[HN Gopher] 4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything
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4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything
Author : andy_xor_andrew
Score : 966 points
Date : 2022-08-30 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andys.page)
(TXT) w3m dump (andys.page)
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I think this might be the first time I've genuinely seen
| something and though this quote applied: "Any sufficiently
| advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
|
| Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there is a skill and what I'm seeing
| in demos is the happy path where it all happens to work well. But
| damn it's impressive.
| akomtu wrote:
| I'm late to the party, but what stops training this SD model on
| audio spectrograms? Then you'd tell it "some mozart-style violin
| for 5 seconds, add drums in background." The spectrogram is then
| translated to sound and suddenly you're a very decent music
| writer.
|
| With img2txt you could give it an audio file, call it "S" and
| tell "music in S style, but with flute".
| donkarma wrote:
| openai did this but it doesn't sound great, I think it's
| because sound has less information so the brain is very picky
| akomtu wrote:
| mp3 density: 30sec per 1MB (some instrumental music with
| background). jpg density: 12M pixels per MB (trees and some
| landscaping). I'd argue music has a lot more information, if
| we can compare seconds with pixels. Imho, OpenAI didnt do a
| great job: a small dataset and a limited model.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| I'm a 40 year old engineer. The big events in my life from a
| technology perspective so far have been:
|
| 1989: Coding for the first time (Apple IIe)
|
| 1994: Getting on the Internet
|
| 1999: Using Google when it started to get really good
|
| 2005: Buying GOOG Stock
|
| 2014: Buying Tesla Stock
|
| 2022: Building a local Pipeline with GANs, SD, Nvidia 1660
|
| Things are about to go nuts. Tim Urban explains it well.
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
| helloworld97 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/4KOgmxCKhws
|
| The technology might be there but the capital structures...are
| not?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| As far as She-Hulk goes yes. This isn't going to replace
| Netflix shows, it is going to create entire new industries,
| just like how when YouTube came out no one thought that some
| 12 year old kid named Jimmy was going to build a 9 figure
| business on top of it.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| What does buying stock have to do with technology?
| OOPMan wrote:
| Things are always about to go nuts and yet mostly they don't
| seem to...
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The article is from 2015, so yes, you are right, it is easy
| to say that we have not had insane changes since 2015. And
| certainly there have not been insane changes between
| yesterday and today. But if things start changing just 1%
| more each day it becomes a big deal within a few years.
| sleightofmind wrote:
| Can someone give this completely ignorant old fellow a
| description of what the author is doing in this article?
|
| What is the initial drawing being done with?
|
| What is this stable diffusion process? (Amazing is one answer.)
|
| A very brief description of the software used.
|
| Color me astounded. I actually liked (was delighted by) the
| results in step-6. When I realized it was done programmatically
| somehow, I had to pick myself up and get back in my chair.
| XCSme wrote:
| Like telling an artist "hey, could you add a tree", "now
| recreate it, but make it appear to be on the moon", only that
| he's talking to an AI (artificial neural network).
| GaggiX wrote:
| The author is using a text-to-image neural network to generate
| an image, in this case the author is also conditioning the
| model on a sketch to guide the generation process.
| sleightofmind wrote:
| Okay. Now I'm starting to wonder if folks who worry about AI
| taking over are onto something. Well, not really... yet. But
| color me absolutely flabbergasted.
|
| Thanks for the explain.
| dougmwne wrote:
| This has been flabbergasting a lot of us. I have been
| playing with these text to image models for about a month
| and I still cannot believe it.
|
| Try for yourself a bit. Here's my current favorite
| interface to Stable Diffusion. Give it a little sketch,
| then go wild with the prompt description. Try different
| style descriptions like oil painting or comic book.
|
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingface/diffuse-the-rest
| RVRX wrote:
| Why does my down arrow-key refuse to bring me downwards on this
| webpage before it shoots me back to the top ;(
| mNovak wrote:
| All I want is an AI to give me beautiful color palettes. For some
| reason that is the absolute hardest part for me to get right.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| I know HN, we're supposed to make thoughtful comments etc, but...
| holy shit. :) Fits on a USB, or even a DVD.
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| That's very thoughtful. Maybe I'll get downvoted but I'll say
| this: One could just store this on the long-storage tech or in
| a temp-controlled seed farm in someplace cold with a computer,
| and english instructions on how to use this. Maybe one day a
| human (or even another being for that matter!) in the late late
| future will discover this and wonder what the hell this was
| about and how it really worked.
| jameshart wrote:
| It's a trope in sci-fi - the protagonist encounters a
| mysterious technological object from an ancient civilization,
| a trove containing 'all the knowledge of an extinct race'.
|
| Usually it gets downloaded into someone's mind, triggering
| some kind of cascade of baffling imagery.
|
| Feels kind of odd that this model data actually... works sort
| of like that?
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| ha! Hadn't thought about it that way.
|
| But only so much can be encoded through history. I'd love
| to see a sci-fi movie combined with the butterfly effect. A
| somewhat advanced civilization in the past and another
| (maybe present) civilization where people try to find out
| stuff about the other one, maybe they're successful at the
| beginning at depicting how they were but they start to
| think they know everything and the whole perspective of the
| civilization changes.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Or maybe it'll provide them insight into how their own modern
| technology works that they didn't understand any more. ;)
| spyder wrote:
| And the size will be less and less until a certain information
| compression limit: Emad tweeted that their optimized model is
| already just 2.1 Gb and he hopes to make it less, around 100
| Mb:
|
| https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1564655464406650881
|
| With all the model optimization, distillation papers already
| out, a few hundred Mb doesn't look impossible with similar
| quality outputs.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Oh I've been doing this since they published. I warned a friend
| (who is a concept artist) that his days are numbered.
|
| Great article about one of the little known features of stable-
| diffusion. The img2img.py awesomeness that turns your 4 year olds
| finger paints into Picasso or Monet. It's just mind boggling!
| franciscop wrote:
| This is the first time I see this accessibility issue, pressing
| the "Down" key (V) doesn't work to navigate the page (scroll
| down) and instead goes all the way to the top.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah there's something really screwy going on here - I ended up
| having to disable JavaScript on the page in order to copy and
| paste from it without it leaping me up to the top when I tried.
| franciscop wrote:
| It seems to be because of this, any other key closes the
| modal and resets the hash, and resetting the hash scrolls you
| up: function closeModal() { let
| modal = document.getElementById("myModal");
| modal.style.display = "none"; window.location.hash
| = ''; } // Left and right arrow keys
| scrub through the gallery. // Everything else closes
| the modal. document.onkeydown = function (e) {
| if (e.keyCode === 37) { // Left arrow
| goBackPrevImage(); } else if (e.keyCode === 39) {
| // Right arrow advanceNextImage(); }
| else { closeModal(); } };
| devindotcom wrote:
| PgDn also does this... strange. Scroll wheel works fine.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I do not have that problem; it works OK for me.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I went through this process yesterday, trying to create a city on
| a floating island in the sky, and it's _so fun_.
|
| Basically, drawing sketches, editing (rudimentaly) in image
| editing software, img2img, edit, img2img, and a few more rounds,
| and you can get to something really, really cool.
|
| This Photoshop plugin demo blew my mind yesterday:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho...
| pjgalbraith wrote:
| Yeah I've been using the same iterative process using img2img.
| Using AI removes most of the toil (tedious masking and colour
| matching and relighting images) involved in this kind of photo
| manipulation work. As these tools improve it will be
| interesting to see what professional artists can do with it.
|
| Posted video example here
| https://twitter.com/P_Galbraith/status/1564051042890702848
| Yhippa wrote:
| Can we see your work of art?
| cube2222 wrote:
| Sure, why not.
|
| Here's the before[0], and here's the after[1].
|
| And an example of a step in-between: The base was [2] which I
| changed into [3]. That was I think the last step before the
| final generation.
|
| It's not great by any means, but it's miles ahead of what I
| could hope to achieve myself. The biggest problem was to stop
| stable diffusion from turning my flying island into a pretty
| standard mountain. It kept trying to connect it to the
| ground. Especially in further iterations.
|
| [0]: https://imgur.com/a/wKraDWn
|
| [1]: https://imgur.com/a/Vn0RS9O
|
| [2]: https://imgur.com/a/Ti5gazx
|
| [3]: https://imgur.com/a/CDJoKQ1
| shrimpx wrote:
| That's awesome, thanks for sharing!
| naillo wrote:
| I found this one to be really rad too:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0u9a8/ama...
| davidro80 wrote:
| That demo is amazing. I feel like I'm living in the future
| watching that. Great stuff.
| fragmede wrote:
| What's fascinating is what img2img _adds_ to the creative
| process. Text to image was pretty cool, but not super
| interesting to me. But seeding the output with something I 've
| drawn, with a drawing befitting a 3-year old's work of art,
| really adds to it, because of the larger part you're taking in
| the output's creation. It's like that story from the 50's when
| cake mix was first introduced, with a recipe of water+cake mix
| to make a cake. It flopped, and was pulled from the market.
| They reintroduced it, with a new recipe of water+egg+cake mix
| instead, and was a success. The added egg made it feel just
| that much more like cooking, and I think the same thing is
| happening here with img2img.
| wizofaus wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/
| schnevets wrote:
| That was an awesome video. I can't wait for someone to
| inevitably start a _The Joy of pAInting_ twitch feed, complete
| with chill commentary and occasionally ruining the canvas with
| a daring addition to the picture.
| butz wrote:
| As always, I will suggest adding loading="lazy" attributes to all
| images on page (or even website), as loading currently is
| struggling. Hoping HN won't hug your server to death, as topic is
| very popular.
| naillo wrote:
| Not really relevant bc it's kinda nitpicky but amazingly it's not
| even 4gb, it's more like 2gb if you use the float16 version
| (which has no quality degredations). Quite amazing that so many
| images fit in that small a package.
| achr2 wrote:
| The images do not. The output of the trained / weighted
| correlations do.
| naillo wrote:
| Exchanging compute for space in the space-compute tradeoff
| curve.
| mkaic wrote:
| hmm -- I tried converting to float16 just using a naive
| model.half() call and saw some quality degradation in my images
| compared to just autocasting parts of the model to float16
| while leaving others at float32. Curious if anyone else has had
| the same experience.
| naillo wrote:
| Might be that there's some degredation but I think it's
| pretty close. Anyway I'm using their 'official' fp16 version
| which they might be doing some extra magic on idk. I.e. via
| StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("CompVis/stable-
| diffusion-v1-4", revision="fp16",
| torch_dtype=torch.float16, ...)
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| But you just said "no degradation".
| naillo wrote:
| Try it yourself ;) I haven't spotted any but I can't
| dispute the parents observations.
| latchkey wrote:
| That's how I felt about the original ipod.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Ah yes, just what the world needs, more soul-less art
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I remember when I tried to get my classmates to sign up for the
| AI ethics course at my grad program. Most declined saying it
| would be boring, not markettable, or wtv. At the end, a small
| slice of my cohort took the class. Kinda scary if it is the same
| at similar programs. I feel like a lot more people need to be
| thinking about the ethics of this. This particular blog post is
| quite harmless tbh, but things quickly get out of hand with
| explosive growth.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The article starts off with me expecting the twist to be that the
| image was generated with a single text prompt. That would have
| been neat, and in line with the other recent sensational coverage
| of how these new models are BLOWING PEOPLE'S MINDS. But it's
| actually a walkthrough where the author goes through a much more
| tedious process that I could ever imagine going through to get
| the level of quality of that final result.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I'm very skilled at illustration and fine painting. Compared to
| what it takes to "manually" make such an image, his process is
| about as trivial as a single text prompt.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| Huh. I had almost the exact opposite opinion. As someone who
| likes to make art, this example leads me to believe that this
| kind of process can allow me to quickly create images that are
| far closer to what I have in my head than most of the DallE
| style examples I've seen recently.
| vidarh wrote:
| My reaction too. I've only superficially played with some of
| the AI image generators, and while it's easy to get something
| which looks interesting or even good, getting something which
| matches a specific idea precisely seemed hard. This
| walkthrough shows a clear technique which seems endlessly
| adaptable to using it as a tool to get to a specific goal.
| SamBam wrote:
| Like my sister comment, I had the exact opposite reaction.
| Dall-E is very cool, no doubt, but the idea that I could
| actually work _alongside_ the AI to produce something that is
| in my head was much more eye-opening.
