivalent to a single vector-matrix multiplication, unable to do any interesting multi-step reasoning.
At least as it works now, on a given system, you can generate an identical image given the exact same prompt and the same random seed. That is assuming you are using the exact same software version and model version and the exact same graphics card.
Plus, I can't imagine it ever becoming faster to generate a 512x512 image using AI than transmitting the full image over a network.
Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team?
The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all
It's pretty rare that patent law makes a big difference in slowing down a field of software innovation. The main examples I can think of are eFax suing fax machine software companies, and Blackboard suing education companies.
In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".
It is heavily unlikely that there is exactly one route to intelligence: to take a card from biology, look at octopuses versus humans. Since only relatively specific architectures can be patented, I expect that one would have no issue circumventing any patent that could claimed.
The problem with patenting AI is that you have to describe how something works in order to patent it. The issue presently is that you can describe relatively obvious things (e.g. one click checkout) and patent those.
AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to.
My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.
Network effects apply to almost every industry, not just social media apps. FMCG companies are a great example. The reason Nestle, Unilever, P&G have so many brands is because they have a phenomenal distribution network. Even a crappy product is guaranteed to make millions of dollars in revenue.
The irony should be mentioned. many comments here point to human artists becoming obsolete, but it is a common refrain on this forum that people with art degrees already struggle to make a living. So which is it?
I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.
What about the negative side of this? All these generators will be used for evil. Looks like we need a way to figure out if an image or video is real or not and we need it desperately. Not sure if we are working on that at all. The implications of not having that are huge.
people forget that art is something unique to the artist.
you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings.
reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art.
but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style.
and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities.
it's the same reason, we tend to overlook countless paintings of trees
done by street artists unless the style is so unique and
evokes our emotions by beauty or novelty.
for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and
say AI art won't push artists out of jobs
gizmo|3 years ago
Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant.
Uber was hard on the taxi industry, but fundamentally you still have drivers taking people from A to B. First you had to call the cab company now you use an app. It's an improvement, but not truly disruptive. Not like level 5 self-driving cars would be.
Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Stable Diffusion (and similar tools) fall in this last category of truly disruptive technologies. It's going to destroy the livelihoods of the majority of independent artists in a way that looks inevitable to me. These new tools boost artist productivity by 100x and that means good artists will be producing much more art than ever before. This pushes cost down and quality expectations way up. Some artists will adapt and thrive in this new environment, but the majority won't. It won't be long until making a living with photoshop will become as hard as making a living playing guitar. This is good for society but bad for many individual artists.
There will be a backlash. People will insist that SD art isn't real art. Artists will fight back, and lose. Because SD isn't going anywhere. This is what disruption looks like, and it isn't pretty.
mejutoco|3 years ago
When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art.
I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures.
In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues.
I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.
Jevon23|3 years ago
Why is SD going to destroy the livelihoods of artists when machine language translation hasn't put human translators out of work yet?
I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.
nemothekid|3 years ago
I'll believe it when I see it. How many self sufficient, independent digital artists are actually making a living doing something other than webcomics or furryporn? SD is amazing technology for sure, but this notion that it's going to incredibly disruptive is the latest in a long line of AI hype. It ignores the simple fact that there is already more art produced and uploaded onto the internet, every hour, than can meaningfully be consumed. Independent artists already had to compete with millions of art uploaded very minute, what is a few million more?
enord|3 years ago
And yet, with «stable diffusion» it is just so. Disruption is declared wholesale, without even passing mention of the preceding state of the art of computer generated art.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you not see the own goal here?
SilasX|3 years ago
>Amazon and Walmart by contrast did disrupt entire industries. Independent book shops and mom&pop retailers saw the writing on the wall. They knew they couldn't survive facing this kind of competition, and largely, they didn't.
Sorry, I’m still not seeing the distinction you’re making between these cases. You say that with Uber, it makes no difference because there are still drivers going from “point A to B” (a pickup to a destination), but it was a huge difference with Walmart because small shops “saw the writing on the wall”.
But … in both cases you have the same service still being provided (rides and retailing) and the unprofitability of smaller providers (small shops vs taxicab companies).
If there is a difference between the two, could you highlight it clearly and in plain language?
lambdaloop|3 years ago
Professional illustrators will always have work, but their work may be in a different shape than current one, relying on AI as an additional tool to generate images for their clients. In any case, a big part of the work for illustrators do is in refining the vision of their client and exploring the space of art this way. This is as much of an issue with the current AIs, you need to ask for something very specific to get a good looking image. Iterating to produce a quality image can take hours.
As for art more broadly, it is much greater than visual art. It will be interesting to see the new ways people find to express themselves with these new tools.
simiones|3 years ago
I really don't see it. What tools like SD, DALL-E etc do is essentially similar to what Google Image Search does, except that the results are presented differently - instead of showing you the results it has indexed in some order, it picks features from the results it has trained on with some priority, and presents a kind of amalgam view of the entire collection at once.
