in terms of sheer spam, they might be killing the sense of awe in someone who found them awe-inspiring to begin with.
i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me. it's just blockbuster clip art. we had already been living in a broader culture that desensitises people to the impression of substance prior to dall-e or whatever; netflix originals and nolan flicks are visibly high-production-value but, generously, one out of every ten actually says anything.
even entirely hand-produced "blockbuster clip art" like that one pic of the cat with big round sunglasses with space reflecting in it that's been a fixture of 4chan wallpaper threads since time immemorial has long since served as an emblem of the easily-amused (see also any visual artifact that is a mainstay of stoners). and all it is is an original photograph by a certain андрей прохоров from a series known as "a girl and her cat", subject to a deviantart user's "10 minutes in photoshop for practice" for the reflections.
the real risk to awe is highlighted further down in the article and touched upon far too briefly relative to the firehose thing, which is the stain upon awe of suspicion. is this image from a camera or a 3d package or a generative neural network? balancing a healthy fascination with the world with a healthy suspicion of your senses is a discussion that risks veering into dangerously political, religious, not-very-hacker-news-guidelines territory, but i'll play it safe and just say an apocalyptic tone is not conducive to determining what the healthy balance is.
In your denouncement of the ostensibly trite content of "a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever", you fail to look past the content itself and find value in the technique. From an artist's perspective, these models are nothing short of magical in how they manage to pack in knowledge across so many styles and contexts.
It's personally mind-blowing how effective diffusion is in general (but retrospectively, it's a beautifully simple concept), but it's not just the isolated image of a t-rex on mars that it interesting. It's the speed and cost at which the image can be generated, and the ways in which the data can be modified or recontextualized in a feedback loop. Or how multimodal systems like GPTV or LLaVA allow a new form of communication which blurs the line between images and language. I could go on, but the essence is that you are doing yourself a severe disservice by generalizing these capabilities as "blockbuster clip art".
> i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me.
Oh yeah? What about... "a mesmerizingly vibrant and colossal T-Rex with an iridescent, shimmering skin that reflects all the colors of the spectrum. It stands in a fantastical, alien landscape filled with towering, luminescent mushroom-like structures and a flowing river of brilliant, neon light. In the background, an otherworldly nebula explodes with the most intense and vivid colors across the cosmic star-filled sky"!? [1]
I have nothing else to add to this serious topic, I just like drawing dinosaurs like I'm eight years old again [2]. I rented a GPU for this weekend and I've got a script using GPT4 to generate random topic-specific prompts for SDXL to test out all the parameters, schedulers, etc (5k images and counting so far). Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose but I don't know how anyone could lose their awe so fast. It's just fun and there doesn't have to be any more to it.
Agree. Another example of desensitization is the popularity (now diminishing) of Marvel movies. Relative to their visual presentation, they are empty of content. Gauging the depth of meaning in a Marvel movie takes almost no effort. I suppose their recent drop in popularity might indicate that the broader culture is finally catching on to this.
A friend of mine built a snowman today. It was beautiful. No photo real or generated can do it justice. The act was in the building and being there. That is the key takeaway from all this. Choose real life. Go out and build a snowman. Interact with the world and with people and materials. It doesn't matter if a master photographer or an AI generates a picture of a snowman. In the end if it motivates you to go out and build one yourself then it is good. Otherwise it is just porn.
Yeah, if you want to be awed, go outside. Visit a forest after the rain. Or climb a big hill and look around. Or use a light pollution map to find a nice dark sky to go out and see the stars (admittedly much harder than it used to be).
Nature is awesome. Most photographs don’t do it justice. You have to get out there and see it for the full sensory experience.
If it's meaning you want from art, then DALLE-3 or SDXL plus extensions or abilities like inpainting might actually be the most effective way to achieve that.
After all, there is quite a bit of meaning in the text used to generate them. That seems like a head start if you are trying to make a statement. Not to mention the speed that the image or image elements emerge and can be iterated or integrated.
For example, take Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (admittedly just from the top of Google search results about artistic statements). It is a series of plates that have sculptures depicting femininity in various ways at various heights. With something like a painting tool with SDXL or DALLE-3 integrated one could create an image with similar content by drawing the table and then generating/inserting or inpainting each of the individual plate contents per specification such as the size of the inpaint mask and prompt.
