[HN Gopher] The AI Art Apocalypse
___________________________________________________________________
The AI Art Apocalypse
Author : nkurz
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-08-16 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| nperez wrote:
| My gut feeling is that artists will be the primary users of these
| tools and there will be a large market for those who are very
| skilled at producing, curating, tweaking, and post-processing the
| results. Some jobs will be lost due to clients who do it
| themselves, but there will be enough people who don't want to
| learn the tools no matter how simple they are. I also think the
| tools will become more complex.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Actually, truthfully, AI is merely a complex tool. Any "art"
| created by an AI with no human interaction is pure rubbish. It is
| the humans operating the AI that knowingly discard the rubbish,
| and after significant effort entailing a lot of trials and random
| experimentation they manage to get something their human mind
| comprehends is integrated with the goal they have in their
| imagination. It is the human curating and editing the AIs
| generations that produces the "art" and not the software. The
| software is merely a sophisticated idiot savant, and I
| significantly stress the idiot part because they are innately
| capable of zero art themselves.
| lfnoise wrote:
| Try to get an AI to render an upside down face. In my attempts,
| they can't do it at all. Deformity results. It is outside the
| training data.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Disclaimer: I love MidJourney. It's the most provocative and
| addictive tool I've played with on a computer for many a year.
|
| Largely agree with AW the OP, but think the question of "what art
| are we talking about" needs more air.
|
| A lot of the turmoil around these tools appears to be about the
| threat they pose to the careers of artists and designers (and
| soon, most related domains). But some of the simple versions of
| this story (not this one) overlook the nuances IMO.
|
| Some of those being,
|
| - the distinction between "fine" art in the commercial "art
| world" gallerist sense, and graphic
| design/illustration/commercial art - that professional commercial
| artists are going to adopt and exploit these tools with the same
| intrinsic advantages they have using with other tools - that in a
| very short time there is already an explosion of work that uses
| these tools as one (large) element to produce synthetic work
| across media that would have been prohibitively expensive/time
| consuming without them
|
| Even as a bystander, but with a background and interest as a
| serious and modestly successful artist in a different medium,
|
| it's been remarkable to see just how quickly people with fewer
| kids, better ideas, and more time than me, seized upon these
| tools not as simple image-making widgets, but as sophisticated
| tools to exploit to generate a stream of imagery to be applied to
| create Other Things, both as proofs of concept, commercially, and
| as yes "real art" in the gallerist sense.
|
| These things are quite obviously disruptive in a way most VC only
| dream of.
|
| Idle other comments:
|
| The "eerie" uncanny sense that scaling up the visual cortex
| abstraction stack toward "grandmother neurons" that these systems
| has, is IMO considerably more unsettling than the impact on
| specific industries. What we can see (literally) in these systems
| is a visualization (in the data viz sense) of how much further
| along towards AGI these things may soon be.
|
| Their failure modes are more interesting to me than their
| successes. The ramifications for how they fail and how they are
| of course unaware of their own failure, is a true cautionary
| tale.
|
| IMO those failures offer an excellent basis for "cautionary
| tales" and illustration to the general public of why we need
| oversight and governance for the deployment of these systems.
| It's one thing for them to produce "nightmare fuel" when asked to
| create kittens in the kitchen; it's another for a comparable
| (smaller less tuned closed-source closed-training-dataset...)
| system to be put in service approving mortgages, assigning credit
| risks, or (as made ProPublica famous) assessing whether someone
| is a candidate for bail.
|
| (Highly recommended: The Alignment Problem)
|
| Anyway. The singularity is already here, it's just unevenly
| distributed.
| samfriedman wrote:
| Without this technology, if I want to procure a concept-art
| quality image to promote my video game, I need to pay at least an
| amateur artist for their time and skill. With this technology, I
| can simply run some generations and maybe tweak or combine the
| output in Photoshop. I don't see how AI won't gobble up the
| bottom X% of the visual art industry almost immediately.