| barrkel wrote:
| This article demonstrates control via iterative techniques,
| which is more flexible than trying to encode everything in a
| sentence. The input image acts as state carrying forward much
| more information than a sentence from one iteration to the
| next.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| After this, I'm joining r/preppers
| wazoox wrote:
| OT, but the page can't be scrolled using the keyboard, it just
| resets to home position. Weird and quite irritating :)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Vonnegut wrote some about the effect of recording technology &
| mass media on the value of individual artistic talent--in short,
| that it all but obliterated both the monetary and, perhaps more
| importantly, social value of all but (literally) world-class
| skill. Fewer sing-alongs around the piano at home. No more small-
| time performance troupes (say, vaudevillians) making enough money
| to get by. That uncle who's an _amazing_ story-teller just can 't
| compete with radio programs, so the social value of that skill
| plummets, and it's like that for _every_ medium that puts the
| ordinary in competition, if you will, with not just the world 's
| most talented people, but, as fields advance, with entire _teams_
| dedicated to making those already-top-notch folks seem better-
| than-human.
|
| The benefits of this are clear, but the problem is that artistic
| expression and being able to receive small-scale rewards and
| genuine encouragement--at least in one's family or social circle
| --for even minor talent seem to be very healthy and fulfilling
| things for people to do. Taking that away came at an ongoing cost
| that none of the beneficiaries of that change had to pay. A kind
| of social negative externality.
|
| Relatedly, consider the sections of Graeber's _Bullshit Jobs_
| where he treats of the sort of work people tend to find
| fulfilling or are otherwise proud to do, or are very interested
| in doing (sometimes to the point that supply of eager workers
| badly exceeds demand and pay is through the floor, as in e.g.
| most roles related to writing or publishing). What kind of work
| is it? Mainly plainly pro-social work (to take one of Graeber 's
| examples, the disaster-relief side of what the US military does,
| which is _by no coincidence_ often heavily featured in their
| recruiting advertising; or teaching, for another one) _or_ :
| creative, artistic work.
|
| Graeber notes an apparent trend whereby these jobs tend to pay
| pretty poorly either due to the aforementioned over-supply of
| interested workers, or because there's some societal expectation
| that you ought to just be glad to have a job that's obviously-
| good and accept the sacrifice of poor pay, and that you must be
| bad at it or otherwise unsuited if you want to make actual money
| doing it (teaching's a major case of the latter--I've seen that
| "if you care about being paid well you must be a bad teacher"
| POV, and the related "if we raised teacher pay it'd result in
| worse teachers", advanced on this very site, more than once--it's
| super-common).
|
| People _really, really want_ plainly-good and /or creative jobs,
| but those don't pay worth a damn unless you're at the tip-top,
| either of talent level, or of some organization. This seems like
| another blow to the creative category of desirable jobs, at
| least.
|
| My point is: I wonder and worry about the effect this latest wave
| of AI art (in a broad sense--music and writing, too) generation
| is going to have on already-endangered basic human needs to feel
| useful and wanted, and to act creatively and be appreciated for
| it by those they're close to. There's already a gulf between the
| among-the-best-in-the-world art we actually enjoy and, should our
| friends present their creations, how we "enjoy" those these days,
| with the latter being much closer to how a parent enjoys their
| child's art, and everyone involved knows it. Used to be, hobby-
| level artistic talent and effort was useful and valuable to
| others in one's life. Now, that stuff's just for yourself, and
| others _indulge_ you, at best.
|
| Why, with this tech, you can't even get by doing very-custom art,
| such that the customization, rather than the already-devalued-to-
| almost-nothing skill itself, is what delivers the value. Now the
| customization is practically free, too, and most anyone can do
| it.
|
| Getting real last-nail-in-the-coffin vibes from all this. I'm
| sure it'll enable some cool things, but I can't help but think
| we're exchanging some novelty and a certain kind of improved
| productivity, for the loss of the last shreds of a fundamental
| part of our humanity. I wonder if we'd do this (among other
| things) if we could charge the various players a fair value for
| harm to social and psychological well-being that happens as a
| side-effect of their "disruption"--alas, that pool's a free-for-
| all to piss in all one likes, in the name of profit (see also:
| advertising)
| neonnoodle wrote:
| This traditional and digital artist agrees with you on all
| counts. Bad Things are happening.
| dejongh wrote:
| Wow. Standing at the edge of the uncanny valley.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Feeling sorry for matte painters in Hollywood studios now.
| pram wrote:
| Here is my perspective on these kinds of images. This kind of
| 'picture' usually comes from speed-painters who incorporate
| techniques like photobashing. As in integrating 3D models and RL
| photos into their composition, or just painting over a 3D picture
| entirely.
|
| It was already a genre that highly incorporated computer assisted
| methods. There is a lot of doom and glooming going around, but
| honestly the modern process of creating 'concept art' was already
| extremely commodified and efficient. These weren't exactly your
| idealized vision of some artisan craftsman laboring weeks over a
| picture, they churned this stuff out in a few hours (if that)
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I think you're not grasping the magnitude of the change.
| Creating even an _average_ quality speed-painting requires
| tremendous amount of expertise in drawing, painting techniques,
| composition, lighting, perspective. It takes years of training.
|
| These models let anyone achieve similar results in minutes.
| Without _any prior learning_. It is not even lowering the bar,
| it is literally dropping the bar to the ground.
|
| Besides, stable diffusion is able to generate not only
| painterly scenery, but also photographic images that are almost
| indistinguishable from actual pictures (certainly helped by the
| fact images have a heavy digital look in our era).
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| it just got faster. what's the drama about?
| oefnak wrote:
| I think it will be interesting to see how this comment has
| aged in five years.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I am talentless and untrained. Now with a combo of prompts
| and img2img, I can create awesome results on any topic and
| in any style that I have the rights to use. That's a 0 to 1
| moment. It didn't get faster for me, it went from
| impossible to possible.
| a_shovel wrote:
| "Any style" seems like an enormous stretch. There
| definitely seems to be some styles that AI favors, ones
| which I've seen described as "clutter the frame so you
| don't notice the flaws". It struggles with simpler
| styles. I have yet to see a flat black & white image
| generated by an AI that looked even passable.
| simonw wrote:
| How about this one?
| https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2022/dall-e-
| pencil-s...
|
| From https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/23/dall-e/
|
| Have you tried DALL-E or Stable Diffusion yet? I bet you
| could generate a black and white image that met your
| standards for being impressive, if you spent a few
| minutes on it.
|
| You can try Stable Diffusion free here:
| https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/
| dougmwne wrote:
| I considered qualifying "any" but decided it required no
| qualification. I don't know how many examples are needed
| in the training data for a given artist to be able to
| reproduce that artist, but given how many obscure artists
| I have seen Dall-e and Stable Diffusion able to
| recognize, it must not require that many examples. And
| it's still possible to fine tune a model with additional
| training if a new artist comes along or you want a bit
| more capability with a rare style.
|
| So yeah ANY style, I'm pretty sure of it.
| a_shovel wrote:
| Nah, that's not it. I mean flat #000000/#ffffff. Google
| "stencil image" and you'll see what I mean.
|
| AI really doesn't handle styles with restrictions like
| that well. I tried the stable diffusion website with
| variations on "black and white silhouette stencil image
| of a cat". It kept wanting to give the cat colored eyes,
| or it used shading, or the cat didn't have a coherent
| anatomy, along with the typical AI art "duds" that aren't
| really anything at all.
|
| To be fair, I did get a couple of passable results when I
| replaced 'cat' with 'dog'. They were simple, but didn't
| have any obvious errors.
|
| To be fair in the other direction, replacing 'cat' with
| 'abacus' gave me an (admittedly pretty) grid of numbers
| and some chainmail, and 'helicopter' suggested a novel
| design where two helicopter bodies would be stacked
| vertically, connected by a vertical shaft through the
| rotor, and which turned into a palm tree trunk above the
| top unit. Once you get out of the sample data, it starts
| to fall apart.
|
| I feel like other people here are willing to forgive more
| errors than I am. They see an incoherent splotch in an
| image and assume more development can iron out all the
| problems, and I see a unavoidable artifact of the fact
| that these systems don't have a real understanding of
| what they're making.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Is this not an acceptable result to you? Did this on my
| first try and to my eyes it's the same thing as I see
| when I googled "stencil image." I'm thinking you have
| just not tried these prompts enough.
|
| https://ibb.co/k5hMWZr
|
| Edit:
|
| I gave this another shot to see if I could get a more
| complex stencil. This was my very first try again, so
| truly not cherry picked. Prompt was: "Stencil image of a
| tiger face. Clip art. Vector art." This looks like an
| infinite stencil making machine to me
|
| https://ibb.co/mNdsms8
| a_shovel wrote:
| That first one just sucks. I don't have anything else to
| say about it.
|
| The second one is representative of the upper end of what
| I was getting. It's _almost_ passable, but doesn 't hold
| past about five seconds. The left and right half don't
| look like they belong to the same animal. The blank space
| in the middle of the face is huge and detracts from any
| sense of structure, and the whole mouth area is just odd.
|
| It's seriously impressive for AI, but it's not end-of-
| artists type stuff. I can google "tiger black and white
| stencil" and get a bunch of tiger faces, and _every_ one
| of them is noticeably better. People imagine there are
| plenty of art jobs where discrepancies like this don 't
| matter, but there really aren't.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I do feel like you just moved the goalposts on me from AI
| can't produce this style at all, to can't produce this
| style on a level with an experienced human artist. I
| don't think anyone is claiming it beats a good human
| artist. That does not make it useless for stencils.
|
| Again those were my first try and I know nothing about
| stencil beyond what 2 seconds on Google images could give
| me. Certainly better than I could produce if you gave me
| Adobe Illustrator and a weekend. And the image is mine to
| use as I please, unlike what I could rip off Google
| Images.
|
| Also, I thought the cat was cute, but there's really no
| accounting for taste. Here's a silly and swirly cat that
| might be more your thing? This was a cherry picked one of
| 10 since you have high standards;)
|
| https://ibb.co/BytvVVF
| flyinglizard wrote:
| There's nothing a modern computer does compared to 30 years
| ago other than being "faster". It opens up everything.
| dougabug wrote:
| That seems like an overreach. Thirty years ago, object
| recognition basically didn't work, except in extremely
| simple cases. Something like semantic segmentation would
| have been way out of reach. Computers couldn't play Go
| effectively against even modestly skilled human amateurs.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| I meant the very technical sense where you could take an
| object recognition algorithm and compile it to run on a
| 80386 and it would run fine although slow to the point of
| not being practical. Computers brought us more speed (and
| memory) to enable new classes of uses, but there's not a
| single intrinsic operation a modern computer does which
| an old one can't replicate.
|
| So quantity is indeed a quality.
| pram wrote:
| Technically true, but I think this is VASTLY understating
| what has become possible with your average PC over the
| past 30 years.
|
| Today I can get quick, effortless renders from Blender
| with a zillion available assets on the internet on my
| laptop. I can drop that directly into something like Clip
| Studio and paint right over it.
|
| In the 80s you needed an extraordinarily expensive
| workstation like the Quantel Paintbox to even do
| primitive Photoshop type stuff. If you wanted a 3D render
| you needed a whole farm of servers.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| I agree. People aren't grasping the magnitude because they're
| thinking about jobs. Jobs a silly way to measure this. Jobs
| are temporary. Nobody worries about the mechanical stocking
| frame making socks anymore.
|
| This is more like the literacy/printing press transition.
|
| Used to be, people had to learn to memorize a lifetime of
| stories and lore. Now nobody learns to make a memory palace
| or form a mnemonic couplet. Why would you bother? You just
| write things down.
|
| Today, people learn to draw. In a generation, why would you
| bother?
|
| There will still be specialist jobs for people generating
| images, but instead of learning to make them up, the
| specialists will be very good at _picking_ them, suggesting
| them, consuming them.
|
| Humans will be the managers and the editors, not the
| creators.
|
| The same thing will happen to other arts. First (and very
| easily) to music. Eventually, perhaps, to writing and whole
| movies...
|
| The only thing stopping that is that the models can't
| maintain a reality between frames. They can't make an arc.
| It's all dreamlike.
|
| If we find a way to nail object persistence it will be a
| singularity-level event. The moment you can say "make another
| version of this movie, but I want Edgar to be more sarcastic
| and Lisa should break up with him in the second act" we will
| close the feedback loop.
|
| It's a lot bigger than "lost jobs".
| [deleted]
| pjgalbraith wrote:
| I mean it sounds pretty cool to be able to fork a film and
| create different iterations and mashups. Maybe if you
| create a cool enough scene the director will merge your PR
| back in.
