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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

114 pointsby valgazealmost 3 years ago

36 comments

adamhialmost 3 years ago
I won&#x27;t pretend that this isn&#x27;t a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.<p>One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I&#x27;ve generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them &quot;good&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s always something wrong, and you can&#x27;t tell the model &quot;the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees&quot;, or &quot;the hands should <i>not</i> look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or <i>why</i> things are the way they are. It&#x27;s never exactly right.<p>It&#x27;s like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the <i>second</i> 90%.<p>But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don&#x27;t get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, <i>will</i>) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren&#x27;t on it anymore.<p>If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it&#x27;s just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.
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vanadium1stalmost 3 years ago
I am a working digital artist, my personal feed is filled with takes like this. I understand the crisis that artists go through currently and I understand their emotions. I&#x27;ve personally made peace with it already, but it will take time for everyone and there will be a lot of concern, rage and bargaining in the process.<p>All of us artists woke up in the world where the thing we were learning to produce all of our lives became 100x cheaper. I&#x27;ve been kinda waiting for this to happen for truck drivers or translators and was honestly surprised that it got to the artists first. But, there&#x27;s nothing to do now.<p>There will be a lot of takes trying different ways to deny this reality. Like if we agree that this thing is immoral or anti-cultural it will go away and our potential customers will forget about it. I think that it&#x27;s a waste of time The industry is not completely gone, but it will go though a massive transformation. The basic hierarchy of artists will probably stay the same - people who were good in the pre-ai era will still be good working with the ai. If you&#x27;ve learned your basic skills right - they will still work.<p>I&#x27;ve personally already changed my workflow to use ai art for the sketches, ideas and references. And then polish them to commercial level using my old experience and skills. It&#x27;s funny how this thing is so new, but I&#x27;ve gotten so used to it that it&#x27;s already hard for me to come back to my old set of tools. And I do recommend all other artists to do the same and to try to find their place in the new reality - it really seems like there&#x27;s no other way.
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flipbradalmost 3 years ago
We&#x27;ll want to be a little careful with how society responds to this. Basquiat put it well ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bastiat.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;petition.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bastiat.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;petition.html</a>)<p>Excerpt follows:<p>&quot;We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us<p>.<p>We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull&#x27;s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.&quot;
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xor99almost 3 years ago
Digital art is not permanently interesting. My sympathies go out to people who feel like they will lose some of their business. However, a group of developers has shown what was always true about digital art: its computational art even if you draw it because it is encoded digitally. In other words, it was always going to be reproducible and remixable.<p>The problem with being shocked by Dall-E, in my view, is that it shows an ignorance about the historical development of art and its incredible diversity of practice + the final productions and forms of art. OpenAI have sort of Warholised digital art in a way and that&#x27;s just very standard in art history. People went crazy when Warhol productised art but in reality this was an overreaction and plenty more stuff came after that which completely different in its orientation towards art (e.g. something like Hans Haacke). Dalle-E is a system for producing digital art in the way that Warhol&#x27;s practice was a system for producing visual art as a commercial product.
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aynggalmost 3 years ago
A lot of art created now, especially for film&#x2F; media, already goes through a similar process that AI just automates and accelerates. Several big concept artists I have met have lamented on the fact that many artists in the industry basically churn compositions out through mashing references they gather on google images or asset stores, not to mention just straight photobashing, which has made a lot of the concepts produced fairly derivative and homogenized since everything is just referencing what google images serves or assets that everyone else uses.<p>Even fine artists have likely had their practice influenced by the whims of what the algorithms on major social media outlets are willing to favor in order to get engagement. It kind of feels like many creatives have been incentivized into becoming slaves to these processes, which has in turn made them seem replaceable with AI.
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MontyCarloHallalmost 3 years ago
Transfer learning to emulate artistic style [0] has been around for the better part of a decade and has had zero impact on artists’ livelihoods.<p>People consume art because they enjoy admiring the human talent that creates it, celebrating that some individuals are capable of extraordinary feats the vast majority of people are incapable of. It’s the same reason people watch sports—they enjoy admiring the top echelon of human physical ability. Very few people would watch Olympic Games performed by realistic androids.<p>I do agree that tools like this could eliminate mediocre graphic designers, or anyone else creating visual products that are so mundane that their viewers never bother to consider the artist. Corporate Memphis [1] designers’ days are numbered.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.paperspace.com&#x2F;art-style-transfer-neural-networks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.paperspace.com&#x2F;art-style-transfer-neural-networ...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corporate_Memphis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corporate_Memphis</a>
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thejohnconwayalmost 3 years ago
Speaking as a professional digital artist, I am not very concerned by this. Images created by AI without comparable human experience (and therefore meaning), is not the same as art, although it can of course look like it. People who are more than casual appreciators of images follow and admire artists, and their translation of human meaning into an artwork.<p>I can see this eating into the commercial artwork market, which is bad news for the artists that rely on that for income, but it&#x27;s not an existential threat to the meaning of art.