|
| Fine arts, contemporary artists showing in galleries, mediums
| that can't be printed on photo paper (sculpture, canvas
| paintings, etc) will be more resistant to displacement. But the
| massive majority of commodity art & visuals - adverts,
| billboards, book covers, article images and so on - will
| definitely be displaced in the very near future.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Yes, and: as the space evolves, human artists will figure out
| what AI art is bad at doing and find new niches.
|
| And then software will "learn," and the arms race will
| continue.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Right now, I think the winning move for artists is feedback
| and iteration: "make his head tilt more to the left. make his
| tie a lighter shade of blue." etc kind of modifications that
| aren't easily parseable by an AI.
|
| That being said, I'm quite enjoying generating pixel art to
| stand in for my programmer art before I commission artists.
| notart666 wrote:
| For most works using this as concept art would be deceptive and
| out right fraud in worse cases. The FCC doesn't pursue it so
| you'd probably be fine but this is not a replacement for an
| actual concept art unless you are working on a low quality or
| low poly game and even then this would be very
| misrepresentative. This has no real use case outside fraud.
| astrange wrote:
| What do you think concept art is? Any picture seems like it'd
| work as concept art. Even an uncreative illustrator AI would
| help if the person using it just can't draw.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| I'm extremely confused. The situation illustrated was that of
| an indie game dev using Mid journey or whatever to generate
| concept art.
|
| _Who_ exactly is being defrauded? Is the dev defrauding
| themselves? Their future customers? How would anyone even
| know? It 's not like concept art is used for anything
| external?
| c3534l wrote:
| Generally, if you make something cheaper, people want more of it.
| The world will change around the new economic fact that art is
| cheap.
|
| Besides, the art apocalpse already happened over a hundred years
| ago. There's not much demand for technically accurate paintings
| since photography. People aren't now, nor in the future,
| primarily concerned with narrowly accurate representations.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| How are these systems trained to make sure they're not polluted
| with images created by AI already?
|
| I can see how it's semi-easy to have a database of images up to a
| certain date (before AI generating algo existed), but what about
| if you want to train the AI with modern data?
|
| For example, say if I want to query, in 2035: _" Flying hippos in
| the style of McGrundsBulle"_ where McGrundsBulle is an artist who
| only started producing art in 2025... How is the AI then not
| going to trained with "flying hippos" generated between now and
| 2035 by AI like DALL-E 2 / midjourney / etc.?
|
| I'd argue it wouldn't make sense to train better AIs using
| current AI's generated pictures for many of them are the stuff of
| nightmares and it doesn't seem to be because they've been trained
| by nightmarish datasets. They're just creepy due to how the
| current AI works and many details are obviously off, which makes
| them very creepy to humans.
| ethav1 wrote:
| Datasets can be manually curated to contain primarily original
| images if this becomes a real issue. For example, classifiers
| can predict whether an image is generated or not. You could
| adapt the process used to create laion-aesthetic[0] to remove
| generated images.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion-
| datasets/blob/main/laion-a...
| VHRanger wrote:
| Classic luddite argument at the core of the article.
|
| Technology both displaces jobs and enhances jobs. It's impossible
| to tell a priori the economic effect.
|
| It's just as possible that artists leveraging these tools are
| paid more because they're incredibly more productive than the
| overall demand for art somehow being sated and reducing artist
| employment
| lxe wrote:
| I always reference "The Ontology of the Photographic Image"
| (https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Phot...)
| by Andre Bazin, who expressed similar observations about
| photography entering the scene.
|
| I've been "successfully" creating AI art for a few months now,
| and although there are some staunch opponents (mostly on Reddit),
| the medium has been generally very well received by both the
| audiences and many artists in the established community.
| oraphalous wrote:
| Have you noticed that young people use music less and less as a
| signalling device? That is to say they care far less about
| whether or not the music is cool and signals their affinity to
| some kind of subculture... and more about whether or not they
| just like the sound.
|
| This is because access to music has become cheap. Discovery of
| music has become cheap. Signalling behaviours though rely on the
| costliness of signalling through a particular medium. Costly
| signalling is the theoretical framework you want here to
| understand what is going to happen to art if the tech is as good
| as it is currently being hyped.