She clearly explained the meaning of the work and it can fit in a few long sentences.
The more I think about this, the more it seems that image generation should be very helpful for artists who want to "say" something.
Well written and enjoyable. But this is not really new or related to AI. As mentioned in the article, this is more about aging.
I take a different stance where the author claims AI manipulated imagery is less "real" than photography that is produced with focus stacking and HDR shadows. Those are no less false than AI, particularly at the degree used in his examples.
The awe-drop towards photography that he describes I experienced during the rise of Instagram over a decade ago. I couldn't understand why people compromised otherwise good photography with something so obviously manipulated. It felt like people being proud of an exam they cheated on. But the world became accustomed to that and moved on.
> the world became accustomed to that and moved on
I used to have a similar opinion, but some young kids made me aware of an entirely different perspective. The young world seems to be waiting. There are those who jump on every hype to kill boredom or to compensate, those we all see and, I'll be honest here, who we all pity. But then there are those who couldn't get inspired and stimulated in that rather short window between the birth of awareness and that infinite moment when the dark patterns of big tech and the marketing industry hit them like a 2 mile-long freight-train. They can't move on; they are paralyzed. And society acts like they need reeducation.
Some people call it the "enshittification" of the internet and culture itself, which makes it worse because the term just creates another hype. The underlying issue are obedient engineers just doing their job instead of _simply_ (because they are damn good) being the better and much brighter competition. Rationalism and game theory have fooled the smartest into conformity.
Doesn't this hold true for everything? It all started with painting. Then photography came around and took some work to produce. Photography finally reached the masses with 1-hour photo shops. Then anyone with a phone could create them. Now AI can do it. It's the price of lowering the barrier to entry.
We can go through this same exercise with a number of technological improvements.
Construction has led to the demise of awe around buildings.
Mass production has killed our sense of awe around products.
Cheap abundant food has led to a decline in awe around fancy meals.
I'm still in awe when I see certain paintings and buildings made by human hand, because it involves thousands of hours to become good at something in general. There is an emotional component to it that makes me like it more than computer generated stuff - that is just mid at best. Never been amazed by some ai art. There is some indirect grind component to be admired in it when you consider research and development, but that does not touch me like a masterpiece of some legendary artist.
Not every art movement in history has been motivated by awe. There’s a toilet in a gallery somewhere. Important to remember that these tools are extensions of humans and their expressions through time, and generative AI is still subject to humans’ tastes: from the beginning of the prompt to the choice of sharing or deleting the result.
“If everything is extraordinary then everything becomes ordinary.”
We've become so accustomed to amazing things, some real, some synthetic, and every mixture in between, that these just seem less than "awful", to use the original sense of the word, to me. Even though they're probably objectively (heh) among the best micrographs ever taken.
Is the author really claiming that it's generative AI's fault that we're inured to awe-inspiring images?
The internet killed our sense of awe with aggregators and algorithms. "Sort by popularity" killed it. It became easy a long time ago to binge on awesome images and content.
So there's a larger issue here -- predating even the Internet -- which I'll call "The Machu Picchu effect." In essence, it's the way that amazing first time experiences can be debased by having constantly been exposed to scruffy, easily accessible but lesser versions of them beforehand.
I avoided this in the 1990s, before hiking Nepal's Annapurna Circuit, by refusing to watch any videos showing the trail. No, no, no. I wanted to take in the whole experience with a sense of wonder. And, yes, that's what happened. Totally unforgettable trip.
Fast forward to 2012, when I had business in Peru and a chance to visit Machu Picchu. This time I messed up. I watched the videos, flipped through the slide shows, etc. So, sadly, when I hiked up to the Sun Gate and caught the first glimpse of this restored ancient city, all I could think was: "Yep. That looks just like the pictures."
Generative AI certainly widens the ways we can inflict novelty fatigue on ourselves. But we've still got the ability to dial back on armchair experiences that will deaden our appreciation of the real thing.
I dream suburbias where every child is brave and funny, where a green-skinned scientist cackling at dusk or a journey to the sherbet-wastes of Mars are childhood commonplaces. I dream teenagers, the boys with letter sweatshirts, girls with single brush-stroke brows, in endless ice-cream parlors, never growing old or running out of flavors, dream them in moon-chilled jalopies when their sit-com day is through... the delicate perfume of sex and leatherette pervades the air, the radios playing new Gene Vincent songs, new episodes of discontinued but beloved shows.