kradeelavalmost 3 years ago
It&#x27;s odd as a design manager, I feel like people focus on the wrong things to be alarmed about with DALL-E, and <i>aren&#x27;t</i> alarmed enough about others.<p>* feels like there will be a subtle shift from (corporate) designers as creators to designers as technical sheepherders and retouchers. senior designers who have a real nose for art direction and understanding the fundementals will be fine. interns and juniors may get hit with a widening canyon of blindly using these tools without understanding why the &quot;base&quot; styles&#x2F;logos look good. the act of creation is a learning experience that this removes.<p>* I feel like phi-y in a different comment has the most accurate read on the situation, given how this will not replace the superstar artists who&#x27;ve already gone through the years of training and sweat-shop work to refine their craft, but the beginner artists who &quot;need&quot; the sweatshop years to get a real-world sense of their craft and the money from the more easily reproducible works.<p>* there is a difference from using digital art as a tool (say, an apple pencil) to digital art as a resource-crutch (photobashing) when crunched for time or resources. I have mixed feelings about photo bashing as an art but those who rely on the resource-crutch sign may get hit hardest versus the ones that already have the raw illustration skills and can adapt&#x2F;art-direct on the spot.<p>* copyright laws are gonna be interesting when people start trying to &quot;base&quot; results on logos like disney and coca-cola and get lawyers sent after them if it&#x27;s too obvious. My fear is this creates yet another power imbalance between those who have the money to sic lawyers on others versus not.<p>* I&#x27;m mixed on DALL-E because on one hand and to be perfectly blunt, I feel like the most easily reproduced work is ugly&#x2F;same-y as sin, and lacks all originality compared with the more creative&#x2F;taboo-art circles who are the first ones to push stylistic and thematic boundaries. I&#x27;m not worried about DALL-E replacing styles that are inherently harder to reproduce.<p>On the other hand ... a sense of grace should be extended to artists who are affected. Being slowly replaced&#x2F;treated as obsolete is a hard thing to experience, much like how natural age is rough on people&#x27;s emotional states to the point where it&#x27;s a type of trauma. It&#x27;s messy, and it&#x27;s hard, and I acknowledge there&#x27;s going to be casualties.
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digitalsushialmost 3 years ago
Hire a human and &quot;pick any two: fast, cheap, or good&quot;.<p>Or hire the computer and you can have all three.<p>You&#x27;re telling me I don&#x27;t appreciate the genuine artifact? Well, tell me how realist painters survived film photography, and how film photographers survived digital photography. I&#x27;d ask but I don&#x27;t know any anymore.<p>Subjectivity defines what is good. This thing makes art as reliably as 9 bucks gets you fries, a coke, and a burger. Talk about disruptive technology.
tomatotomato37almost 3 years ago
As a hobbyist artist my main concern is less the automation will replace artist as much as that 99% of that automation will come from the 3 companies with deep enough coffers to train and run the most complex AIs, and 2 of those companies will be FAANGs. Ultimately it will be a future where instead of paying an artist X amount for decent art with the artist getting a ~7% margin, it will be paying 90% of X to a monopolistic tech company for almost decent art with the company&#x27;s CEO getting a 70% margin
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bdw5204almost 3 years ago
AI generated art seems like a good way to open up solo game dev to people who can&#x27;t draw. Just run the AI over and over again until you get artwork close to what you want.<p>There are already tools out there for people who want to automate the programming part of game dev. I don&#x27;t see how that&#x27;s any different in principle from an AI that generates art. This seems like a better solution to the problem of making a game without being any good at art than buying assets since your assets should be unique.
marc_ioalmost 3 years ago
I sympathize with all artists who are concerned about these new tools. Once I thought about being a full time artist, but life got in the way.<p>However, visual art creates a cultural feedback loop that is constantly evolving, it is a crucial mirror that shows us stark naked. Just read the history of art.<p>People should not forget that there is no way this technology can make such a vital form of collective expression relevant without artists participating in it.<p>Of course it will disrupt a lot of things, and nobody enjoys that, but new ways of meaningfully involving humans in it will continue to emerge. Otherwise it would just cease to be relevant.
superchromaalmost 3 years ago
The linked reaction is probably slightly too alarmist but I am also still surprised that this was the field that some manager decided to devote millions of dollars of research and development funds to automate.<p>I&#x27;ve read in advice for technical founders that programmers tend to want to jump and automate the wrong problems, and this feels a bit like one of those cases in retrospect.