The only significant advantage compared to Google Image Search is that AI-generated art is getting around copyright, allowing you to publish it legally under your own name. This makes it very similar to Uber, which got around taxi regulations that were impeding market access.
Essentially, if we ignore copyright, there are relatively few illustration problem you could have where DALL-E/SD/... would help more than searching for an existing image. Branding is an obvious one, where the need for unique-ness is not only legal, but also practical. The other is that DALL-E/SD/etc can also sometimes produce combinations of unrelated images, thought that is offset by just how bad their results are in other places where there is plenty of existing art to choose from (especially anything involving images of humans).
evrydayhustling|3 years ago
Digital technology has already accelerated this process a lot, allowing artists to communicate prototypes efficiently and supervise implementations of their work on the other side of the world. What's new is how AI makes this dirt cheap and accessible, not just folks who can earn the admiration of assistants. People are focused on the plight of the artist-creator, but I also wonder what will happen to the legions of substantiators already out there in the world.
nullc|3 years ago
For 99.999% of art that is commercially relevant no one cares if it's "real" or not.
The problem here isn't necessarily that these tools change the story for "real" art, it's that they change the story for _commercially relevant_ art which has always tended towards uninspired and formulaic.
There are a lot of artists that have hobbies in art they consider meaningful while making a living with commercial art that can be software-displaced.
evancoop|3 years ago
Artists are losing today, but why are they in any way more vulnerable? They just seem to be next on the chopping block.
lofaszvanitt|3 years ago
"There will be backlash"
bergenty|3 years ago
0xa2|3 years ago
psadri|3 years ago
If something affects a large group of individuals, it will eventually have an impact on society as well.
megaman821|3 years ago
yojo|3 years ago
1) the lower rate per piece enabled by higher productivity unlocks a much larger market for commissioned work. No one has to lose their job, people make up the price difference in volume.
2) there is not a much larger market waiting for cheaper art. The existing pool of artists is too big, and some of them need to find new work.
My guess is lowering the price does grow the market some, but not enough to avoid displacing at least some of the artists. Whether that’s 10% or 99% depends on how good these tools ultimately end up being.
time_to_smile|3 years ago
I can immediately recognize (as I did for this post) when art is AI generated right now. I've spent a lot of time playing with SD and while it's been a blast as a toy, the vast majority of the outputs are 'meh' and even the best still have those weird artifacts that stick out like a sore thumb.
Just like the clip art ascetic quickly becomes recognizable and somewhat nauseating, so too is AI generated art already starting to feel that way.
As far as aiding experts I don't imagine synthetic art will be nearly as game changing as the Adobe suite. I do a fair bit of writing and find GPT-3 to be completely unnecessary for "quickly generating a bunch of concepts". I assume that visual arts, like writers, already have a bunch of ideas in their head for what to do. That's never the bottle neck. Writers block happens but it's not because you can't think of a general concept, it's because implementing that specific concept into text is what's hard.
mikepurvis|3 years ago
andreilys|3 years ago
Inevitably they started on the lower rungs and worked their way up.
If these tools displace the need for lower level/apprenticeship like work, then it won’t be a surprise if later on we have less quality artists who weren’t able to get the necessary experience early on.
JackFr|3 years ago
You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring
soared|3 years ago
Since we still have to give text prompts to generate images, and these prompts need qualifiers (x subject “oil painting”) it seems possible that a prompt giver could generate images in a specific way to achieve their own unique style.
Difficult now since the tools are new and don’t have a ton of features, but down the road if the tools are built out more and prompts get more nuanced I could see “prompt givers” as “artists with their own unique style”
phailhaus|3 years ago
- Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally.
- Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand.
- Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced.
That's not to say that we've ignored creation. We've built hundreds of tools to make producing content easier: word processors, Photoshop, and even TikTok to name a few. It's just that AI has recently taken a huge leap in this area. For that reason, I don't think "unbundling" is the right metaphor here.
brundolf|3 years ago
Otherwise- really good points, well-written
aaroninsf|3 years ago
In the unbundling story, the premise is I gather that what is disruptive atm is that what's left as the god-in-the-gaps human role, is now democratized in the the technological acceleration in the the creation-substantiation phase at the head of the snake.
What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem.
Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some.
What I am saying is, before we are ready, the aspects which remain human-domain in the cybernetic collaboration between humans and AI in what well call "content generation," namely, the agency and the intention—the "idea" which today is, the prompt; the editorial and curatorial functions; the insight and lightbulb and all...
...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well.
What inspires "art" or whatever else?
The filtering of media streams (aka cultural discourse, the zeitgeist) and the identification of symmetries, analogies, serendipity, humor... whatever that is, it like the "substantiation" phase is going to be ceded to the super-human in a few years.
I speculated recently to a friend that the way the fine-art market reacts to this is going to be interesting. We're going to have Wintermute on tap. I wondered if gallerists will represent AIs, or, spin them up long enough for them to emit some stream of work then be ceremoniously destroyed.
Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways.
Anyway. The writing is on the wall.