| rvz wrote:
| > It's a lot bigger than "lost jobs".
|
| I agree. It is more than just _" lost jobs"_, like artist
| impressionists, court room sketch artists, etc. it is a
| complete dystopia and it doesn't help artists at all, but
| displaces them. At least the value of actual paintings will
| be more valuable that the abundance of this highly
| generated digital rubbish.
|
| So given that the technologists have so-called _'
| democratized'_ and cheapened digital art, I really can't
| wait until we get an open-source version of Copilot AI that
| would create full programs, apps, full stack websites with
| no-code so that we would be seeing very cheap Co-pilot AI
| shops in the south east of the world generating software
| that effectively eliminates the need for a senior full
| stack engineer.
|
| Easy cheap business solution for the majority of
| engineering managers on a tight budget who know they need
| to offshore tech jobs without the need for any skill as it
| is offloaded to cheap Copilot prompters.
|
| So we will have no problems with that and be happy with
| that dystopia. Wouldn't we?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Not disagreeing, just wanted to point out that this is
| already happening in some niches. It used to be that you
| had to hire someone to make you a webpage, and they had
| to use PHP or whatever. Then came WP and themes - and you
| had your page made by some youngster for peanuts.
|
| But I think society will find a way. Who knows, maybe
| we'll all work less and enjoy life more? One can hope.
| jerojero wrote:
| People can already use websites to create simple websites
| but that hasn't really displaced web developers because
| our needs keep changing. But it has definitely help
| people bring their businesses to market much easier. You
| don't need a whole lot of IT knowledge anymore to start
| an online clothing business. But that definitely means
| jobs have been displaced, though in reality, they tend to
| move rather than simply disappear.
|
| Being an artist isn't really being able to draw well, it
| is able to do a lot more than that in harmony, and so I
| believe these tools will just get incorporated and some
| new artists will appear and older artists will adapt.
|
| My only worry with this, and it's not something that I
| see being pointed out too much. Is that due to these
| models being able to produce art from previous art
| they've seen we might find it difficult to come up with
| new novel styles. But then again, this might precisely be
| a new kind of avenue for human artist expression.
| coffee_beqn wrote:
| Speed painting also usually involves practicing certain
| scenes. This method anyone can use to create any new scene
| that they can imagine and the result looks quite good with
| some patience. Seems like some people are overly pessimistic
| but to me this seems like we're on the cusp of something
| truly disruptive in the arts space. And it's not NFTs.
| Remember that last year this would have sounded mostly like
| sci-fi unless you were following cutting edge research.
|
| In the realm or "real" art I'm actually very excited since I
| believe there are hundreds of very imaginative and patient
| people who just can't paint well but will be able to create
| new art with tools like this. It can also synthesize new and
| alien things.
| rvz wrote:
| > This method anyone can use to create any new scene that
| they can imagine and the result looks quite good with some
| patience. Seems like some people are overly pessimistic but
| to me this seems like we're on the cusp of something truly
| disruptive in the arts space.
|
| A race to the bottom and the cheapening of 'art' in general
| for the sake of replacing artists is a shame to see and
| nothing to celebrate. I was against both the gatekeeping of
| GPT-3 and DALL-E by Open 'faux' AI. But now it seems that
| every-time an open-source alternative or version was
| released into the wild, it seems that the uses become even
| more dystopian; especially with DeepFakes, fake news
| propaganda / articles and catfishing with generated
| hyperrealistic faces.
|
| > And it's not NFTs. Remember that last year this would
| have sounded mostly like sci-fi unless you were following
| cutting edge research.
|
| Stable Diffusion is the reason why JPEG NFTs will always be
| worthless. Both of them will fuel JPEG NFT prices to the
| floor value of zero. But as NFT proponents cheered in
| believing that they will help artists, here we are seeing
| DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion fans screaming that it will
| help artists. No it will not.
|
| > In the realm or "real" art I'm actually very excited
| since I believe there are hundreds of very imaginative and
| patient people who just can't paint well but will be able
| to create new art with tools like this. It can also
| synthesize new and alien things.
|
| This isn't the 'democratization of digital art', it is the
| complete devaluation and displacement of digital artists
| and it now makes 'real art paintings' much valuable.
|
| A dystopian creation.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > I was against both the gatekeeping of GPT-3 and DALL-E
| by Open 'faux' AI. But now it seems that every-time an
| open-source alternative or version was released into the
| wild, it seems that the uses become even more dystopian;
|
| So are you still against gatekeeping? Are you in favor of
| releasing AI advances to the wild?
| rvz wrote:
| I am still against OpenAI's gatekeeping and gave AI
| itself a chance to be more used for good and
| significantly less dystopian.
|
| Even with the release of GPT-3, there seems to be very
| little good in such a system despite it being generally
| underwhelming at generating convincing sentences. However
| with DALL-E 2, it has gotten much better for worse on
| digital images, to the point where even gatekeeping it
| would spur on an open source competitor superseding
| DALL-E 2 anyway.
|
| But it was actually after the release of Stable Diffusion
| that done it for me when most here hyping just want to
| aid the race to the bottom and at the same time are
| screaming that it will help artists when (like NFTs) it
| won't.
|
| So looking at both DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, it is yet
| another contribution that advances the dystopian AI
| industry which will just be used for fake news,
| surveillance and catfishing. Worse part is that they
| haven't built any detectors for this.
| wpietri wrote:
| > it is literally dropping the bar to the ground
|
| I think you're directionally correct, but overstating the
| case in a few ways.
|
| One, as a not particularly visual person, even this example
| involves some skills of composition and perspective. If you
| asked me to do something practical, like creating an
| illustration to go at the top of a blog post, I would not do
| nearly as well as somebody with art skills, and I would take
| a lot longer.
|
| Two, this is the beginning. In the same way that digital
| artists took tools I could use and got really good at them, I
| expect the same will happen here. What will a good artist be
| able to do with a solid workflow and a few years of picking
| up tricks? Given the opaqueness and quirkiness of models, I
| expect a person who puts in the time, especially one with a
| strong command of art styles, composition, and the practical
| uses of visuals, will be able to run rings around me.
|
| Three, people are quite accepting of AI images right now, but
| they're novel and exciting and decontextualized from how we
| normally use images. That's a playing field that advantages
| the novice. But what happens once these images are no longer
| fun and novel, but boring and overdone? As we learn to
| discern novice-grade work from what real artists can do with
| AI assistance, I think our bar as image consumers will rise.
| selimnairb wrote:
| But it didn't drop the bar on the ground, it raised a new
| bar. People without computer literacy and/or basic
| programming skills won't be able to pull this off. Even using
| Photoshop (which I believe does/will integrate this new
| technology) is not easy/possible for some who can actually
| draw. Plus, how many regular people have access to the
| machine with 12GB of VRAM?
| mtizim wrote:
| You can run the model on your CPU quite easily, and a lot
| of people have access to 16gb machines - it's much slower,
| for sure (10minutes/50passes on my old gaming pc), but it's
| still much faster than drawing things of the same quality
| by hand.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| > Plus, how many regular people have access to the machine
| with 12GB of VRAM?
|
| Probably not many in general, but the RTX 3060 has 12GB or
| ram and it is around $350. And I saw a RTX 2060 12GB for
| $250 the other day. That's a pretty reasonable entry fee
| IMO.
| bawolff wrote:
| Much less than what photoshop costed back in the day.
| nanonomad wrote:
| Few have those high end cards, but they don't need to
| anymore. Huggingface is saying it needs 12gb, but the
| source was forked with some smart mods to chunk the loading
| on to the GPU.
|
| Itll comfortably run on 6gb now. gtx1600 series cards need
| to run in full precision mode to produce output. The HLKY
| fork has improved the Gradio GUI and integrated realesrgan
| and gfpgan for those with beefier cards.
|
| Someone else also figured out how to load and run it all on
| a CPU, so pretty much anyone can in theory run the model
| now.
|
| There is an elaborate Colab notebook linked in the HLKY
| repo that seems to get more point and click user friendly
| every time i look at it. I think it even launches the
| gradio webui so you can use the Colab instance with a webui
| remotely.
| josephwegner wrote:
| The parts that are inaccessible right now seem incredibly
| easy to overcome.
|
| Using a CLI-based tool is inaccessible for most people...
| but building a GUI around this would be very easy. I'm too
| lazy to google it, but I would bet someone already has a
| GUI, or is working on one.
|
| 12GB of VRAM may not be accessible on most computers, but
| there's nothing innovative about offloading that task to an
| EC2 instance. It just requires an opportunistic developer
| to tie the pieces together.
|
| I would be monumentally surprised if
| Figma/Canva/InVision/Adobe are not already working on this.
| vkou wrote:
| > Using a CLI-based tool is inaccessible for most
| people...
|
| CLI-based tools are perfectly accessible to most people.
|
| They just can't be arsed to learn them, _unless they need
| to_. And most of the time, they don 't, because good-
| enough alternatives exist.
|
| If a CLI-based tool is the only way that an average
| person can get their work done, that's what they'll use.
| fragmede wrote:
| If you're on windows and have a GPU, there's a GUI you
| can install. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/com
| ments/x1hp4u/my_...
|
| There's a WebUI with a docker container if you're on
| Linux w/ GPU; https://github.com/AbdBarho/stable-
| diffusion-webui and https://github.com/AbdBarho/stable-
| diffusion-webui-docker.
|
| If you don't have a GPU, there's a Colab UI (Google
| hosted GPU). https://github.com/pinilpypinilpy/sd-webui-
| colab-simplified
| hbn wrote:
| The method shown in this demo was already simple enough to
| teach someone to do in an afternoon. But we're only a week
| into the release of SD and we haven't gotten to all the
| sure-to-come GUIs that will pack the model into an idiot-
| proof application.
|
| Think about it, give the user a few basic, MS-Paint level
| pencil tools, colors, shape makers. Ask for a description,
| the application can even push you in the right direction
| for putting together good, detailed prompts, gives you a
| list of art-styles, artists, filtering methods, etc all
| with reference images so you don't need to memorize names.
| You can zoom into sections of the image to work on
| independently (like the birds in the article), then blend
| it into the greater image. Drag and drop image files onto
| the project and iterate on them.
|
| Implementing the glue to simplify the "tough" parts of this
| process is honestly pretty trivial.
| coding123 wrote:
| It dropped the bar to the other side of the planet. There
| are so many people computer literate that can pull this
| off. You could pick 5 people off the street that can follow
| these instructions and 3 of them would. VS the old way, you
| would have to pull off 400 people off the street and you
| probably wouldn't get this result unless you got really
| lucky.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Pick 5 people at random you get one who doesn't know what
| a mouse is, 2 or 3 who can turn on the computer and maybe
| one who can get to the cli. Out of 400 people you will
| find more natural artists compared to someone who could
| install this even if they had the equipment
| bee_rider wrote:
| There are already web sites that will run the underlying
| models, requiring no installation.
|
| The neat new applications that have taken over this site
| for the last couple days sometimes require CLI steps to
| install because they are in active development and it can
| be easier to experiment with something local. I'm sure
| they'll either be moved online or wrapped in nice
| installers over the next couple weeks.
| visarga wrote:
| They can use it from their phone or tablet.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Let me update your heuristics on this. Computer mice are
| practically obsolete. People use cell phones, not
| computers. No one needs a cli to run stable diffusion
| because a mobile web interface was released on day one.
| 6.6 billion people have a smartphone which is 83% of the
| world's population (including the infants). This is about
| the same number of people who are literate.
|
| 4 out of 5 people globally would be able to submit a
| stable diffusion prompt and view a result. Most would
| have no idea what the hell was going on or even why it
| was interesting.
| breck wrote:
| I think all of Wikipedia is 40GB (the text parts anyway). So
| doesn't seem too outlandish.
| spaceheater wrote:
| How much of it is it `painting` though? It looks like your
| typical startup, combine two ideas into one. (Image) Search
| engine + Photoshop. You enter some prompts, it searches it's
| database for matches, and meshes all found results into a single
| visually pleasing image. Can it draw something that is not a mesh
| or a variation of it's database? Can you?
| simonw wrote:
| I don't that "searches it's database for matches" description
| is a great metaphor for how this really works.
|
| As Andy points out in this article, the model itself is a 4.2GB
| file. That's way, way too small to work as a "database" of
| examples it can stitch together.