Kiroalmost 3 years ago
In case anyone wonders, this is not about DALL-E or Midjourney. He&#x27;s referring to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stability.ai&#x2F;blog&#x2F;stable-diffusion-announcement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stability.ai&#x2F;blog&#x2F;stable-diffusion-announcement</a>
status200almost 3 years ago
I think the tweet author is missing the meat and focusing on the gravy - they themselves indicate that the AI just replicates existing styles, so it will only ever produce existing art styles with the signature AI blurry weirdness on the details.<p>A main hallmark of breakthrough artists is inventing new styles and making them their own, a feat that AI has yet to perform very well (unless you include the aforementioned blurry telltales of generation and scrambled letters). Otherwise artists are just borrowing ideas from each other anyway so AI removes the need to learn someone else&#x27;s style to replicate it.<p>In my opinion it will hurt the bottom tier of artists, but the ones who create new styles along with their own works will continue to thrive.
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tmslnzalmost 3 years ago
Like I suppose many of us, I had a conversation with an artist friend about this very topic. They are concerned about it. Some of the generated results are impressive and surely can sufficiently replace some subset of the current human output.<p>But! Seeing DALL-E artwork from a bird’s eye view, I am more and more convinced that it’s just another tool, not a replacement: It is amazing good at producing unexpected results, and just like GPT3, it does so by regurgitating what is already out there, remixing it in somewhat interesting ways. This is an especially useful tool to quickly produce mood boards, or communicate an artistic intent. However it is not a replacement for the kind of thinking required to produce good artwork.
PaulsWalletalmost 3 years ago
There is a response to this tweet where someone says &quot;stop gatekeeping art&quot; which while I understand the gist of what they mean, seems like a weird thing to say to console someone who is concerned they are about to be automated out of a job.
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prvcalmost 3 years ago
&gt;t does not seem that they have any safeguards in place to protect artists<p>From what? Until strong AI comes about, good human artists will always be able to compete on originality and relatability, and even afterwards, human art could be valued for its &quot;authentic flavor&quot;, or something like that. Until then, among humans, only the hacks need fear these systems.
madelynalmost 3 years ago
I think my heuristic is Magic: the Gathering card artwork.<p>Can DALL-E make set defining breathtaking high res promo art, with fantastic composition, style and proportion? Maybe, but probably not as well as ex. Raymond Swanland right now.<p>Can DALL-E crank out the 50x lands and commons needed for the set? Almost certainly.<p>Superstar artists will be fine but I fear the bottom will fall out of the craft.
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fleddralmost 3 years ago
I think the concern is fully justified. Those still being skeptical of AI art fail to understand exponential progress. Usage of various algorithms is about to explode, feeding back billions of signals to correct the model.<p>A second or third generation model may really understand relations between objects, depth, lighting, etc.<p>It&#x27;s both amazing and scary. A little behind the curve, but expect similar developments in music generation.<p>Given the speed of all of this, the socio-economic discussion on AI should really get prioritized, as very little cognitive work is going to be safe.
apialmost 3 years ago
I get the sense that the same thing is about to happen to many forms of creative work as happened to hand crafting during the industrial revolution, and if so the fallout may not be pretty.<p>People still buy hand crafted items of course, but they tend to be relegated to high-end or niche markets. The same would apply here. The larger number of people employed churning out relatively uncreative material would be displaced just like weavers and seamstresses were by textile mills.
0x20cowboyalmost 3 years ago
“A girl in a red dress throwing a Molotov cocktail in a field of flowers in the style of Banksy”<p>“An obese politician smoking a cigar being held up by a crowd of starving people wearing American flag pants in the style of Norman Rockwell”<p>“A web page sign up form in the style of Uber”<p>Content violation or ??. Heck, any cartoon in the New Yorker would probably be a content violation.<p>The hard part, I think, is art making an “on the edge” statement. If they allowed this, it could easily - and would - be taken too far (depending on what your version of too far is).<p>I just don’t think human art and all the subtleties behind it can be algorithmically replaced. They weren’t algorithmically created.<p>Corporate soda ads… that’ll probably get replaced (but will still need layout and mixing)<p>UI design and video game art (not concept art in game art) seems too precise. And meaningful art seems to have too much in baked human judgments.<p>I am as afraid of this as I am of Github copilot. Meaning, not much.<p>DALL-E is super cool, but like AI becoming conscious, I am not holding my breath.
h2odragonalmost 3 years ago
I&#x27;m watching an artist play with DALL-E for the past few days; it&#x27;s proving to be a useful tool for inspiring concepts and leading her to her own visualizations and execution of things that she had not gotten to &quot;gel&quot; previously.<p>I can recall a little bit of the fuss at the beginning of digital art, &quot;is that even real art?&quot; I don&#x27;t think this fuss has as much to stand on. It&#x27;s a tool for making art; whether it&#x27;s really art or not is a judgement only the individual viewer can make.
