I have a friend who works as an artist and he's excited and nervous about this. But also he's trying to learn how to use these well. If you try these AI out, there's definitely an art to writing good prompts that gets what you actually want. Hopefully these AI will become just another brush in the artist's palette rather than a replacement.
I hope these end up similar to the relationship between Google and programming. We all know the jokes about "I don't really know how to code, I just know how to Google things". But using a search engine efficiently is a very real skill with a large gap between those who know how and those who don't.
Replying to myself because I just had a chat with him about this. He's thinking of getting a high end GPU now, lol.
Some ideas of how this could be useful in the future to assist artists:
Quickly fleshing out design mockups/concepts is the obvious first one that you can do right now.
An AI stamp generator. Say you're working on a digital painting of a flower field. You click the AI menu, "Stamp", a textbox opens up and you type "Monarch butterfly. Facing viewer. Monet style painting." And you get a selection of ai generated images to stamp into your painting.
Fill by AI. Sketch the details of a house, select the Fill tool, select AI, click inside one of the walls of the house, a textbox pops up, you write "pre-war New York brick wall with yellow spray painted graffiti"
I have a friend who paints, google/ athanasart. His paintings are usually purchased before they are even finished, and sometimes even stolen. All of that technology, Dalle2, Disco diffusion, Stable Diffusion, is totally boring to him. He doesn't even care. He will not install this technology to his machine, or use it online, even if he is paid to do it. I love Craiyon, Dalle2, Stable Diffusion, but just beautiful images, are not art.
But the definition of art can't depend on your knowledge of how was it made. I can show you two beautiful pictures and ask you if any of them is art, and you'd know I was trying to trick you. But you could pass a piece made by an AI as art if you didn't know how it was produced.
Yes, in case someone gets a painting without any additional information, a computer art piece, could easily be mistaken for a human art piece. That's true. My position on the subject is as follows, the best art for humans is made by humans, and the best art for computers is made by computers. Actually i have yet to see a computer generation on the same level as Mona Lisa, not even close. However computer generated women, some of them are alright!
Kinda like the creation of copilot and it's ilk for programmers, and gpt3 for writers. Ive seen some talk recently around 'prompt engineers'... Probably to some extent, every job will become prompt engineering in some way.
Eventually I suppose the AIs will also do the prompts.
At which point I hope we've all agreed to a star trek utopia, or it's gonna get real bad. Or maybe it'll get way better.
I think right now we could setup the AI's to do the prompts. You type in a vague description - "gorilla in a suit" and that is passed to GPT-3's API with instructions to provide a detailed and vivid description of the input in X style where X is one of several different styles. GPT-3 generates multiple prompts, the prompts passed to Stable Diffusion, the user gets back a grid of different images and styles. Selecting an image on the results grid prompts for variation, possibly of the prompt and the images.
Yeah, if we're gonna replace every fucking profession with a half-assed good-enough AI version, what're we even here for? We're sure not all gonna survive in a capitalist society where you have to create some kind of "value" to earn enough money to pay for your roof and your food and your power.
IIRC there is some vague "it sure got real bad" somewhere in the Trek timelines between "capitalism ended" and "post-scarcity utopia" and I sure am not looking forwards to living through those times. Well, I'm looking forwards to part of that, I'm looking forwards to the part where we murder a lot of landlords and rent-seekers and CEOs and distribute their wealth. That'll be good.
Next let's get rid of all the artists and replace them with AI. Redistribute their skills so we can all make art. Oh wait that just happened. You're a hypocrite that wants to redistribute the wealth of others, but not your own.
Also joking about murdering people is bad taste and not how you convey a point or win an argument. Very low class.
> Next let's get rid of all the artists and replace them with AI. Redistribute their skills so we can all make art. Oh wait that just happened. You're a hypocrite that wants to redistribute the wealth of others, but not your own.
Recognising that doing the former without the latter demonstrably hurts people isn’t being hypocritical. Hence all the talk of post-scarcity. Post-scarcity for me not for thee is very much a sign of the times though.
There weren't "uprisings" mostly because the destroyed jobs were replaced with others that paid better and were less "dangerous". There were some local minima (Detroit auto workers) where this happen only partially and we know the pathology this led to.
Is this replacement of jobs happening this time around? No. So violence there will be.
(OP here) I agree. I am an artist (not by trade but by lifelong obsession) in several different mediums, but also an AI engineer--so I feel a weird mixture of emotions tbh. I'm thrilled and excited but also terrified lol.