|
| I think of it instead as an enormous mass of loosley assembled
| impressions of concepts - everything from a low-level primitive
| like a triangle to a Star Destroyer. You can use text prompts
| to combine those primitives - so you could get it to generate
| something just from dots and lines and shapes, or you could mix
| in extremely detailed concepts like the Seattle skyline - or
| anything in between.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| What is painting if not a mesh of ideas?
| spaceheater wrote:
| At bare minimum I can think of the 3D space the character is
| in, and rotate and shift it to any location and position I
| can dream of, even if I have never seen it before. When we
| will have 3D aware AI, that would be interesting.
| fragmede wrote:
| I fed the mid-post prompt into MidJourney (text-only) and got
| https://imgur.com/a/Xg0Byt1. Guiding the input with a ms-paint
| worthy picture really adds to the "I made this!" feeling of
| img2img.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| That's not all, they say they can get the model down to around
| 100MB.
| protonbob wrote:
| I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but it
| seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace. It makes me
| rethink my involvement in the creation of software and its
| ethical implications.
| koala_man wrote:
| The fact that making work more efficient can be a _problem_
| highlights some fundamental flaws in our society.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Well, it highlights that there's some disagreement between
| people who see maximizing production as inevitably positive,
| and other people who are unconvinced.
|
| It sounds like you might be so squarely in one of those
| camps, that you see it as a fundamental flaw that people may
| disagree with you. To me, that sounds even worse!
| vkou wrote:
| We could work those flaws out after we figure out what people
| getting put out of work are going to eat. Or do.
| barrkel wrote:
| Rapid change is a real problem and not a flaw of society.
| People cannot change careers quickly without loss of human
| capital. There is no flaw in society that you can fix to
| prevent this.
|
| It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make things more efficient,
| but economies exist to serve people, not the other way
| around. That sometimes means bailing some people out,
| sometimes it means phasing something in, and sometimes it
| means changing the definition of value.
|
| For example, painting used to be how you'd get a portrait.
| But photos did that much better. Painting shifted: it became
| much more abstract, and because photos were cheap and easy,
| they didn't have the same cachet as a portrait. Not many
| people hang big photo portraits on their walls they way they
| might have done with paintings.
|
| I suspect authenticity, or some other thing which the machine
| cannot replicate, may be valued more in future.
| protonbob wrote:
| I agree. But I also think that meaningful work that provides
| value to your community and to yourself is something that
| provides some of the greatest satisfaction available to man.
| If you remove that ability by either automating someone's job
| or reducing it to a kitschy "artisan" label which implies
| that their work is now inefficient and flawed compared to the
| efficient automated way, you are taking away something
| important about the human experience that cannot be replaced
| by leisure activities.
| xapata wrote:
| > ... greatest satisfaction available to man.
|
| What about women? Yeah, yeah, I know it's uncouth to worry
| about gendered language. On to the real topic ...
|
| > reducing [a job] to a kitschy "artisan" label
|
| Automation doesn't (only) reduce jobs, it (also) allows
| people to get meta. They are now free to think about how
| the job gets done, rather than constrained by time to only
| do the job the way they did it yesterday. Or, they can do
| other jobs that they prefer.
|
| I used to live in an apartment without a washing machine,
| and where the closest laundromat was a 20-minute walk away.
| I got used to a bucket-and-plunger method for washing my
| clothes. It was enjoyable in that "I am the salt of the
| earth" way. When I found a used sink-attachable tiny
| washing machine on Craigslist, I had a smile on my face the
| rest of the day.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| I think it revolves around just one fundamental question
| that's become obvious since the start of the industrial
| revolution: why have workers if you can get work done without
| them? You can answer this question rather quickly; very
| often, the benefits of being able to produce something en
| masse outweigh the initial drop in quality due to adopting an
| automation process that is not yet mature but evolves over
| time, and that's been proven many times in the past two
| centuries.
|
| It's just the speed and the scale that have been following
| logistic distribution. We're still before the midway point as
| a global society, but we can certainly see the big speedup as
| more and more work becomes automated.
|
| If people's work can be automated away as a whole and people
| somehow become poorer rather than richer, then the benefits
| of automation are sucked away from them. And here comes the
| flaws you mention - or the _flaw_ , I think, singular. They
| happen exactly in this one point.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| Something I sometimes think about, is how really can
| capitalists benefit from that? If you can automate your
| company away, and fire all employees, and if every company
| is doing that, then workers have no jobs or ways to make
| money. So the customers for most of the companies start
| disappearing. It's the ultimate accumulation of capital, to
| a point that the wheels of economy grind to a halt.
| dougabug wrote:
| That's exactly what happened to the Magratheans in
| "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
|
| "Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that
| Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and
| the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The
| Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic
| recovery that could afford their services once more."
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Why should it matter what benefits the group of people
| who end up just sitting on a pile of money in the end?
| vidarh wrote:
| This is exactly Marx' thesis. He took capitalists on
| their word with respect to believing that competition
| will drive margins towards zero over time, and that as a
| consequence cutting labour is inherently a pre-requisite
| for surviving competition, and that as a result that
| capitalism will eventually, once it runs out of new
| markets to expand into, start experiencing crises of
| simultaneous overproduction and under-employment.
|
| If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work
| with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such
| crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Sometimes it's just an initial drop in quality, other times
| it's permanent. My favourite example is book binding: hot-
| melt glue has completely supplanted cold glue in mass
| production, despite being _drastically_ inferior, because
| it's (just barely) good enough, and it's _so_ much faster
| /easier/cheaper for production.
|
| Many aspects of computer setting of works for printing also
| show a significant regression in potential quality (prose,
| musical engraving, _& c._), though the right software and
| proper human tweaking can balance that out--but people
| seldom actually do as much tweaking as would be done
| automatically by the experts of old. And as for text
| presentation on screen... well, that's just lousy compared
| to what an expert setter would do. But it does adapt to
| different media with no or minimal effort required, doing
| in one second what used to take days, and that's a rather
| big deal.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| That's not the fundamental question.
|
| The fundamental question is: Why have owners?
| [deleted]
| boppo1 wrote:
| I am a person who will, to a fairly serious extent, have my
| marketable skills displaced by this. You shouldn't worry too
| much about it.
|
| The ratio of people the printing press helped to those it hurt
| approaches 1.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| >I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but
| it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace.
|
| Yes, and isn't it wonderful?
|
| Ideally machines will do all of our work as soon as possible.
| bckr wrote:
| Only if we engage in our political processes enough to ensure
| democracy survives this transition
| onion2k wrote:
| _I know that technology has displaced workers in the past, but
| it seems to be doing so at a faster and faster pace._
|
| Technology has always enabled the creation of jobs faster than
| it displaces workers though. Sure, horse manure shovelers
| lamented the automobile, but people who became mechanics and
| petrol pump attendants didn't. The same will likely be true for
| artists - this will suck for them, but the proliferation of
| easily generated art assets will likely enable the creation of
| entirely new jobs we haven't considered yet.
| balutdev wrote:
| Technology is the amoral multiplier of output from using the
| mind & nature to reduce effort.
|
| If the highly ethical are avoiding involvement the advances
| will be left to the greedy and oppressive.
| kirse wrote:
| All of these AI image-algorithm furnaces are ultimately powered
| by the raw material shoveled in by humans. If we stop providing
| the algorithms with unique material the capabilities will
| decrease.
|
| Further, when you automate one portion of the work you still
| need the human brain to strategize and orchestrate at a higher
| level. Job opportunities have only increased as a result of
| this, not decreased.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Having worked with a lot of artists, they are seeing stable
| diffusion and other image generators as a way to generate lots
| of ideas. A base they would then ,usually starting from
| scratch, build their end product off of.
|
| So even though to a casual glance, these images look amazing,
| if you look closely, you see all the flaws that come with them
| being generated. Weird artifacts, a lack of symmetry that
| humans usually add to their creations.
|
| These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a
| professional artist paints the same scene.
| vidarh wrote:
| Meanwhile I've gotten into a lot of very heated arguments
| with artists who fear this will actively destroy their
| livelihood. I lean towards seeing these developments as a
| massive positive for a society as a whole, but I find it hard
| to ignore that. Most of the flaws you see today will be
| reduced over the next few months, and people will get better
| of finding ways of working around them. It _will_ cause
| substantial upheaval for a lot of people, including job
| losses especially on the low end. Maybe many, or even all, of
| those job losses will be compensated with additional jobs
| elsewhere, but we don 't know.
| tartoran wrote:
| > Having worked with a lot of artists, they are seeing stable
| diffusion and other image generators as a way to generate
| lots of ideas.
|
| But it also dillutes their own ideas. I know of painters
| painting AI generated stuff and that is likely a new genre
| but a lot of genuine artwork will lose interest on the
| market. It is what it is and don't I love or hate it...
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| You don't just paint a better version of the generated
| images, you look at a bunch of generated images, and get a
| better idea of what you want to paint from that.
|
| Say you know you want to do a portrait of a woman in armor,
| you can generate a dozen of those in around a minute on a
| 3090, look at the generated armors, the faces (usually all
| sorts of screwed up), and the composition. Its just a way
| to kickstart the creation process.
| Applejinx wrote:
| You say 'look at the generated armors' etc. but this does
| not mention what you use to look with: the artist's eye.
|
| People so quickly assume that access to these tools will
| make everyone an artist, but the raw output is so lacking
| in a voice and intentionality. If you supply the voice
| and intentionality through your iterative process and a
| hybrid visual/text language playing the generator like a
| violin... you're playing the generator like a violin.
|
| Your artistic skills have been translated to a wholly new
| set of vocabularies, and it's your eye that is tested
| most. Can you see/imagine better than the next guy?
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, I get that but if everyone's doing it it becomes a
| race to the bottom sort of thing... I hope I am wrong and
| things turn out in a completely different direction that
| I can't see now
| dweekly wrote:
| Yes - this will make artists hyper productive IMO; and will
| make a lot more people willing to make art! If you've ever
| had a little ditty and wondered what it would sound like as a
| violin concerto in D minor, now you can know! If you ever
| wanted your wife painted as a Rembrandt, there you have it.
| If your five year old comes up with an idea for a fun video
| game called Laser Chicken, now his friends can play it.
|
| Imagine pairing this with bespoke automated clothing output -
| take a photo of an outfit, verbally describe the changes you
| want to it ("a little more debonair, dark lapels, 1920's
| styling"), click a button, preview it as it would look on you
| in several recent pictures you took, and a week later your
| tailored suit arrives. Now for sneakers. Hats. Bags. Watches.
|
| The 20th century was about mass production to ensure everyone
| could have things: food, clothing, transport, entertainment.
| The 21st century may turn to expression: allowing each person
| to express themselves however they want in their goods and
| services. Or just following along to buy whatever your
| favorite tastemakers recommend. However involved you want to
| be!
|
| The world is about to get a lot weirder and more interesting.
| protonbob wrote:
| Making artists hyper productive will cheapen even further
| their output. If one artist can do the work that you are
| currently paying 8 to do, you only need to pay one artist
| that can wrangle these tools.
|
| I would agree that this is like 20th century mass
| production. To be clear, I don't necessarily think that
| mass production is a good thing either. In fact, it has
| been probably the most detrimental thing to our environment
| that humans have ever done.
| skydhash wrote:
| They cheapen the entry fees for learning, but the
| expectation will keep getting higher. It's like games
| where, even for indies, they won't accept N64 quality
| these days. Text to speech is quite good now, but people
| prefer real narrators. Everyone can create music with a
| cheap laptop and some midi keyboards, but only those
| really talented will make it.
| Retric wrote:
| Some very popular games are much less polished than
| N64/SNES quality.
|
| Mobile, Indy, and Retro are all very popular, just look
| at what people are playing on Twitch.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I thought Teddy K was dead. Maybe you're a bot trained on
| his works.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > If one artist can do the work that you are currently
| paying 8 to do, you only need to pay one artist that can
| wrangle these tools.
|
| And maybe the number of places paying for art will grow
| by a factor of 8.
| namose wrote:
| Maybe, but it hasn't worked that way for software. I
| think people might see the opportunity to inject bespoke
| art in a lot of places it wasn't previously. College
| students who could only afford movie posters previously
| will have art commissioned, every building will have a
| mural, etc etc.
| skydhash wrote:
| This concept was used in westworld [0]
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/2xm4feEKDjw
| protonbob wrote:
| I would argue that the technology will soon be at a point
| where these flaws are much less visible and will then further
| cheapen the work done by a human.
| josephg wrote:
| > These flaws would not exist (to such a degree) when a
| professional artist paints the same scene.