I dream of cities that old futurists would weep with joy to see, of wharfside neighborhoods where tough kids track down spies, where crumbling tenements contort to teetering and eccentric shapes that seem to spell out words against the night.
I dream of rugged, mustard-yellow monsters from the deep, with vulgar and percussive names like Zax and Rul-Rah-Room. I dream a world of dreams fulfilled, a place where ecstasy and not his brother pain has run amok, and even as I dream I know my dreams are almost true, a planet of attained desire and concrete fantasy that spins and glitters, balanced on the diamond capstone of Olympus.
What makes art impressive - what invokes awe - is the understanding that the artist is immensely talented and created something that is unique to them; no one else could have created that exact same thing.
Pressing a button and getting a technically impressive image will simply never invoke awe in the way that a human artist can; at least not after you've experienced it for the first time.
That's one thing that can invoke awe. I wouldn't say it's the only thing. In fact, I unfortunately don't think most art observers think too much about the details of the artist, their craft, or how they created the work.
But more importantly, unless I am misunderstanding I think your description just ruled out photography as being able to invoke awe.
This is contradicted by AI art winning competitions for traditional art. People could not tell it is AI art, they felt what they felt. Only later must they convince themselves that it could not have been that good after all, because a machine made it.
CGI has killed my sense of awe 20 or 30 years ago. How can I find special effects in movies awe inspiring when I know it's all done with a computer?
It used to me that I watched Godzilla smash a building and was awestruck because each and every tile on the roof of the buildings was carefully placed by hand, the brick walls crumbling like real brick walls showed me how much work and care went into making just a few seconds of footage.
But now I can watch monsters smash entire cities and it bores me to tears. I know the buildings are copy pasted, the details are just tiled textures. It still took somebody some time to design and arrange but I know it's relatively cheap because being cheap is the whole point of doing it this way and they try to compensate by doing more of it on a wider scale, which lacks intimacy. Because even the camera itself is fake they can fly the camera around rapidly to make sure I never get a good look at any of the details, to hide the deficiency of the models, to make sure I don't notice the cut and paste jobs.
Then I watch a war movie. All the shots of the huge armies are from very far away so the men are indistinct ants. Close up shots only show me a few men at a time, it's all calculated to hide the fact that they didn't actually have thousands of men on the field and how can I be amazed when I know this? But if I watch Waterloo, 1970, I am genuinely amazed because I can clearly see thousands of men in detail. They really did have an army on the field and it's awe inspiring in a way that a movie with copy-pasted composite armies never can be.
Some of the newspaper opinion pieces about the evils of photography or the cold inhumanity of listening to a record instead of a live performance would fit right in to the discourse today with nary a noun change.
I am pragmatic with most things in life. Clinging onto something is mostly a losing proposition. If something, for some reason, does not do work for me anymore, and there is no reason to assume that's going to change and nothing I can realistically do about it anyway, then it's probably a good idea to adjust and let it go.
In this particular and rapidly evolving part of our experience, I am sure we will discover new things about us. Maybe yeah, looking at actual photos of strange places will do less to us. Maybe that's fine because we never did care if it's real or not; maybe that part of the experience was mostly for the photographer and not the audience. Maybe for the rest of us the wonder that is somehow induced and the imagination being tickled can just as well be synthesised.
Would that be bad? Of course, too much of a thing will still be tiring and outright bad for you. Food is our most obvious nemesis in this regard. But even in a society where it's overabundant, we still value whatever good food means for us and I think it's highly unlikely that that is going to going to change.
Only if you rely on screens for your awe. If you can get away from light pollution, going outside on a clear night is one good way to experience awe. Substitute your favorite way to experience nature in person...
I do wonder how future advances in VR will impact this. On occasions VR has given me a true sense of awe, even in it's current, technologically-limited form.
If you can conjour up any vista and see it around you at true scale, running your hands through alien grass and smelling the alien breeze - will that make the claims in this article harder to refute?
However I can't help but feel it's a bit like arguing one should never see too much beauty in life because one doesn't want to become bored of beauty. I'm not sure where this argument leads other than "ration your dopamine"
This is mostly about AI generated images, not ChatGPT and alike that still put us to the ground on our expectations.