|
| We like to think of art as this inherently communicative act - as
| the author says. But the main psychological motivation is
| signalling. We would not waste so much energy as a species on
| such behaviour if it didn't have some kind of evolutionary
| benefit. So I expect much of the energy that goes into the
| artistic signalling medium will be redirected toward more costly
| mediums.
| mushufasa wrote:
| Yes, I think the tech evolution of music has a lot of parallels
| here. In the 60s-70s, production and distribution were
| expensive, so there was scarcity. In the 90s-early 2000s DAWs
| on laptops made it easy to self-record/produce, so there was a
| a lot more music made, then in the 2010s legal distribution
| became cheap through streaming.
|
| Nowadays there's more music being created and consumed than
| ever, but the musicians don't make nearly as much money as in
| the golden days of the CD. The mega-stars like Billy Eillish
| still make a good amount through brand deals / live shows, but
| the 'middle class' of musicians has fallen away.
|
| I think lower barriers to entry through creating art via AI
| assistance will mean more art available, but it probably will
| make it harder to make a living as a professional artist. That
| said, I don't think anyone who chooses to be an artist today is
| primarily motivated to earn money.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I wouldn't have predicted artists, so-called "creatives", would
| have been the first to get displaced by AI, yet here we are.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I just completed a "show" of some of my art at my regular cafe
| that hosts local art on their wall for one month each.
|
| I need to write about this experience (mostly so I can feel
| "done" about it), but my show was titled "Is This Art?" and
| consisted of around a dozen images generated by VQGAN/VQGAN+CLIP.
| I sold almost every single piece! Not bad for a non-artist,
| frankly.
|
| Anyways, I think the key to my "success" was two fold: One, most
| images took an input image, all were photographs I took in the
| local area. Second, I was brutal in my curation of what I
| actually decided to print and include in the show. The keystone
| piece was actually a warped image of the coffee shop itself! In
| an art medium without clear constraints, my challenge was to
| define those constrains for myself. Not exactly a knew problem
| for artists.
|
| I also chose to overlay the output image and original photograph
| in some cases, and unmask the photograph in certain locations in
| the image. I used this opportunity to touch up the output in
| photoshop, and add/remove artificers and details. I was limited
| by my lack of digital art skills here, but this was the fun part.
|
| Final thought, a good eye for color and composition helps any
| artistic endeavor, and the same is true for this medium.
| delusional wrote:
| No need to call yourself a non-artist. To me it sounds like
| you're an artist :) Congratulations on the successful show. Is
| it possible to see the final results anywhere on the internet?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Thanks! And I've actually been joking that now that I've sold
| something, I'm an artist. "Art is whatever you can get away
| with," someone once said.
|
| I don't yet have the curated pieces available online, but
| that's on my TODO list. I really appreciate you asking,
| though, especially now that I've got the physical part
| figured out, over, and one with. :)
| astrange wrote:
| Context being that another AI art model (StableDiffusion) knows
| the names of many popular artists and can create images that sort
| of kind of look like their work. This terrified a lot of artists
| on Twitter who've now gone around harassing AI developers and
| claiming they're plagiarists, then simultaneously posting things
| like "umm this is all uncreative and ugly collages" and "this is
| going to take all our jobs".
|
| Oddly, the main instigator turned out to be a "Pokemon in real
| life" fanartist who didn't notice he's already a professional
| plagiarist.
|
| > So in that context, saying "horses stuck around when the
| automobile came" is true, but if you went up to a painter and
| said "hey, within your lifetime painting will see a 90% decline,
| stop being taught formally, disappear from daily life or
| awareness".
|
| The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists
| (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons'
| paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace
| paintings because they aren't paintings! Print shops already
| exist and may have replaced you though.
|
| > I've had a lot of struggles with this. I have a specific image
| in my head, I'm trying to prompt for it, and the AI just does not
| want to do it. The most trouble that I've had so far has been
| with trying to get a tavern running across the plain with chicken
| legs.
