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.<p>Dropbox made filesharing easier. It's a good product, but not disruptive. Nobody panicked that Dropbox would make their job redundant.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>You can't ask for "in the style of Keith Haring' before there's a Keith Haring
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:<p>- Before writing, ideas had to be distributed orally.<p>- Before the printing press, distributed copies had to be written by hand.<p>- Before the internet, distribution required thousands of physical copies to be produced.<p>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")<p>Otherwise- really good points, well-written
Hottake on skimming the article: people don't yet fully get where this is going (fast).<p>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.<p>What we need to start preparing for is that the creation phase is next; it's a mere engineering problem.<p>Yes, that's somewhat sardonic; it's going to take some years. But only some.<p>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...<p>...that is going to become the domain of the AI as well.<p>What inspires "art" or whatever else?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Per Ex Machina that may not go so well in various ways.<p>Anyway. The writing is on the wall.<p>And it's not in OUR handwriting.
> 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...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I think Stable Diffusion is a both a threat and a tool for illustrators but will mostly be a tool for artists.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Something new must emerge for AI to move past probability generated mimicry.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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. <a href="https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e" rel="nofollow">https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...</a>
> 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;<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?
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?<p>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
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?<p>I really wish I knew what DFW had in mind when he said irony wasn't the point.
Isn't there going to be the great bundling with AI? Contrary to the trend in the past of unbunding?<p>He can't see the forrest for the trees:<p>"I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet [...]"<p>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.
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.<p>you can't have another van gogh by reproducing van gogh paintings.<p>reproducing van gogh painting will teach you a lot about art.<p>but once you become good, you develop your own flair / style.<p>and that's what makes art great, the infinite possibilities.<p>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.<p>for that reason alone - I will go against the grain and
say AI art won't push artists out of jobs