And I agree that a lot that can be generated in images with simple prompts is awesome. The problem is that is comparable or even better than the “old” awesome made by expensive artists. So, it was so awesome that old art if I can generate something even better with a short prompt?
I have 3 readings on that: AIs are standing on the shoulders of giants, most of “art” was not so much the work of genius but something more or less mechanical on remixing memes and cultural trends, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the watcher is as responsible for the “art” as the artist as much of the magic happens in his head, and that is independent from how the image was generated.
In any case, I think we didn’t lost our sense of awe. I can generate a thousand pictures with simple prompts and think they are amazing, even to have a healthy effect on my by watching them. But the artificial scarcity and market that used to be around images may end.
I would suggest that we've already been through this with the advent of the internet - if anything awe inspiring happens anywhere in the world we can all hear about it which is a massive change from only being aware of local art/events. I think the major change will be the democratising of artistic taste, it's far easier to tweak a prompt than to learn how to be an artist so we'll get to see artistic expression from a much wider variety of people that are outside of artistic cliques.
It's my view that aesthetics are entirely independent of the work/suffering put into it by the artist and I'm looking forward to more art that is created to appeal to my innate sense of aesthetics by others who share that sense.
So far AI was great in generating awe-inspiring outputs and fail on realism. I've been to Cappadocia and the photos of the photographer don't represent the reality of Cappadocia at all, they are all heavily stylised and what's lost is the awe to this stylisation.
IMHO Artists really need to embrace these new tools the way they embraced digitalisation and thrived.
You can tell that there's a plenty of room for artists as the nerdy types keep pumping out of the mill AI content that is only interesting in the context that it is AI.
The swagged pope image for example, is an example of good use of the tech for art(I know, may will disagree but consider the impact of that image on the culture).
My problem with the generative AI tools is strictly with the economical problems they might create to the artists who might lost the opportunity to be compensated for the art they already produced(because their business landscape was designed with the assumption that it's impossible to do what AI does today) and used in the development(training) of these tools. Other than that, it's just another toolset and it creates ample opportunities.
This is nothing new, and there's been plenty of examples already, but here's another: I remember game reviews on the Commodore 64 raving about the incredible realism of some game's graphics. An 8-bit machine with a muddy 16-color palette, and yet that awe was real. Same thing continued through the '90s, the 3D revolution, Doom and Quake and Unreal--the now-infamous "yes, these are in-game graphics" magazine cover.
Now it's 2023, game graphics are basically photorealistic, and when's the last time you saw half a review raving about awe-inspiring graphics? If you have at all, it wasn't for their "realism." In fact, there's a good chance it was for their lack of realism, for a novel stylistic filter that makes a game look more like an animated artwork than a film.
Given supply and time, amazing becomes expected becomes boring. It's why artistic fashions change and evolve in the first place. No one development will ever hold on to first place, but there will always be something new to impress us.
It is the same for every tech advance. What used to be awesome is now mundane.
The article is about questioning the reality of picture. It started way before AI, when image manipulation became possible. Many people find it difficult to appreciate the picture of a beautiful woman on the cover of a magazine, because it must be all makeup and photoshop. Even if she may be stunningly beautiful and natural in real life, what to believe once we know what photo editors can do?
With or without AI, I tend to assume that all awesome pictures are edited in some way, unless some somewhat trustworthy source tells me they aren't.
And even without editing, straight from the camera images, what you are seeing may be a distorted view of reality. For example, a wide angle shot of a room makes it look bigger than it is in real life, a trick well known by real estate agents. Our eyes don't have the field of view of a wide angle lens, so is such a picture "real"?
[+] [-] 0x69420|2 years ago|reply
i can't speak for anyone else but i don't exactly find myself seeking out stable diffusion output because a big colourful high-contrast image of a t. rex bursting out the center of mars surrounded by rainbow mandala constellations or whatever doesn't really do anything for me. it's just blockbuster clip art. we had already been living in a broader culture that desensitises people to the impression of substance prior to dall-e or whatever; netflix originals and nolan flicks are visibly high-production-value but, generously, one out of every ten actually says anything.
even entirely hand-produced "blockbuster clip art" like that one pic of the cat with big round sunglasses with space reflecting in it that's been a fixture of 4chan wallpaper threads since time immemorial has long since served as an emblem of the easily-amused (see also any visual artifact that is a mainstay of stoners). and all it is is an original photograph by a certain андрей прохоров from a series known as "a girl and her cat", subject to a deviantart user's "10 minutes in photoshop for practice" for the reflections.
the real risk to awe is highlighted further down in the article and touched upon far too briefly relative to the firehose thing, which is the stain upon awe of suspicion. is this image from a camera or a 3d package or a generative neural network? balancing a healthy fascination with the world with a healthy suspicion of your senses is a discussion that risks veering into dangerously political, religious, not-very-hacker-news-guidelines territory, but i'll play it safe and just say an apocalyptic tone is not conducive to determining what the healthy balance is.