And it's not in OUR handwriting.
burlesona|3 years ago
You can say the same thing about food today versus food 100-200 years ago. But we've seen how that plays out, with western countries and the US in particular facing massive public health problems and an obesity epidemic. Humans evolved for scarcity, not abundance. We just can't handle having so many cheap, hyper-palatable foods around.
In the same way I think it's obvious that hyper-information is harming our mental health. And while I hate to think of losing access to all the wonderful information resources we have today, I also think the path we're on will be net worse off for most people, just as no sane person would ever wish for famine, yet junk food also makes most people's physical health net worse off.
In the same way that the entire "diet industry" thrives today, I expect to see a greater and greater rise in the amount of self-help books, training, and support to help people with resources cope with information overload. Meanwhile most people's mental health will be harmed.
If we want broad prosperity in the face of over-abundance, we're going to have to learn how to cope with abundance and filter the bad out, so that we get an abundance of good without drowning in junk. This is going to be the defining challenge of the 21st century.
mr_mitm|3 years ago
riskable|3 years ago
usehackernews|3 years ago
Content will be created specifically for you.
mudrockbestgirl|3 years ago
firasd|3 years ago
cleandreams|3 years ago
The reason is that AI intelligence is probability generated mimicry. By extension it mimics art but is not art. Think of the character arcs in Shakespeare, the narratives, the layers of meanings. This sort of thing cannot even be modeled as a problem in AI. The ability to define what is necessary to produce such layers of meaning does not exist.
I think AI is missing something fundamental about intelligence. What it is missing is the ability to construct systems of abstraction and have them relate via meaning (which is informed by history, context, experience).
Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.
AbrahamParangi|3 years ago
One of the lessons from DALL-E and latent diffusion is that problems can often be decomposed into a “semantic” space and a “textural” space loosely corresponding to what we consider layers of abstraction.
unknown|3 years ago
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pyaamb|3 years ago
egypturnash|3 years ago
yunwal|3 years ago
There are good uses for human guided AI, but I fear most people are down for accepting whatever the algorithm happens to crap out at you
DisjointedHunt|3 years ago
The News aren't just about distribution, you moron. If we didn't have large companies such as twitter and Facebook misclassified deliberately through government protection and instead called out as the publishers they are, newspapers would be one helluva profitable business line.
Just because economic forces were over ruled in favor of a national security advantage in keeping the American tech industry growing into the massive multinational beast it is, that does not automatically disqualify the hard journalistic effort in contributing to the large subset of content that drives engagement and thus clicks and thus ad dollars for many of these businesses.
ryan93|3 years ago
MOARDONGZPLZ|3 years ago
sixQuarks|3 years ago
But what happens when AI becomes more creative than humans? There will really be no need for a human artist at that point.
ChaitanyaSai|3 years ago
inkcapmushroom|3 years ago
I thought the AI's interpretation was much more interesting than what the author wanted.
bambax|3 years ago
AI makes the execution step near-instantaneous and almost free. It kind of erases it. It's more disintermediation than unbundling. Execution artists are being removed as gatekeepers.
A question remains that, if an AI generator produces deterministic, consistent output given a set of (prompt, seed, model), does that mean that all possible images are somehow contained in the model?
If there was a Borgesian book containing, say, all possible 512x512 images, one on each page, then surely two people having the same copy of that book wouldn't need to exchange images, they could simply exchange page numbers, and see exactly what the other one is referring to.
If we are now able to exchange prompts and seeds and get a predictable, consistent result out of SD, isn't that what we're doing?
harperlee|3 years ago
If that were the case, the page number would be as long as the image, and exchanging one or the other is the same. Heck with proper order arrangement, the page number IS the image, in a known format.
In other words, the information content of such book is exactly 0.
OkayPhysicist|3 years ago
A perfectly linear model with linearly-independent matrix columns could generate any possible value, but would be exactly equivalent to a single vector-matrix multiplication, unable to do any interesting multi-step reasoning.
jjeaff|3 years ago
Plus, I can't imagine it ever becoming faster to generate a 512x512 image using AI than transmitting the full image over a network.
hertzrat|3 years ago
The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all
lacker|3 years ago
In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".
OkayPhysicist|3 years ago
AbrahamParangi|3 years ago
awillen|3 years ago
AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to.
My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.
unknown|3 years ago
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gbasin|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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hacsky|3 years ago
djenendik|3 years ago
I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.
KingOfCoders|3 years ago
He can't see the forrest for the trees:
"I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet [...]"
Most of those ideas will look shallow in the future and be generated by an AI, executed by an AI etc. aka the great bundling.
yalogin|3 years ago
kordlessagain|3 years ago
dzonga|3 years ago
you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings.
reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art.
but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style.
and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities.
it's the same reason, we tend to overlook countless paintings of trees done by street artists unless the style is so unique and evokes our emotions by beauty or novelty.
for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and say AI art won't push artists out of jobs
unknown|3 years ago
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yubozhao|3 years ago
Hippieblog|3 years ago
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