|
| There's a general unfixable problem here, which is it's hard to
| be aligned with silly prompts without giving you silly output for
| "normal" prompts. That's also why they're complaining the model
| output has too safe composition - the developers are lucky they
| even got it to do that, it's better than random blobs of color
| and body parts like older models would generate.
|
| But the picture they want probably is hiding somewhere in
| Midjourney's latent space; it's just a matter of finding a prompt
| that recreates it.
|
| One way to do that could be to sketch the picture you want some
| other way and run it through a reverse image-to-text notebook
| like https://github.com/pharmapsychotic/clip-interrogator.
|
| Another would be prompting it with your sketch so that you can
| get an image in its "house style" - which doesn't seem very
| appealing for most models, but Midjourney has a pretty strong
| one.
| mkaic wrote:
| As an artist (music, film, 3D modeling/rendering, creative
| writing, portraiture) and an AI engineer, I'll admit I have a lot
| of uncertainty about the future of art. Some days I'm very
| scared, other days I figure I'll just "go with the flow" and not
| worry too much about a future I can't control.
|
| I read the papers. I see the pace of progress. I understand how
| these models work on a technical level and I am blown away by how
| quickly they are being iterated on. I expect little to no digital
| art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for
| profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I
| haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street
| art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough
| robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably
| come soon as well).
|
| People _love_ to bring out the painting-and-photography example
| as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to
| the art market, but I just don 't see it as a valid analogy.
| Photography and painting both survived because they're
| fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished in
| cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate
| themselves. AI art is different, because its entire purpose is to
| replicate, and no matter what human artists do with the medium of
| digital images, the AI will always be right there to gobble up
| the new wave changes and learn to replicate them.
|
| Whereas the advent of photography was never _meant_ to kill the
| painting industry, these AI algorithms are very much _meant_ to
| kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the
| researchers or not.
| karpierz wrote:
| > I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films,
| music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10
| years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to
| physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't
| know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those
| yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as
| well).
|
| I would 100% take you up on this bet.
|
| > People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example
| as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end
| to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy.
|
| I think that painting-and-photography is the wrong analogy;
| stuff like DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers
| didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one
| layer up.
| yunwal wrote:
| > Photography and painting both survived because they're
| fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished
| in cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate
| themselves
|
| I think there's a good argument to be made that photography
| killed photorealism in painting (or at least, it's an ever-
| shrinking niche). Photorealism was cheapened, and in response,
| Modern Art was created.
|
| What's getting cheapened now is transforming works into
| digitally-defineable idea-spaces. Create a new idea in art,
| give a machine enough representations, and it can endlessly
| generate new works within that space.
|
| What's not getting cheapened yet is 1) New idea-spaces -> I've
| yet to see an AI generate something that could be defined as a
| new art "movement" 2) New mediums -> I'm sure that something
| like Dall-E will exist for 3D CAD files sooner or later, but
| there are a lot of mediums that won't be physically reproduce-
| able by a computer (think James Turrell). Works in these spaces
| will remain valuable or even increase in value. And while AI
| might be able to generate new ideas in these spaces, there will
| need to be people to decide to put in the effort to execute
| them. 3) Curation and "found art" -> Deciding which ideas
| (generated or not) deserve attention.
| nmat wrote:
| Many successful artists don't paint, sculpt or build anything.
| It's not about the technique. Art is about sending a message,
| it's about what the artist is trying to say. It's about what the
| public feels and thinks when exposed to their work.
|
| AI has a place as a tool to produce content in a fast and cheap
| way. And yes, as a result of that certain jobs will likely
| disappear. But art will continue to exist and great artists will
| still be followed and admired by the public.
| dsign wrote:
| I don't think that AI is going to replace those artists, but if
| it does, maybe some will be convinced to become AI researchers
| :-) ?