[+] [-] soulofmischief|2 years ago|reply
It's personally mind-blowing how effective diffusion is in general (but retrospectively, it's a beautifully simple concept), but it's not just the isolated image of a t-rex on mars that it interesting. It's the speed and cost at which the image can be generated, and the ways in which the data can be modified or recontextualized in a feedback loop. Or how multimodal systems like GPTV or LLaVA allow a new form of communication which blurs the line between images and language. I could go on, but the essence is that you are doing yourself a severe disservice by generalizing these capabilities as "blockbuster clip art".
[+] [-] civilitty|2 years ago|reply
Oh yeah? What about... "a mesmerizingly vibrant and colossal T-Rex with an iridescent, shimmering skin that reflects all the colors of the spectrum. It stands in a fantastical, alien landscape filled with towering, luminescent mushroom-like structures and a flowing river of brilliant, neon light. In the background, an otherworldly nebula explodes with the most intense and vivid colors across the cosmic star-filled sky"!? [1]
I have nothing else to add to this serious topic, I just like drawing dinosaurs like I'm eight years old again [2]. I rented a GPU for this weekend and I've got a script using GPT4 to generate random topic-specific prompts for SDXL to test out all the parameters, schedulers, etc (5k images and counting so far). Maybe it's just the fact that I've avoided the reddit firehose but I don't know how anyone could lose their awe so fast. It's just fun and there doesn't have to be any more to it.
[1] https://dalle.party/?party=cA8EVQF5
[2] https://dalle.party/?party=pXWEenFO
[+] [-] davesque|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] injidup|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|2 years ago|reply
Nature is awesome. Most photographs don’t do it justice. You have to get out there and see it for the full sensory experience.
[+] [-] ilaksh|2 years ago|reply
After all, there is quite a bit of meaning in the text used to generate them. That seems like a head start if you are trying to make a statement. Not to mention the speed that the image or image elements emerge and can be iterated or integrated.
For example, take Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (admittedly just from the top of Google search results about artistic statements). It is a series of plates that have sculptures depicting femininity in various ways at various heights. With something like a painting tool with SDXL or DALLE-3 integrated one could create an image with similar content by drawing the table and then generating/inserting or inpainting each of the individual plate contents per specification such as the size of the inpaint mask and prompt.
She clearly explained the meaning of the work and it can fit in a few long sentences.
The more I think about this, the more it seems that image generation should be very helpful for artists who want to "say" something.
[+] [-] vorticalbox|2 years ago|reply
https://i.postimg.cc/KcHPQSmf/image.png
[+] [-] gausswho|2 years ago|reply
I take a different stance where the author claims AI manipulated imagery is less "real" than photography that is produced with focus stacking and HDR shadows. Those are no less false than AI, particularly at the degree used in his examples.
The awe-drop towards photography that he describes I experienced during the rise of Instagram over a decade ago. I couldn't understand why people compromised otherwise good photography with something so obviously manipulated. It felt like people being proud of an exam they cheated on. But the world became accustomed to that and moved on.
[+] [-] sericccus|2 years ago|reply
I used to have a similar opinion, but some young kids made me aware of an entirely different perspective. The young world seems to be waiting. There are those who jump on every hype to kill boredom or to compensate, those we all see and, I'll be honest here, who we all pity. But then there are those who couldn't get inspired and stimulated in that rather short window between the birth of awareness and that infinite moment when the dark patterns of big tech and the marketing industry hit them like a 2 mile-long freight-train. They can't move on; they are paralyzed. And society acts like they need reeducation.
Some people call it the "enshittification" of the internet and culture itself, which makes it worse because the term just creates another hype. The underlying issue are obedient engineers just doing their job instead of _simply_ (because they are damn good) being the better and much brighter competition. Rationalism and game theory have fooled the smartest into conformity.