It's my fucking job. I've spent my whole fucking life getting good at drawing. I can probably manage to keep finding work but I am really not happy about what this is going to do to that place where a young artist is right at the threshold of being good enough to make it their job. Because once you're spending most of your days doing a thing, you start getting better at it a lot faster. And every place this shit gets used is a lost opportunity for an artist to get paid to do something.
I wanna fucking punch everyone involved in this thing.
I mean I get what you're saying, sucks to have someone or something take your job, but isn't this a neo-luddite type argument? AI is gonna come for us all eventually.
Please save this comment and re-read it when a new development in AI suddenly goes from "this is cute" to "holy fuck my job feels obsolete and the motherfuckers doing it are not gonna give a single thought to all the people they're putting out of work". Thank you.
Look at that, you said the same thing to me 8 days ago [0]. I'll stick to the same rebuttals you got for that comment as well, namely that AI comes for us all, the only thing to be done is to adapt and survive, or perish. Like @yanderekko says, it is cowardice to assume we should make an exception for AI in our specific field of interest.
Admittedly as someone who's been subscribing to Creative Cloud for a while I already wanna punch a lot of people at Adobe so the people working on this particular part of Photoshop are gonna have to get in line.
You got to move one step higher and work with ideas and concepts instead of brushes. AI can generate more imagery than was previously possible, so it's going to be about story telling or animation.
I make comics, it's already about storytelling and ideas as much as it is about drawing stuff. I make comics in part because I like drawing shit and that gives me a framework to hang a lot of drawings on. I like the set of levels I work at and don't want to change it. I've spent an entire fucking lifetime figuring out how to make my work something I enjoy and I sure bet nobody involved in this is gonna fling a single cent in the direction of the artists they're perpetrating massive borderline copyright infringement upon.
But here's all these motherfuckers trying to automate me out of a job. It's not even a boring, miserable job. It's a job that people dream of having since they were kids who really liked to draw. Fuck 'em.
This feels so wrong this AI thing, strangely enough Im not that stressed.
Look at the recursive side of it its hilarious. Im an artist. AI is around. Do I want to put my work online? No. So no artists put stuff online anymore? So how does future of art work exactly? Will send booklets by mail again?
There is the democratic side of it. We the people ultimately decides. Those pictures are generated by using artists works, not out of thin air. So not a freedom question here but a people one: do we want that or not? Maybe with 30+ years old pictures for example, could be good for economy.
I mean you can literally replace any job you want but the artist's it seems. Imagine when people will be jobless because AI replaced them. You'd think they'd want to make art during their retirement right?
Its a case where the snake eat itself. If AI ruins our online life, we'll stop going online.
Yeah going offline begins to look tempting except for the part that huge amounts of how you get people to want to pay for your work is by sharing it publicly. Except then someone can come along and scrape it all and dump it into their AI training black box without giving two shits about copyright.
All of the artists of the world will remove their online work. Who'd want to put their work online again? Its not even in the interests of the big players like Epic Games or Marvel or Disney. Nah I dont see how this is gonna fly.
Automation doesn't eliminate jobs. As such this automation won't eliminate your job, QED.
(It's bad monetary policy that eliminates jobs. The US has very very low unemployment right now so it doesn't appear that's been happening.)
Go ahead and try it. It'd be impossibly harder to create one of your own pictures with it than it was for your to make one. Instead what's going to happen is you'll get more efficient ways to do backgrounds and unimportant bits of an image, just like Blender CSP provide 3D models to do layouts with.
Check out the melodies I made with an AI assistant I created (human-in-the-loop still but much quicker than if I tried to come up with them from the scratch): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578Y.... There are also good AI tools for other parts of making music, like singing voice generation.
AI will just replace existing jobs. It is unethical since a lot of people will be destroyed but our leaders sponsored by the majority's insatiable appetite for power will soon make it legal.
AI is a new tool that will automate away a lot of workers like other machines.
What happens with these workers is what defines us.
And there are a lot of influencers saying that it will be "really nice that AI will replace the boring jobs so we can focus on creative/fulfilling life" yeah right...
Ironically, with Moravec's Paradox, (digital) creative tasks will probably be automated while the boring tasks of moving boxes around might not be for a while:
> Moravec's paradox is the observation by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning requires very little computation, but sensorimotor and perception skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".