|
| These art AIs are very good at driving the point home that our
| DNN AIs are seriously capable. But those capabilities need to be
| nursed by ever-growing armies of people. True, maybe there is a
| limit to the amount of people needed to profit from coloring
| pixels in images, and maybe, just maybe, that ceiling is going to
| go down the more these artist AIs are used. But AI has the
| potential to break open areas we can't even imagine now. I for
| example have trouble imagining that in the time of the horses,
| there was an industry for traffic signals, another for
| transporting horse fuel between countries (but maybe there was?),
| another for teaching teenagers to drive the carriages and get
| their horse-driving licenses, and so on and so on. Although I
| don't know much about those days, maybe it was popular to be
| young and to horse around on top of a good steed.
|
| Maybe we will be teaching our kids about how to survive in the
| jungle of wild AIs we have created for them, and teachers will be
| needed. Maybe we will hemorrhage AI-produced content, and in
| twenty years, there will be an industry for certifying that
| something is human-made (maybe a lesson to learn about how chess
| survived in the age of incredibly capable chess-playing computer
| programs?). Or maybe something else we can't quite see yet.
| notart666 wrote:
| A bit too speculative. Even though this can generate images at
| a rapid pace the creative space does not. Rapidly prototyping
| is not really that useful when it comes to things in concept
| design, nor does it fill the niche of making an entire scene.
| Realistically, it's only practical uses are in doing things
| most artists are not able to do well, such as defining
| characteristics of individuals to prop and assert generation
| which in the current scenario it is quite useless for but it
| isn't to condemn the entire GAN space it will likely never
| replace artists. Nor the human centered design.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Right now it is new, but soon people will start to see the common
| sorts of failures that AI generated art has (and will have a very
| difficult time getting rid of) will become obvious and seem tacky
| and cheap.
|
| Look at the coins with the dragon and his horde for example. The
| newness will wear off, people will become sensitized to the
| flaws, and AI "art" will find a niche which is quite a lot
| smaller than people impressed with technology imagine.
|
| Art and artists aren't dead, AI is not at all "creative" just
| derivative. It will be one influence among many for actual
| artists, become a tool for some, and for the rest of us, take the
| place of "art mill" art for the kinds of places that want to look
| fancy without putting any effort into it. (I'm looking at you,
| "luxury" apartment building with the exact same bad, inoffensive
| abstract print on every floor's elevator lobby)
| mkaic wrote:
| >AI is not at all "creative" just derivative. And humans are
| not derivative? Every image human artists make is based off of
| something that artist has seen or experienced before. _All
| creativity is derivative_.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Perhaps its just because its early innings but a lot of the early
| examples of AI generated art seem to be in that uncanny valley
| stage. A bit dystopian - like from an unpleasant dream.
|
| I'm curious whether thats just the text descriptions people are
| putting into the generators to get clicks or inherent in the AI
| art generation techniques used.
|
| I'll also throw out that for most of the history of art - "art"
| has always been cheap to produce. My pre-schooler created "art".
| Its really only the outliers that we remember. And really the
| ones who make it do it through verbal communication of their
| ideas or have some mechanism for conveying a consistent,
| overarching theme/narrative. [1]
|
| A professional AI "artist" might need to figure out how to become
| more of a visual creator/curator - ushering the generated images
| into coherent story that can be shared via discussions at gallery
| showings, etc.
|
| Perhaps real professional visual artists need to find the
| equivalent of a live show that has kept music viable as a career
| or a live book reading that makes an author relatable.
|
| [1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/the-hidden-side-of-
| the-...
| bambax wrote:
| > _So, would people stop making art?_
|
| An analogy that TFA curiously doesn't touch is the advent of
| photography. What did it do to painting?
|
| Painting became less and less figurative as photography became
| more and more accurate. The point of painting was to represent
| reality; but as photography became so much more accurate, that
| point became moot.
|
| And so, painting went into a different direction. Represent not
| reality, but feelings, what the artist feels when looking at
| reality; something that's out of reach of photography.
|
| AI is trying to conquer this as well. Human art needs to go
| further. Something weird that AI cannot touch.