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forrestthewoodsalmost 3 years ago
I’m still not sure where the line is. Human artists steal style all the time. Maybe they eventually evolve into their own unique style. But any great artist could definitely imitate many other great artists’ style.<p>I’m not sure where the line is for machines. Copying the signature is funny, but also fixable. Is copying the style fundamentally wrong? If yes, is it wrong when humans do as well?<p>Feels like an impossible line to define.
throwaway82388almost 3 years ago
I think it’s telling that the primary ethical concerns around AI development (at least at OpenAI, if not others) are that AI tools not be used to enable propagandists, or to generate violent or sexual imagery.<p>I see comparatively few ethical concerns about the economic fallout professional artists and illustrators will experience as a result.
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PheonixPhartsalmost 3 years ago
I&#x27;m pretty <i>unimpressed</i> with the stuff coming out of Dall-E etc (I know, controversial opinion on HN, but bear with me). It&#x27;s technically impressive, but imho, it still hasn&#x27;t closed an essential gap need to make AI truly compelling, and still feels like just a modern ELIZA: simultaneously impressive given the technology and a parlor trick.<p>That said, I&#x27;m also not too impressed with many contemporary &quot;artists&quot;, especially the type this person is afraid of being replaced with AI.<p>What I see here is that artists that have turned themselves into <i>art making robots</i> are vulnerable to being replaced by <i>robots that are making art</i>.<p>As a counter example I present the work of Ben Kovach [0], a generative artist, who makes art with robots essentially. All of his work is generated from computer programs but there are many (and certainly not all) pieces that capture a genuine sense of art that I have not seen in either the slew of human artists churning out robotic work to satisfy customer demand or current generation AI generated art.<p>Kovach&#x27;s work reminds me of the work of Factory Record&#x27;s designer Peter Saville, probably most famous for the cover of Joy Division&#x27;s <i>Unknown Pleasures</i> [1]. In a sense Saville is pushing form the opposite direction of Kovach, trying to use human skills to create art that feels somehow robotic and sterile (whereas Kovach does the opposite, create something that feels more human than your typical machine generated art).<p>I don&#x27;t see current generation a threat to art, but rather the trend towards the reduction of art towards being a reproducible, automatic process. That is the art that can be replaced with AI was already art created by an ad hoc &quot;artifical&quot; artist.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bendotk.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bendotk.com&#x2F;</a><p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.media-amazon.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;I&#x2F;812FS2R2v6L._SL1500_.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.media-amazon.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;I&#x2F;812FS2R2v6L._SL1500_.jpg</a>
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joecool1029almost 3 years ago
Can I get an &quot;Amen, Brother&quot;?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Amen_break" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Amen_break</a><p>Not saying AI&#x2F;ML won&#x27;t be damaging and cause negative effects, just pointing out that other uncompensated prior art has been used to create transformative works before we ever had DALL-E.
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alexashkaalmost 3 years ago
It&#x27;ll be just another tool in an artist&#x27;s toolkit. The jump in quality among artists since tablets (pens to draw on a computer screen) and stock photography became widely available 15-20 years ago, has been astronomical.<p>Not to mention the 3D graphics of the past 2 decades, oh ma gawd! It&#x27;s artist paradise compared to what people had 50 years ago.
satyrneinalmost 3 years ago
I wonder what is at the end of this road. Hopefully it&#x27;s not just that some junior artists get fired and everything else stays the same.<p>Does the line between novel and graphic novel blur, as more authors &quot;direct&quot; AIs to depict what&#x27;s in their brains?<p>Is this how we get to infinite generated worlds in the metaverse?
morelispalmost 3 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boundary2.org&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;mueller&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boundary2.org&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;mueller&#x2F;</a> didn&#x27;t predict precisely this step of the process, but it&#x27;s still the solution.
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ChainOfFoolsalmost 3 years ago
Ford CEO to Union boss: &quot;how will you get your men to build cars as fast as my new robots?&quot;<p>Union boss: &quot;I don&#x27;t know Mr Ford, but how will you get those robots to buy your cars?&quot;
cercatrovaalmost 3 years ago
Title should be more like, artists concerned about Stable Diffusion AI model that makes images look human-made.
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seydoralmost 3 years ago
I suppose they can make a disclaimer that prohibits AI companies form using pictures of their work?
acadapteralmost 3 years ago
Mail couriers had to teach themselves to drive after many years of using horses.<p>Artists will have to learn how to stimulate AI models in effective ways and perform suitable post-processing.
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sitzkriegalmost 3 years ago
the only group that should seriously be concerned is maybe the stock photo industry
donkarmaalmost 3 years ago
one area where human artists excel: learning. if i ask dall-e to draw something that was made after it was released then it wouldn&#x27;t be able to do it without a very detailed description