|
| The flaws in AI generated art were 100x as obvious in systems
| like this only a few years ago. In 5 years I doubt anyone
| will be able to tell the difference between AI and human art.
|
| When the photograph displaced most portrait painters, we
| invented a new type of artist - the photographer. I hope
| we'll see the same thing here - artists who specialise in
| using stable diffusion (and friends) to make new art in a new
| way. This blog post is like one of the world's first
| photographers saying "hey look how the photo changes when I
| move the subject relative to a light source!". I can't wait
| to see what results we get with deep expertise (and better
| algorithms).
|
| How long before we have filmmakers using AI to cast, direct
| and shoot their films?
| samatman wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. It didn't happen with CGI, the uncanny
| valley hasn't been surmounted, car chases aside.
|
| The mulchers, as Bruce Sterling calls them, have a fresh
| meat problem. They've consumed all the words, and all the
| pictures, and we already know that feeding them their own
| mulch gives worse results.
|
| We're not at the scale limit for data but we know where it
| is. It's not clear that refinements to the mulching process
| will create mulch good enough to tell apart from creation.
| It might. But it might not.
| pwinnski wrote:
| > with CGI, the uncanny valley hasn't been surmounted
|
| I'm not so sure about this. While some scenes are still
| obviously using CGI, I think a lot of CGI in movies now
| passes unnoticed, even entirely digital characters.
|
| We certainly notice when those characters do things
| humans can't do, of course, and when budget or schedule
| or both result in things being pushed out too early, but
| how would we know when digital characters look natural
| on-screen? We wouldn't!
| hbn wrote:
| I wonder if anyone is gonna take advantage of this point in
| time where the average person isn't aware of these
| breakthrough AI models, and sets up themself an account as
| a professional-grade artist on Fiverr, offering to draw
| highly detailed landscapes or whatever where the client can
| provide reference material and ideas.
|
| You generate the image in 30 minutes (maybe less if you get
| the process down to a science), then wait around for a few
| weeks to keep up the illusion that you're actually doing
| the drawing by hand, and send it off to your satisfied
| client. You could be charging hundreds of dollars for your
| "artistic services," and have dozens of clients going on
| simultaneously.
| bombcar wrote:
| real clients are going to want sketches and ideas so they
| can tweak them before final art.
| hbn wrote:
| Wonder if you could convert an image to a sketch
|
| That makes the process a little less simple, but still
| easier than doing the real work
| Retric wrote:
| The issue is an ever smaller percentage of the population can
| be successful at ever more difficult opportunities that
| result from ever better automation.
|
| Manual labor still exists, but it's a vastly smaller
| percentage of overall jobs. Productivity and automation seem
| like the same thing on the surface. However, the argument for
| a long tail of creators in an ever more wealth society breaks
| down when AI can start writing niche romance novels not just
| barely coherent news articles etc.
|
| In theory we might have ever more new types of jobs, but
| automation isn't just getting better it's also getting
| faster.
| atemerev wrote:
| This happened before, and this will happen again. There are no
| more typists, nor data entry personnel. Hardly any human travel
| agents. No bank tellers. Human translators are next in line.
|
| However, much more positions in machine learning and data
| science.
|
| Software _is_ eating the world. The only viable survival
| strategy is learning to code. I don't believe that not everyone
| can learn to code. I teach people to code, and I have yet to
| meet one that couldn't learn, assuming some general
| intelligence (about the same that you need to learn a foreign
| language).
| bitwize wrote:
| The coding skills I'm trained in will be handled by Copilot
| or its successor in a few years.
|
| I haven't gotten around to faffing about with Python and
| Tensorflow or whatever yet.
| lightsandaounds wrote:
| Don't think of "coding" as writing javascript to make
| websites. Think of "coding" as "talking to computers".
|
| As software eats the world, the value of people who can
| talk to computers will increase. Even if it takes fewer
| programmers to make a website, there will be more jobs for
| programmers to automate concept art production pipelines.
| You may not be writing javascript or python in fifteen
| years (I bet you will) but there will be code to tell the
| automation services what to do.
|
| The interesting question is the general population becoming
| more tech savvy? Will this change in work encourage more
| students to learn how to code (whatever that looks like in
| twenty years)? Or will the demand for coders rise without a
| corresponding increase in supply?
| atemerev wrote:
| Well, in software engineering, like in many modern
| professions, you don't get trained once and then work for
| life. Learning is continuous, and this is not optional
| anymore.
| schroeding wrote:
| ... will there ever be a (better) Copilot for COBOL or
| PL1? This may be an escape hatch, just throw yourself at
| legacy mainframes, this may work for an additional 20-40
| years. :D
| atemerev wrote:
| Yes, Copilot works for COBOL. (Haven't tested for PL/I,
| though).
| whateveracct wrote:
| I doubt computers are gonna be good at physically using pencils
| or paintbrushes. Art will have value long after every commenter
| here is rotten in the ground.
| writeslowly wrote:
| I feel like a lot of the discussion is around using these things
| to directly create new artwork, but these technologies (and
| GPT-3) feel like a method of digital divination to me. It's
| basically a more sophisticated form of casting an I Ching or
| reading tea leaves for artistic inspiration. I personally think
| that divination is underrated in modern society, so these
| developments are an interesting trend to me.
| green_on_black wrote:
| You call it divination, I call it a random seed.
| watercooler_guy wrote:
| I think that's an interesting connection and way to look at
| this. I first encountered that sort of artistic inspiration on
| a Twitter account that randomly generated sheet music snippets.
| Sure the generation could be garbage, but that gives the artist
| a starting point to say "this is bad because X, it should be
| more like Y". And of course with these AI models, the
| generation is more likely to be good. Having a
| divined/generated starting point for creative work can
| definitely be an invaluable tool.
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| Pretty exiting stuff. It feels like there's a new cool model
| being trained every week, the probability that some of the
| upcoming ones won't have a huge impact on the world in the next
| few decades seems close to 0% to me.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| AI art will continue to contribute to the decline in quality of
| all media. I could write 10,000 more words on why but I'll just
| stop here.
| namose wrote:
| I think pop media will continue to decline while the long tail
| will become better and better (this has already happened to
| music, film, tv, etc). If you use google and billboard charts
| as a discovery engine you're gonna have a bad time, but people
| who seek out quality will have more options than ever.
| songzme wrote:
| if I want to replicate what the author did, what drawing tool /
| software should I get to do the initial drawing? I use ubuntu so
| preferably something compatible with that.
| Evidlo wrote:
| The author mentions using GIMP. There is also Krita
| fragmede wrote:
| /u/imperator-maximus is working on a SD plugin for Krita: htt
| ps://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x13om1/i_a...
| samwillis wrote:
| I think it's fascinating, and at least to me completely
| unexpected, how good these image generation models are. What
| happens when we have a 42gb model, or a 4.2tb model?
|
| For comparison, the human brain is estimated to have a
| (equivalent to a computer) capacity of about 2.5 petabytes [0].
|
| I think I read in the past that the human mind holds memories in
| a picture like way, I wander if that's why these image based
| models are so incredible when compared to the text models.
|
| Maybe we are in a new "Moore's Law" like period where the
| complexity and size of these models is going to double something
| like every 18 months. It's going to be fascinating what's
| possible in a few short years time, I fully expect to be
| continually surprised.
|
| I'm looking forward to seeing a video model trained on 10 second
| clips, someone somewhere is working on it.
|
| 0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-
| memor...
| JackFr wrote:
| > I think it's fascinating, and at least to me completely
| unexpected, how good these image generation models are. What
| happens when we have a 42gb model, or a 4.2tb model?
|
| First 'how good' is an ill-defined metric -- that it seems in
| this case is a measurement of how much surprise and wonder they
| generate in the audience.
|
| Second, it might just be that the real wonder of the models is
| the their compression -- that is there is a space of mappings
| of line drawings and simple descriptions into art and this
| technique was able to lossy compress that space down to 4.2G.
| If you only compress it down to 42G, you'll be looking at the
| JPEG that's 90% compressed instead of 99%. Yeah it will be
| better but incrementally, not necessarily "Wow!" better.
|
| Honestly it's not obvious that it will be better at all.
|
| > For comparison, the human brain is estimated to have a
| (equivalent to a computer) capacity of about 2.5 petabytes [0].
|
| That's a terrible and basically non-sensical comparison to
| make.
| visarga wrote:
| The size of neural nets grew 3000x in 10 years - from 60M
| params AlexNet to 175B params GPT-3. Thats about 2.23x per
| year. Moore's law was a doubling every two years, that comes up
| at 2^(10/2)=32x.
|
| Model size scaled 100x faster than compute over a decade. We
| are paying for this difference by using more energy and
| hardware, but it's already too expensive to train except for a
| few labs, and deployment is restricted.
|
| Can't even load GPT-3 on most computers. Stable Diffusion is an
| exception, they did a good job and were lucky the model can be
| so small.
| hydrolox wrote:
| dougmwne wrote:
| There is evidence that the performance of the models scale
| linearly with size, so moores law scaling is likely to get us
| some "free" improvement even if no one ever invents a better ML
| technique.
| XCSme wrote:
| "Performance" is hard to define in cases like this, I think,
| what does an image that's 10x better mean?
| igorkraw wrote:
| IIRC it scales _logarithmically_ , which is the wrong side of
| the logarithm to be on. I might have missed some new compute-
| data ratio breakthrough though
| happycube wrote:
| I forget where I saw it, but with a 200B parameter model
| generated text actually makes sense.
| barrkel wrote:
| Google Parti, kangaroo holding a sign. 20B not 200B.
|
| https://parti.research.google/
| dougmwne wrote:
| Wow, somehow I missed this one with all the whirlwind of
| image models recently. It's very illuminating how the
| capability keeps scaling in their examples.
| salawat wrote:
| You realize Moore's law is about kaput right? We're running
| up against fundamental physical limits at this point.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I realize we are not done with it yet. There are new
| process node launches planned for the next few years and
| each processor generation continues to improve density,
| power consumption and price per transistor.
|
| I'll hold off declaring it dead till it is well and truly
| dead. And even then we could expect cost improvements as
| the great wheel of investment into the next node would no
| longer need to turn and the last node would become a final
| standard.
|
| As to physical limits, there are plenty of weird quantum
| particle effects to explore so that seems overstated. We
| are still just flipping on and off electromagnetic charge.
| Haven't even gotten to the quarks yet!
| trention wrote:
| >I'll hold off declaring it dead till it is well and
| truly dead.
|
| The classical Moore's law formulation has been dead for
| 15 years already. What we have now is whataboutism about
| why it still holds.
| dougmwne wrote:
| You can draw a straight line right through this log scale
| plot that goes to 2020. Not sure what definition of
| Moores Law you are using, but it doesn't seem to match
| the one on Wikipedia.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
| donkarma wrote:
| well that is transistor count, not transitor per square
| centimeter which can't be measured because it is
| variable. the top chips are simply bigger
| dougmwne wrote:
| Here's a chart for density. Still going strong with maybe
| a bit of drop off.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Density-of-logic-
| transis...
| deathanatos wrote:
| So this "Stable Diffusion model", it was training on a bunch of
| copyrighted data, and anything that comes of it must hope to
| launder the copyright sufficiently to not constitute a derivative
| work, somehow?
|
| > _these models were trained on image-text pairs from a broad
| internet scrape_
|
| ... yep.
|
| I've the same issue with this as with Github Copilot.
|
| I will admit, it is technically impressive, and something I would
| love to use, as someone who cannot draw worth a darn. And it is
| _that_ I cannot draw that I do not feel morally comfortable with
| this: I am using a -- complicated, admittedly -- tool to just
| derive art from the unwilling talents of others. (Admittedly, my
| skill in prompting & editing might matter, but that's true of
| "normal" derivative works, too!)
| oofbey wrote:
| It's not entirely settled law, but it seems the US Supreme
| Court would probably disagree with you. These issues were near
| the center of the Authors Guild vs Google case that ran from
| 2005 to 2015. There's a good relevant summary of it here
| https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...
|
| But broadly the courts have upheld the rights of companies to
| use copyrighted works as inputs to commercial algorithmic
| derivative works like neural networks.