[+] [-] 4RealFreedom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jetsetk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xigency|2 years ago|reply
“If everything is extraordinary then everything becomes ordinary.”
The ordinary is quite awesome as well.
[+] [-] adhesive_wombat|2 years ago|reply
We've become so accustomed to amazing things, some real, some synthetic, and every mixture in between, that these just seem less than "awful", to use the original sense of the word, to me. Even though they're probably objectively (heh) among the best micrographs ever taken.
[+] [-] __loam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpalmer|2 years ago|reply
The internet killed our sense of awe with aggregators and algorithms. "Sort by popularity" killed it. It became easy a long time ago to binge on awesome images and content.
[+] [-] GCA10|2 years ago|reply
I avoided this in the 1990s, before hiking Nepal's Annapurna Circuit, by refusing to watch any videos showing the trail. No, no, no. I wanted to take in the whole experience with a sense of wonder. And, yes, that's what happened. Totally unforgettable trip.
Fast forward to 2012, when I had business in Peru and a chance to visit Machu Picchu. This time I messed up. I watched the videos, flipped through the slide shows, etc. So, sadly, when I hiked up to the Sun Gate and caught the first glimpse of this restored ancient city, all I could think was: "Yep. That looks just like the pictures."
Generative AI certainly widens the ways we can inflict novelty fatigue on ourselves. But we've still got the ability to dial back on armchair experiences that will deaden our appreciation of the real thing.
[+] [-] cortesoft|2 years ago|reply
I think the true feeling of awe that the author is talking about can only come from being out in the real world. Don’t look for it on your computer.
[+] [-] blacksqr|2 years ago|reply
I dream of cities that old futurists would weep with joy to see, of wharfside neighborhoods where tough kids track down spies, where crumbling tenements contort to teetering and eccentric shapes that seem to spell out words against the night.
I dream of rugged, mustard-yellow monsters from the deep, with vulgar and percussive names like Zax and Rul-Rah-Room. I dream a world of dreams fulfilled, a place where ecstasy and not his brother pain has run amok, and even as I dream I know my dreams are almost true, a planet of attained desire and concrete fantasy that spins and glitters, balanced on the diamond capstone of Olympus.
[+] [-] xigency|2 years ago|reply
What a fantastic writer he is.
[+] [-] skepticATX|2 years ago|reply
Pressing a button and getting a technically impressive image will simply never invoke awe in the way that a human artist can; at least not after you've experienced it for the first time.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|2 years ago|reply
But more importantly, unless I am misunderstanding I think your description just ruled out photography as being able to invoke awe.
[+] [-] incrudible|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urbandw311er|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupusreal|2 years ago|reply
It used to me that I watched Godzilla smash a building and was awestruck because each and every tile on the roof of the buildings was carefully placed by hand, the brick walls crumbling like real brick walls showed me how much work and care went into making just a few seconds of footage.
But now I can watch monsters smash entire cities and it bores me to tears. I know the buildings are copy pasted, the details are just tiled textures. It still took somebody some time to design and arrange but I know it's relatively cheap because being cheap is the whole point of doing it this way and they try to compensate by doing more of it on a wider scale, which lacks intimacy. Because even the camera itself is fake they can fly the camera around rapidly to make sure I never get a good look at any of the details, to hide the deficiency of the models, to make sure I don't notice the cut and paste jobs.
Then I watch a war movie. All the shots of the huge armies are from very far away so the men are indistinct ants. Close up shots only show me a few men at a time, it's all calculated to hide the fact that they didn't actually have thousands of men on the field and how can I be amazed when I know this? But if I watch Waterloo, 1970, I am genuinely amazed because I can clearly see thousands of men in detail. They really did have an army on the field and it's awe inspiring in a way that a movie with copy-pasted composite armies never can be.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] myaccountonhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TuringNYC|2 years ago|reply
Midjourney has made my list irrelevant. I noticed I wasnt saving these photos anymore on IG, even without making a conscious decision about it.
I think it is because cute cats are now infinitely generate-able and no longer something to curate. My behavior made me sad.
[+] [-] squigz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Baeocystin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|2 years ago|reply
I am pragmatic with most things in life. Clinging onto something is mostly a losing proposition. If something, for some reason, does not do work for me anymore, and there is no reason to assume that's going to change and nothing I can realistically do about it anyway, then it's probably a good idea to adjust and let it go.