| delusional wrote:
| Art has already been there for ages. I went to see Copenhagen
| Contemporary's exhibit of light & space and I'd never actually
| FELT art like that. It was quite exhilarating. Suddenly i
| understand what people say they feel when they connect with
| art.
|
| That's not what people mean when they talk about AI art though.
| AI art is Commercial Art. What Horkheimer and Adorno famously
| called "The Culture Industry".
| pdntspa wrote:
| If anything, painting has become more stylistic and figurative
| since photography; impressionism was a direct response to the
| photorealistic style of painting popular during the
| renaissance.
|
| It freed artists of having to focus on realism, if they wanted
| to do so.
| badloginagain wrote:
| It also pushed art to the niche. Painted images explicitly for
| children has been a massive industry for decades- also one that
| mature AI generative art could absolutely dominate.
|
| I'd love to see this technology aimed at concept art for games.
| I don't think this would hurt employed concept artists, I do
| think it will be a tool concept artists can use to quickly
| thumbnail significantly more versions of a vision.
|
| That artist will then refine the results into something
| supremely engaging to humans.
|
| Really I see this as an incredible tool for artists to help
| refine truly innovative ideas.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Art that human beings actually care about is not the commercial
| art many people are referencing here. Art is not pretty
| pictures. Art is not a expensively produced media. Art is a
| human communication concerning the realizations of finite life.
| However, Art being Art, it does not communicate these issues in
| immature direct language, Art communicates through richly
| layered metaphor.
|
| Real Art, that which moves one's soul, is beyond the
| capabilities of artificial intelligence for a large number of
| reasons, chief of which because it is a communication between
| beings aware of finite existence.
|
| Note, I am not saying the consumer markets will not be flooded
| with cheap mimicry of art as pooped out by ignorant
| noncomprehending AIs. That will most definitely happen. And a
| generation of would be fine artists will never pursue their
| innate vocation thanks to the misconception that AI is capable
| of creating Art (which it cannot.)
|
| However, you do not have to fall for the stupidity most are
| caught. If you have an artistic vocation, realize that
| indirection and metaphor are your human creative super powers
| that AI cannot touch. Metaphor requires comprehension and often
| complex interwoven comprehensions, which is so far out of AI's
| reach it is laughable the general pubic believes otherwise. AIs
| are idiots when you know them well. They have zero capacity to
| create Real Art composed of complex metaphors embodied in a
| form other than how they appear.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Real Art, that which moves one's soul, is beyond the
| capabilities of artificial intelligence
|
| It's easy to test. Show people "real" art and AI generated
| art and see how often they can tell which is which.
| bsenftner wrote:
| That won't work. Art is also not a popularity contest.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I'm still wating for music to react to recording technology in
| the way painting reacted to the photographic camera.
| beckingz wrote:
| Listen to some drum and bass.
| delusional wrote:
| I'd argue that Hyperpop is a more direct response to the
| commercialization of music.
| crumpled wrote:
| I've been dabbling with text-to-image generation quite a bit
| lately. I also do graphic design, drafting, and occasionally
| doodle with a pen or pencil.
|
| I really enjoy generating images, and I really enjoy drawing even
| though I'm not really good at it. I like to draw with my five-
| year-old, but I've also exposed him to Dalle-Mini. I think
| showing him dalle-mini was a mistake, and I'm going to avoid
| repeating it. (We are a low-media household.)
|
| My concern about AI art has to do with children learning art
| skills. Will it be hard to encourage developing art skills? If a
| person can just ask for an image rather than learning how to make
| one, will they be motivated to do the work to build the skill? Or
| will it suddenly become a waste of time to the young mind?
| elefanten wrote:
| Is that much different from being able to find ready-made
| images to look at in various media?
|
| I could see a difference in the case of wanting to see a custom
| image and being able to summon it via description vs. needing
| to learn to produce it. I'm not particularly artistic and never
| developed any such skills... so I don't know: how crucial is
| that particular motivation to those who acquire art
| (production) skills?
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