|
| Now you might argue this doesn't apply here. A key aspect of
| the decision rested on the fact that the original copyright
| holders (book authors & publishers) were not directly harmed by
| Google's indexing of them, since it probably drove more sales
| of those books. In this case it's not so clear. Is somebody
| using a diffusion model doing so instead of buying a piece of
| commercial art? If they're generating a new piece of art, I'd
| say probably not. But if they're generating something
| specifically similar to an existing specific piece of art,
| perhaps, but if it's deliberately different, it's still a tough
| argument. If the ML model is being used to deliberately
| replicate a specific artist's style, then I think you can make
| that case pretty strongly. But if you're building something
| that's an aggregate of a bunch of styles (almost always the
| case unless you specifically prompt it otherwise) then I don't
| think the courts would find that any damage has been done, and
| thus nobody taking this to court would have standing.
|
| I think it's likely we will see this end up in the courts
| somehow. But being able to prove actual harm is critical to the
| US court system. And it's difficult to see how the courts would
| rule against the kinds of broad general use that is most common
| for this kind of generative art.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Thank you -- that's at least an argument I've not yet heard
| and that isn't the trope of "the AI is thinking".
|
| > _Now you might argue this doesn 't apply here._
|
| Indeed, I would. In particular,
|
| > _and the revelations do not provide a significant market
| substitute for the protected aspects of the originals_
|
| I'm not sure if that holds here. In Google's case, the
| product (a search engine) was completely different from the
| input (a book). Here ... we're replacing art with art, or
| code with code, admittedly _different_ art. And ... uh,
| maybe? different code. I 'm also less certain due to the
| extreme views on what constitutes _de minimis_ copying the
| courts have taken.
|
| > _I think it 's likely we will see this end up in the courts
| somehow._
|
| I agree.
|
| > _But being able to prove actual harm is critical to the US
| court system. And it 's difficult to see how the courts would
| rule against the kinds of broad general use that is most
| common for this kind of generative art._
|
| This is a good argument, too, though I'd like to see it tried
| in court, I think.
|
| > _If the ML model is being used to deliberately replicate a
| specific artist 's style, then I think you can make that case
| pretty strongly._
|
| I'll link the same example I linked in a comment, [1]. Seek
| to "On the left is a piece by award-winning Hollywood artist
| Michael Kutsche, while on the right is a piece of AI art
| that's claimed to have copied his iconic style, including a
| blurred, incomplete signature"
|
| [1]: https://kotaku.com/ai-art-dall-e-midjourney-stable-
| diffusion...
| mkaic wrote:
| All art is derivative and there's no such thing as originality.
| Every human artist draws inspiration from their visual and
| emotional experiences, copyrighted or otherwise, how is this
| different? If I watch Star Wars and then make a space opera
| film that's aesthetically similar to Star Wars, that's not
| copyright laundering, it's inspiration! Same principle applies
| here.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Because the AI doesn't have "experience", it has training
| data that it's deriving the work from.
|
| People have shown fairly convincing examples of this in the
| more general sense: e.g., they've had well-known stock image
| (e.g., iStockPhoto) watermarks get produced in the output
| from the AI models (when not prompted). An artist with
| "experience" would not reproduce a watermark. Or in this
| article[1], where an AI was requests to mimic another artists
| style, and the output was (attempting to) reproduce the
| artist's signature.
|
| (IANAL.) If you make a film that directly incorporates
| aspects from Star Wars (what I believe to be the more
| accurate version of what these models do), then _yes_ , I
| would expect that you will be handed a C&D. "Glowing space
| swords" aren't copyrighted, but if you include something
| indistinguishable from a lightsaber & call it a lightsaber? I
| bet Disney would have something to say about that.
|
| [1]: https://kotaku.com/ai-art-dall-e-midjourney-stable-
| diffusion...
| GaggiX wrote:
| The Kotaku article is really trying to spread
| misinformation about this kind of model. The image shown in
| the article was not trying to imitate anyone, as the author
| of the image stated https://twitter.com/illustrata_ai/statu
| s/1558559036575911936 (the artist's name was not in the
| prompt), it is only RJ Palmer who for no reason thought
| this was the case, the signature also does not even come
| close to the original as the model is not really trying to
| copy anything, the signature is like the rest of the image
| completely made up. Also, in the article you linked it
| states that there are programs to explicitly remove the
| signature, this is also not true. Articles like the one you
| posted are usually full of nonsense, written by people who
| don't really understand this kind of technology and I
| wouldn't use them as a source of any kind. RJ Palmer's
| reaction to the image in the article: "This literally tried
| to recreate the signature of Michael Kutsche in the corner.
| This is extremely fucked up", These people are good at
| creating controversy, even when it is based on facts that
| are not true.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The 4.2G is pretty hard to believe. I would have told you it's
| not possible if it weren't right there showing it is.
| jedberg wrote:
| Back in the 90s I bought a book that came with some floppy disks.
| The book was about 500 pages of clip art, and the disks were the
| actual images. At the time, people said such things would put
| graphic artists out of business.
|
| What actually happened is that it put mediocre graphic artists
| out of business and highlighted the difference between one that
| was mediocre and one that was good.
|
| I feel like this will happen again here with digital artists. The
| mediocre ones will be indistinguishable from AI, but the good
| ones will still stand out.
| april_22 wrote:
| Yes and I think it will especially push the boundaries of art
| forward like we have never seen before.
|
| Also, it will be interesting to watch whether and how people
| will be assessing art created by AI. Will there be something
| like Connoisseurship for AI art?
| mrtksn wrote:
| What happens is, story tellers get empowered with each and
| every advancement that makes their process easier. Only the
| technical people with niche focus get screwed.
|
| Over the history of humanity the printing press, the
| photograph, the computers etc. destroyed some profession only
| to make something else flourish.
| quadcore wrote:
| _but the good ones will still stand out._
|
| Yes, for a day or a week. The AI wont stop scanning and
| learning.
| archagon wrote:
| This AI is not intelligent. It will not "learn" in the same
| way that humans do.
| quadcore wrote:
| There isnt a result it wont be able to mimic in a short
| period of time.
| archagon wrote:
| Highly unlikely, unless by "mimic" you mean "vaguely
| evoke". There is no actor behind these models.
| Recombination is only a very limited form of
| intelligence.
| quadcore wrote:
| Its also supervised in the sense that for-profit
| companies work on it to grab as much value as they can.
| trention wrote:
| The fair use argument will probably get scraped when the
| case gets to an EU court. Then no mimicking will be
| legal.
| quadcore wrote:
| Maybe we should go even further. There is no creativity
| in whatever that thing generate, it is always
| sophisticated plagiarism. Therefore training those models
| out of close regulated research environment and selling
| the output should be prohibited.
| trention wrote:
| I actually have zero problems with that happening. Also,
| your opinion of your own ability to use sarcasm
| successfully is at the very least highly suspect.
| quadcore wrote:
| _Also, your opinion of your own ability to use sarcasm
| successfully is at the very least highly suspect._
|
| Please rephrase I dont get it. Do I not sound sincere?
| Rest assured I absolutely am.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| Well it's already been trained on millions (billions?) of
| images and it still has trouble with plenty of things.
|
| Scenes with more than one person in them, or multiple
| people and objects interacting in complex ways, are the
| most obvious cases.
|
| I'm sure the technology will keep improving but I think
| it's possible to be overly optimistic as well.
| quadcore wrote:
| Finaly a fair point. I dont know for sure and some here
| do, but my feeling is that we are still in a Moore's law
| in this art generation thing. If thats true, it means 10
| years from now the AI will be able to mimic the very
| bests to perfection. Taking a pencil will become
| hopeless.
|
| 20 years from now they'll click a button and you'll get a
| fully randomly generated pixar movie thats as good as the
| originals.
|
| Im software engineer and amateur illustrator. I have
| always welcomed technology. Always felt good about it.
| Copilot? No worries, please automate my job, if humanity
| dont code anymore, I dont think its gonna kill us the
| slightest on the contrary. Art? Mark my words, this wont
| go well with people souls. This is an obvious evil
| mistake. Im still confident some wises will stop this
| heresy before civilization collapses (I like to dramatize
| like that but still this is bad imo)
| theptip wrote:
| I think putting some graphics artists out of business is one
| side of the coin. The other side of the coin is creating new
| jobs for people with good visual taste and imaginative ideas,
| who did not pass the skill barrier previously required to
| actually create good art.
|
| Presumably we need fewer of the new more efficient jobs to
| displace the work done by the old jobs. But that lowers the
| price of "mediocre" graphics, and therefore increases demand;
| maybe we actually end up with more jobs at the more accessible
| level.
|
| These market dynamics are quite hard to predict but either way,
| bad time to be an entry level professional artist, great time
| to be just about anyone else.
| jameshart wrote:
| This is a good take.
|
| Look at music production: historically the barriers to music
| creation were the dexterity and practice needed to master an
| instrument, or multiple instruments.
|
| But when you put tools in the hands of more people without
| the filter of needing the time, training and skill to coax
| the sounds in your head from the instrument you have... and
| suddenly you get stuff nobody was making before.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| >The other side of the coin is creating new jobs for people
| with good visual taste and imaginative ideas, who did not
| pass the skill barrier previously required to actually create
| good art.
|
| I mean. Do you think that there are people out there with
| good taste in software and imaginative ideas, who can't pass
| the skill barrier currently required to write code?
|
| Why would art be any different?
| theptip wrote:
| I think art is a combination of physical skill and
| conceptual taste/ability, among other things. The skill
| part is non-trivial.
|
| Software seems like mostly thought-stuff to me, there's no
| mechanical skill-based piece. But even so, when AI can
| generate a full app with the ease of iteration displayed in
| the OP, then sure, I think you'll see some people with app
| ideas generating those apps themselves, instead of having
| to hire contract developers. Right now just completing
| stubs of functions doesn't seem useful enough to allow
| someone that can't code to make an app.
| ellis0n wrote:
| Back in 2012, I made a simple model that can generate multiple
| 512x512 images from an iPad 2 and 512MB of RAM in minutes.
|
| Here are the samples https://imgur.com/a/XMnMi
|
| Then I found that the end of the era of handmade digital art is
| coming. Only transistors are limited and future digital artists
| will differ in memory size and teraflops like bitcoin miners.
| xbryanx wrote:
| Yes! We will still need new creatives to dream up something
| entirely new, which then can be fed into AI as new seeds. The
| cycle continues.
| Keyframe wrote:
| You're right about that. At the end of the day it is a tool in
| the craft domain of art. Artist take a long-ass time to perfect
| their craft end of the business, but ultimately what sets great
| artists from mediocre ones is not craft, it's their taste. Own
| (good or bad) taste pushes artist to not stop working on their
| image/painting until their own taste is satisfied. Same will
| happen no matter the tool. I am actually terribly excited by
| these tools to expedite sketching, not in a sense of speed as
| much as volume while hunting for those directions that satisfy
| that inner taste.
| z3c0 wrote:
| While I'm overall of the mind that nobody can really know what
| to expect, I think this may be a little more accurate of a
| reality than the aspiring Cassandras are trumpeting about. I'm
| willing to bet that most of the people who are going to utilize
| these technologies are people who never could afford a graphic
| designer to begin with. I'm sure some of the market will be
| lost to this tech, but a blackbox that shoots out passable
| images just isn't going to cut it for certain areas of the art
| market.
|
| I also wouldn't be shocked if a big portion of the market for
| this technology ends up being the artists themselves. I
| personally know a painter whose creative process has been
| overhauled by DALL-E. Brainstorming the next project is easier
| than ever, and unlike the DALL-E images inspiring them, the
| resulting paintings actually have the "human-touch" necessary
| to illicit the deeper emotional response that a good painting
| should bring about. Adding depth to a model doesn't necessarily
| add depth to the output.
|
| But like I said, I don't think anyone really knows what's going
| to happen. We'll see, I guess.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There was an example on a Splendid Diffusion post earlier.
| Someone using SD for generating recipe pictures,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32644800 where they
| almost certainly wouldn't hire an artist.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| When new technology is introduced people always talk about
| how existing workflows are cheaper. That's true, but the
| biggest impacts are always driven by things that were
| previously cost prohibitive that now become possible.
|
| YouTubers are a perfect example of that, it used to take
| entire television broadcast studios to do what they do, and
| now it can be done solo or with just a few people. And
| YouTubers are exactly the audience for this new tech - the
| smaller ones who want to put out branded merch can not
| currently do so at a level of quality. But you hire one
| artist to go out and make 5-100 pictures of your branding,
| tell them to take their time and make those few images to
| perfection, and that can now be molded to anything they want
| to create.
|
| Indie game devs must be thrilled. Aspiring indie directors
| looking to make green-screen backgrounds are thrilled. VRchat
| users looking for 3d models are thrilled.