In this particular and rapidly evolving part of our experience, I am sure we will discover new things about us. Maybe yeah, looking at actual photos of strange places will do less to us. Maybe that's fine because we never did care if it's real or not; maybe that part of the experience was mostly for the photographer and not the audience. Maybe for the rest of us the wonder that is somehow induced and the imagination being tickled can just as well be synthesised.
Would that be bad? Of course, too much of a thing will still be tiring and outright bad for you. Food is our most obvious nemesis in this regard. But even in a society where it's overabundant, we still value whatever good food means for us and I think it's highly unlikely that that is going to going to change.
[+] [-] jimmiles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|2 years ago|reply
If you can conjour up any vista and see it around you at true scale, running your hands through alien grass and smelling the alien breeze - will that make the claims in this article harder to refute?
However I can't help but feel it's a bit like arguing one should never see too much beauty in life because one doesn't want to become bored of beauty. I'm not sure where this argument leads other than "ration your dopamine"
[+] [-] gmuslera|2 years ago|reply
And I agree that a lot that can be generated in images with simple prompts is awesome. The problem is that is comparable or even better than the “old” awesome made by expensive artists. So, it was so awesome that old art if I can generate something even better with a short prompt?
I have 3 readings on that: AIs are standing on the shoulders of giants, most of “art” was not so much the work of genius but something more or less mechanical on remixing memes and cultural trends, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the watcher is as responsible for the “art” as the artist as much of the magic happens in his head, and that is independent from how the image was generated.
In any case, I think we didn’t lost our sense of awe. I can generate a thousand pictures with simple prompts and think they are amazing, even to have a healthy effect on my by watching them. But the artificial scarcity and market that used to be around images may end.
[+] [-] cjbgkagh|2 years ago|reply
It's my view that aesthetics are entirely independent of the work/suffering put into it by the artist and I'm looking forward to more art that is created to appeal to my innate sense of aesthetics by others who share that sense.
[+] [-] klyrs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|2 years ago|reply
IMHO Artists really need to embrace these new tools the way they embraced digitalisation and thrived.
You can tell that there's a plenty of room for artists as the nerdy types keep pumping out of the mill AI content that is only interesting in the context that it is AI.
The swagged pope image for example, is an example of good use of the tech for art(I know, may will disagree but consider the impact of that image on the culture).
My problem with the generative AI tools is strictly with the economical problems they might create to the artists who might lost the opportunity to be compensated for the art they already produced(because their business landscape was designed with the assumption that it's impossible to do what AI does today) and used in the development(training) of these tools. Other than that, it's just another toolset and it creates ample opportunities.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|2 years ago|reply
Now it's 2023, game graphics are basically photorealistic, and when's the last time you saw half a review raving about awe-inspiring graphics? If you have at all, it wasn't for their "realism." In fact, there's a good chance it was for their lack of realism, for a novel stylistic filter that makes a game look more like an animated artwork than a film.
Given supply and time, amazing becomes expected becomes boring. It's why artistic fashions change and evolve in the first place. No one development will ever hold on to first place, but there will always be something new to impress us.
[+] [-] mcphage|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustrider|2 years ago|reply
> Limit our brain diet the same way we try not to eat (delicious) fatty food every day to avoid the total collapse of our bodies.
Gives me hope that after our societal binge on social media and genai, we will come up with healthy patterns.
It only took us a hundred years or so after the Industrial Revolution to start adapting habits after the relative plenty that resulted.
[+] [-] GuB-42|2 years ago|reply
The article is about questioning the reality of picture. It started way before AI, when image manipulation became possible. Many people find it difficult to appreciate the picture of a beautiful woman on the cover of a magazine, because it must be all makeup and photoshop. Even if she may be stunningly beautiful and natural in real life, what to believe once we know what photo editors can do?
With or without AI, I tend to assume that all awesome pictures are edited in some way, unless some somewhat trustworthy source tells me they aren't.
And even without editing, straight from the camera images, what you are seeing may be a distorted view of reality. For example, a wide angle shot of a room makes it look bigger than it is in real life, a trick well known by real estate agents. Our eyes don't have the field of view of a wide angle lens, so is such a picture "real"?