| bombcar wrote:
| What's interesting is the comparison- YouTubers can fit a
| niche that TV never could - specifically because they can
| produce content easier without people wandering off.
|
| Though much of YouTube can be summed up as what was the
| three cheapest TV shows to produce - standup comedy, talk
| shows, and howto. The amount of YouTube sitcoms is a much
| lower number.
| k__ wrote:
| Sounds a bit harsh.
|
| It's like software development.
|
| Back in the day you could make good money with websites. Knew
| HTML? You got the job!
|
| But the goalposts are constantly moving. You had to add CSS and
| later JS to your skills to keep up.
|
| Today, you won't get paid for writing HTML anymore.
|
| Same for other industries.
|
| You have to move with the industry, gather new skills, etc.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I think that's a good way to put it, but there's still a
| problem.
|
| The path of a digital artist is long and arduous. For a time on
| this path, the artist may be considered mediocre, or to put it
| better, they are an _apprentice_.
|
| Just as in other physical trades, an apprentice who is mediocre
| at their craft can still practice aspects of that craft well
| enough to be useful and earn some money. It is also through
| practice that the apprentice improves their skills. In this
| way, the apprentice is financially supported and even
| incentivized to improve at their trade, until one day they
| become truly good at it.
|
| So what things like DALL-E and Github Co-Pilot and your clip
| art package do is displace the apprentice. With no path of
| mediocrity for the apprentice to walk, to earn a stipend for
| training, how then can they receive the financial support
| necessary to train until they're a master? They would need to
| already be independently wealthy or receive financial
| assistance.
|
| In order to train more master artists and programmers, we would
| need to provide them with financial support while they train
| without us receiving anything useful in return.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| With tools like stable diffusion, mastery means something
| different than it used to. Now a master is understands style
| and composition, who knows how to use the tools effectively
| to produce stylish, well composed images, then has sufficient
| editing skills to clean up/paint over tool output in order to
| produce professional results.
| salawat wrote:
| All of said tools having the most godawful interfaces and
| documentation known to man if the JS ecosystem is any
| evidence of the direction things are going.
| rdedev wrote:
| But the problem presented in GP still exists right? Not
| everyone starts out with a good understanding of style and
| composition from the start. They need time to master those
| skills but also need a line of income to survive till then.
| If mediocre level work is all automated someone starting
| out might not get the time to reliably skill up
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Learning composition and style is a different thing than
| developing technical skill though. You can learn the
| principles of composition/framing and get a good survey
| of art styles in months, compared to technical skills
| which frequently take years and years to develop. With
| this tech, you could start out as an enthusiast
| generating your own art, then get hired as an assistant
| of sorts to do low level prompt and input "exploration"
| for a head artist in a sort of apprenticeship.
| namose wrote:
| I think the apprentice model will still exist, they'll just
| use AI to aid them. Only the very experienced, talented
| artists will know when AI is hindering them. Same way a
| really good programmer will understand when not to use a web
| framework or whatever, but an inexperienced programmer who
| knows how to make a crud app with django or whatever is still
| valuable.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's interesting that you basically just made Andrew Yang's
| argument for Universal Basic Income -- that we need to
| redistribute the wealth of automation to all of society.
|
| This is the perfect example -- with a UBI the apprentice no
| longer needs to get paid to learn. They can live off of the
| UBI while learning, until they are good enough to charge for
| their services.
| narrator wrote:
| The problem with UBI is Jevons paradox[1].
|
| Just to illustrate what the problem is using an extreme
| example: Oh good, we made it so anyone can turn the whole
| of the earth's crust into paperclips with a push of a
| button in a fully automated way that doesn't require any
| human labor and the energy to do it is completely
| sustainable. Hmm... Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| jedberg wrote:
| Economists are still divided on the subject. So far
| localized experiments in UBI have not caused localized
| inflation, but it's hard to tell since it's small scale.
|
| I'm not so sure it would actually happen though. We
| already give support to a lot of poor people through
| various programs like EBT and Medicaid. This just
| converts that help to cash, which gives people more
| freedom on what they want to spend on.
| JackFr wrote:
| The problem with UBI experiments is that it hasn't been
| U. If it's localized and small scale it's obviously not
| Universal, which makes it hard to draw conclusions.
| yellowapple wrote:
| It's also rarely B, either; I don't know of very many (if
| any) such experiments where the income was sufficient to
| live on.
| jefftk wrote:
| I'm not understanding your objection. Would you be able
| to fill in some of the steps between "UBI" and "the
| entire earth's crust has been turned into paper clips"?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| I'm guessing that they're imagining we'll give the
| productivity AI too much leeway, because it prints money
| so nobody has to work, until it goes unchecked and
| eventually starts making decisions contrary to typical
| human interests, because we based its reward function on
| profit instead of understanding what people really
| need/want to be happy.
| narrator wrote:
| Let's say that we have completely automated fishing
| boats. They can trap every fish in the sea. We give
| everyone UBI. They all decide to eat fish. No humans have
| to work or do anything to completely remove all fish from
| the sea. Is this a good idea? In previous eras we were
| constrained by the need for human labor to do all these
| things, but now AI does it, so we can have as much of it
| as we want until the natural resources run out. This
| creates problems with sustainability however, so how is
| that controlled?
| jefftk wrote:
| This is a problem we already have to deal with: people
| got rich enough that they could afford to pay people to
| overfish the oceans, and we responded by limiting how
| much people are allowed to fish.
|
| That is, I don't think UBI adds a new problem beyond "how
| do we make sure that humanity properly accounts for
| externalities" and "how do we make sure that AI does what
| we want it to do".
| narrator wrote:
| I was using fish to make an obvious example. The answer
| is regulation, but there are so many things like fish in
| the world. Do we have to have a regulation for every
| single one? It seems like it will end with whack-a-mole
| micromanagement of everything. It almost seems like we'll
| get communism eventually out of it. Except there is no
| all labor is of equal value, because there's no labor. I
| wish there was some alternative.
| akomtu wrote:
| How will you live off UBI if all the people who are
| supposed to make your living possible also live off UBI?
| jedberg wrote:
| The assumption is that most basic needs will be provided
| by automation, not humans, hence the need for a UBI.
| Also, immigrants, since they don't get UBI (but hopefully
| get a lot of protection so as not to become a slave
| class).
| yellowapple wrote:
| People will still want extra spending money on top of
| what UBI provides - hence, there will still be a labor
| supply to meet that demand.
| akomtu wrote:
| Laziness is stronger than greed. Indian tribes in America
| already live off UBI, and how does it work for them?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I'm going to be level with you: I don't want to pay for
| someone's food and board so they can draw lines on paper
| (which won't sell) all day. Likewise, I don't expect anyone
| to pay for my food and board so I can do fuck all either.
|
| If you want a living, earn it. If you want wealth, earn it.
| Might not happen with your favorite school of craft, but
| the vast majority of people don't/can't make money doing
| something they are passionate about.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| This is the thing with automation, we're on a path to
| destroy most jobs that you can earn a living from self
| driving cars, automated kitchens (and ghost kitchens)
| self checkout, automated bookkeeping and mid level
| managerial positions, all of those are more or less set
| to be automated on the close future
|
| Even if that only kill half the positions, we're still
| looking to a situation where humans overall don't have
| anything attractive to the market, if you can't earn a
| living wht would you do?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I work in tech, and while it's mostly meetings and
| leaning on some knowledge of various Java and SQL use
| cases, as well as some niche knowledge of crappy
| languages like D, I probably don't work as hard as
| someone scrubbing the toilets or making the beds in the
| local Marriot hotel.
|
| I can accrue money doing what I'm doing - they can't.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment, always have, but I always
| like to probe for issues with it.
|
| When "earning it" takes much more than it used to due to
| technological shifts or otherwise, the only ones who can
| afford to walk the path toward mastery are the very well-
| off. This of course violates the modern western liberal
| ethos of equality for all, particularly in regards to
| educational pursuits.
|
| We end up with a McDonald's worker class, their menial
| profession determined from birth, and their noble
| masters.
|
| Maybe _c 'est la vie_ and there's nothing we should or
| even can do about it. But it's unpleasant, to say the
| least, knowing there's an entire class who's destined
| from birth to perform cheap menial labor their whole
| lives, without the slightest hope of doing anything else.
| After all, slavery is necessary for civilization, always
| has been.
| mikkergp wrote:
| This focus on other people "earning it" almost seems
| religious to me at this point in our evolution,
| especially as we look forward towards automation
| potentially creating plenty. If we need people to work
| jobs, great, but why confabulate jobs just so people you
| can feel good that other people aren't getting their food
| and board paid for?
| dkersten wrote:
| Also, many of the richest people didn't even earn it.
| They inherited it because some ancestor of their earned
| it, or stole it.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > I don't want to pay for someone's food and board so
| they can draw lines on paper (which won't sell) all day.
|
| Quite a few of us already do that for people who don't
| even so much as draw lines on paper. ( _cough cough_
| landlords _cough cough_ )
| jedberg wrote:
| It's called a basic income because it's subsistence
| living. Most people won't just live off it and do
| nothing. And those that would, well, they aren't really
| going to do much anyway if you force them to work, other
| than the bare minimum of the most menial labor.
|
| So far every experiment in UBI has shown that almost
| everyone getting it does something useful with the money
| and doesn't just sit on it.
|
| And frankly, I have no problem with paying someone to sit
| on their ass drawing lines, if it means they aren't
| starving and homeless.
| agileAlligator wrote:
| > And frankly, I have no problem with paying someone to
| sit on their ass drawing lines, if it means they aren't
| starving and homeless.
|
| Why don't you? I am sure that you can support at least
| one such person with your income
| jedberg wrote:
| I do actually. I support a couple of people with enough
| income to keep them from being starving and homeless. One
| I'm not even related to.
| fragmede wrote:
| So what'll you do when _your_ job is taken by robots?
| ausbah wrote:
| seems like you're missing the main idea behind ubi? if
| automation gets good enough at enough things, there might
| not be jobs for everyone to do. if, when, where, and how
| the above might happen are up for debate - but your post
| just sounds like typical anti-welfare nonsense
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| UBI is impossible to work for two reasons:
|
| 1) We need people to do low level jobs. So if UBI exists,
| wages will need to rise until people are willing to do
| them. This will happen along with price raises until an
| equilibrium is found where poor people need to work in
| order to survive. No need for narratives about landlords
| raising rent, though it is possible. The poor people aren't
| in an overall worse position here though, because although
| they're still earning just enough to live, a portion of
| that minimum is now guaranteed. However:
|
| 2) By raising your domestic (or local) wages/prices, you've
| just given yourself an absolute disadvantage against every
| other economic entity in the world. Anything that is
| outsourceable is now more appealing to outsource than
| before. This removes jobs and puts downwards pressure on
| wages.
|
| If everyone just "lives off UBI while learning" society
| won't function because the jobs they do are important.
| Thorentis wrote:
| I'm not necessarily a UBI proponent, but the interesting
| thing to point out here is that if a job is so essential
| that it is required for society to function, maybe it
| should be paying a whole lot more.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > We need people to do low level jobs. So if UBI exists,
| wages will need to rise until people are willing to do
| them.
|
| Andrew Yang's premise is that those low level jobs are
| increasingly being automated away anyway - meaning that
| no, we don't need people to do them.
|
| Even without that premise, this argument presupposes that
| people receiving UBI will do so in exclusion to working.
| That doesn't really logically or practically follow; it's
| just as possible that people will work _anyway_ because
| extra spending money is extra spending money. They 'll
| work because they _want_ to work, not because they 're
| being actively coerced to work.
|
| > This will happen along with price raises until an
| equilibrium is found where poor people need to work in
| order to survive.
|
| With Yang's proposal, the "price raises" part is probably
| true, yes. However, that has nothing to do with UBI;
| instead, it has to do with VAT. VAT advocates oft insist
| that it's somehow "not a sales tax" and therefore
| "totally not regressive like a sales tax", but at the end
| of the day consumers are paying more than they otherwise
| would for goods - and since consumer spending is
| disproportionately higher (relative to income/wealth) for
| the working class than the ownership class (or low/middle
| v. high, if that's the terminology you prefer), that's
| going to have the same regressive tax effects.
|
| _However_ , a VAT ain't the only way...
|
| > No need for narratives about landlords raising rent,
| though it is possible.
|
| Not if the UBI is instead funded by taxing the unimproved
| value of land - a.k.a. a land value tax, or LVT. We
| Georgists tend to call that a "citizen's dividend", but
| it's just a special case of UBI: a basic income intended
| to compensate citizens for occupying less than their
| equal share of land value within a given jurisdiction.
| There are a lot of implications of this (I could go on
| and on about the economic efficiency and ethical
| justifications), but relevant to this conversation is
| that the lack of deadweight loss means replacing other
| taxes with LVT would if anything _reduce_ the consumer-
| facing cost of goods by reducing the effective tax burden
| of those producing said goods.
|
| > Anything that is outsourceable is now more appealing to
| outsource than before.
|
| That has already happened, without UBI. UBI is if
| anything _necessary_ because of outsourcing - again,
| because we don 't need local people doing those
| particular low level jobs, because they're now being done
| overseas.
|
| UBI also might even help correct outsourcing; it's a lot
| easier to start a business if you know that if it fails
| (like most businesses do) you won't be homeless and
| starving as a result, and that's exactly the sort of
| safety net that UBI enables.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Andrew Yang's premise is that those low level jobs are
| increasingly being automated away anyway - meaning that
| no, we don't need people to do them.
|
| Well Andrew Yang is wrong. That's not what automation
| does. Automation reduces the amount of skill required to
| do jobs, reducing both the amount, but also the value.
| You still need people, and often more people because it
| becomes economical to employ poor people at a higher
| scale.
|
| > Not if the UBI is instead funded by taxing the
| unimproved value of land - a.k.a. a land value tax, or
| LVT.
|
| A land value tax is a great idea, but irrelevant to what
| I was saying. We need people to do low wage jobs. If they
| get some wages for free, we need to pay them more to do
| the jobs. If we pay them more, then we need to raise
| prices on the goods in order to not go bankrupt. The
| natural level of wages/prices is the one where people
| need to work in order to survive. The tax system and
| funding of the UBI is a separate problem.
|
| > That has already happened, without UBI. UBI is if
| anything necessary because of outsourcing - again,
| because we don't need local people doing those particular
| low level jobs, because they're now being done overseas.
|
| Economic Comparative and Absolute Advantages are not
| binary events. Doing things that make domestic businesses
| less competitive across the board in a globalized
| international economy is suicidal.
|
| > UBI also might even help correct outsourcing; it's a
| lot easier to start a business if you know that if it
| fails (like most businesses do) you won't be homeless and
| starving as a result, and that's exactly the sort of
| safety net that UBI enables.
|
| It's just a naive thing to focus on this founder idea.
| jostylr wrote:
| Why would the wages need to increase? UBI is additive to
| wages. It is not like welfare where one loses the money
| when one starts working. For the welfare state, you
| absolutely have to raise the wages to be above whatever
| the government is giving to those without money. UBI is
| explicitly intended to do away with that problem. In
| other words, if someone is willing to work for 20k a year
| now and we roll out a UBI that gives everyone 12k a year,
| then the 20k job is still an attractive option and would
| net them 32k. Now, it may be the case that the wage goes
| down to 8k which effectively leads to a UBI subsidizing
| the employers. That would be unfortunate and is a risk,
| but it certainly does not lead to a disadvantage compared
| to other countries in terms of employers though it may
| lead to disadvantages for attracting high earners.
|
| A UBI also opens up the possibility of removing the
| minimum wage which not only allows for more people to
| obtain jobs, but also raises the competitiveness with
| other countries, potentially (it depends on whether the
| minimum wage is actually effective in raising wages above
| the market rate).
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Doing a grueling low wage job because you need those
| wages to survive makes sense. Doing low wage jobs for the
| extra cash is not, because it's not a lot of cash. Money,
| like everything, has a diminishing marginal value. The
| first bunch of money is keeping you alive. If the
| government provides you that first bunch, your employer
| is providing much less value to you. Everyone preaches
| about how UBI will allow people to start businesses and
| learn skills. Well yeah, but that means they're dropping
| out of the labor force because they don't need to do
| those jobs.
|
| How do you incentivize people to work? Pay them more.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| You're missing the point. At SOME point, even YOU won't
| be able to find a job, due to robotics and automation,
| compounded by extremely high unemployment making even
| basic jobs like plumbing impossible to get. If that
| happens, we either just let everyone starve until the
| population drops to equilibrium, or restructure society
| to support people when there's no jobs for 99% of us.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That's great, but we're nowhere near that point. That is
| basically a post scarcity society.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| If our enormous economic engines were devoted towards
| efficiency rather than profit motive, I think we would be
| there.
|
| How many appliances do we build to last for a few years
| and then break? How many economic resources could we save
| by building fewer products to last longer? If the
| economic engine were tilted towards quality rather than
| churn, we could be much more efficient about our use of
| resources.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| No, we're nowhere near it. Last mile labor needs are
| unavoidable at this time and energy and materials are
| still very much scarce.
|
| Durable products would be nice.
| jedberg wrote:
| The assumption of UBI is that it is a wealth
| redistribution from automation, so
|
| > We need people to do low level jobs
|
| Is solved through automation and immigration (only
| citizens get UBI). Of course this is a major downside,
| because you end up with a slave class unless you make
| sure those immigrant workers are well protected.
|
| Your point 2 has already happened. But the wealth still
| remains here in the US. So if that wealth were
| redistributed to the poor it would actually make things
| better.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Is solved through automation
|
| Orders of magnitude more than we have now
|
| > and immigration (only citizens get UBI). Of course this
| is a major downside, because you end up with a slave
| class unless you make sure those immigrant workers are
| well protected.
|
| ... Uh... yeah I would prefer not to have a slave class
| wpietri wrote:
| Was there really an apprentice level for digital artists
| before AI models? I know somebody who does a lot of digital
| art as a hobby. They have spent years and years working on
| stuff for their own enjoyment, and to hear them tell it
| they're only now reaching the point of marketability.
|
| What's the market for mediocre art today? I long ago worked
| on tech for magazines, which would sometimes use adequate
| commissioned art to jazz things up. But that was before the
| rise of vast stock art collections that were instantly
| accessible. Looking at some popular web-based magazines, it
| seems like the still commission the occasional original
| illustration, but that it's mainly stock photos or photo-
| composite illustrations.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I don't know about digital art, but centuries prior,
| traditional artist training followed the apprenticeship
| model just like any other trade at the time. Leonardo da
| Vinci walked this path.
| wpietri wrote:
| Sure, but we're talking about the near-future impact of
| AI. My point is that I don't think this is going to make
| much of an impact on available apprentice positions. I'm
| not worried about da Vinci; he won't be harmed by this.
| Someone wrote:
| And less than a century ago, scores of people drew
| background images for Disney animated feature films, with
| the better ones getting allowed to draw main characters,
| and the best having final say in accepting or rejecting
| drawings.
|
| I guess the same happened with those creating and
| animating 3D models for the likes of Toy Story.
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Learning to play an instrument, to draw, sculpt or
| basically anything is hard, or at least it takes time.
|
| There was never a market for mediocrity... but people will
| happily pay for exposure (to play in a bar, rent a space as
| a gallery and so on). The problem is that even for good art
| it's hard, and it has always been. The rise of accessible
| stock art doesn't help, and AI will not.
|
| Still one point is important: if you want to create
| something new, and not reassess (derive) the same thing, I
| guess we (human) have still a place. At least for now.
| xnx wrote:
| I'm not too worried about this. We have a lot of skilled
| trades that have survied technology (e.g. carpenters and
| power tools)
| Bakary wrote:
| Looks like visual artists will be rewarded in the future for
| creating new styles and templates that can feed prompts. Instead
| of developing a single style and producing from it over a
| lifetime, developing multiple types and spreading them like young
| seaturtles.
|
| Companies could be hired to develop a particular keyword over a
| period of weeks or months to allow for more specific prompts.
| bckr wrote:
| > Companies could be hired to develop a particular keyword
|
| Love that idea. The prompt economy.
| SirYandi wrote:
| Happening already:
|
| https://promptbase.com/
| rvz wrote:
| The grift continues.
| t00 wrote:
| Irrelevant note - it seems page is stuck at the top when using
| page down to scroll down.
| detritus wrote:
| Yeah, that was driving me nuts - can't PgDn nor use arrow keys.
| Doing so at any point after having scrolled down just resets to
| top. Very frustrating!
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| thanks for letting me know. I never even thought to test that.
| I'll give it a look.
| durkie wrote:
| spacebar too. just jumps you right back to the top.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| the reason is the onkeydown=closeModal() that clears the
| window.location.hash
| red_trumpet wrote:
| I had some problems on Android+Firefox, where the page just
| decided to scroll to the Top. Also, the Back button did not
| work.
| d23 wrote:
| The cynicism of some people in this crowd never ceases to amaze
| me. This stuff is nothing short of mind blowing. If you are
| someone who is about to comment "meh," you probably need to take
| a step back from the keyboard.
| dilap wrote:
| at least it'll make for a funny reread in 10 years.
|
| the all-time classic in the genre:
|
| https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
| boppo1 wrote:
| No I think the all time classic is Krugman saying the
| internet will be no more influential than the fax machine.
| dilap wrote:
| It's funny, but in a different genre, because we should
| _expect_ Krugman to be clueless, whereas in theory people
| on geeky tech websites would be better.
| writeslowly wrote:
| I think it's a pretty natural mindset to have for many people
| who work as software engineers. If you see something useful or
| interesting, the first reaction is often to notice what needs
| to be fixed or improved. It's also a field prone to nitpicking
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I do this a lot. I'm pretty sure its close to my worst trait,
| socially.
| TillE wrote:
| I'm firmly in the moderate camp of "this stuff is incredibly
| cool and promising, but we're nowhere near the overblown
| predictions of human artists becoming obsolete".
| quitit wrote:
| The only people who think this are people who have no
| experience in the field.
|
| The creative process, like many kinds of fields applicable to
| business is about problem-solving. AI text-to-image
| generation doesn't replace that function, however it does
| form an excellent tool, especially when it comes to rapid
| conceptualisation. This will allow more people to be creative
| problem solvers without needing to possess technical skills
| in image creation. Much in the same way that graphics apps
| allowed people to make image without needing to learn studio
| or art skills. Or DTP tools allowed more people to publish
| without the tedium and high set up costs. I will still be
| hiring illustrators and designers, and this may be one of
| their tools, and it would be their responsibility to be
| experts in it, but it doesn't replace them - it makes them
| better illustrators and better artists. The right way to
| think about this is not that it shrinks the field, rather it
| opens it and accelerates it - for that it's a very welcome
| addition. No creative is scared of this - they're looking
| forward to the next-generation approach, and it's clear that
| 2D images are not the end point. Soon we'll have 3D (already
| in progress), soon we'll have music, soon we'll have this for
| animation and programming.
|
| People fiddling with the technology have noticed some obvious
| short-comings, such as getting consistent results - for
| example it's currently not possible to develop a series of
| story boards where the character is obviously the same.
| Instead some level of reseeding the image with the desired
| character or outright recomposing the graphics later is
| needed. These aren't things that can't be fixed however, what
| we're seeing now is definitely an exciting new tool in its
| infancy.
| [deleted]
| XCSme wrote:
| 4.2 gigabytes???? That's insane, especially considering how
| poorly optimized the models are (with better algorithms and ways
| to understand and categorize the data, this could be easily
| reduced 10x or even 100x).
| losvedir wrote:
| This is very cool. I've been blown away from my dabbling with
| these text-to-image models, but I love the steps here to help it
| generate more what you're envisioning.
|
| I'd love to follow this process to generate several that I have
| in mind to put up on my walls, but I keep running into the
| resolution limitation. You need a pretty high resolution to get a
| crisp image at a poster size. Is there a trick or a setting to
| get the models to output images suitable for posters?
| xena wrote:
| I usually upscale the images with something like real-esrgan-
| vulkan. I've been using that to build up a bank of images. I'm
| considering getting posters made of a few of them, the most
| notable one is one of Richard Stallman and Bill Gates playing
| chess that I'm calling "The Good Future We Never Got".
| zppln wrote:
| I find myself increasingly frustrated by the low resolution of
| the images coming out of these systems. It all feels like a huge
| tease, blocking my brain from deciding whether I should be
| impressed or not. And at other times I find myself not really
| interested in looking closer at all and just keep on scrolling.
| simonw wrote:
| People have been solving this by using up-scaling AIs to
| increase the resolution of their images.
|
| That's actually built in to some of these systems - Google
| Imagen for example generates a 64x64 image and then up-scales
| it to 1024x1024: https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/how-imagen-
| actually-works/
| XCSme wrote:
| Yeah, can be easily combined with super-resolution or by
| generating the image one section at a time.
| [deleted]
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