[HN Gopher] Don't fire your illustrator ___________________________________________________________________ Don't fire your illustrator Author : todsacerdoti Score : 305 points Date : 2023-08-21 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sambleckley.com) (TXT) w3m dump (sambleckley.com) | Waterluvian wrote: | Has there always been this much debate/discussion any time a new | technology disrupts an industry? Or is this a particularly unique | case because it touches on what we perceive much more as | "creative" works? | | When audio recording became a consumer product, was there huge | resistance from live performers? I would imagine so, but I just | don't know much on the subject. | laddershoe wrote: | I can highly recommend an episode of 99% Invisible [1] about | the musician's strike of 1942, which was a fight about | royalties from recorded music, but was in large part actually | about the the loss of livelihood from music recordings. Very | little new music was recorded for over a year, and the | president of the musician's union was pushing for record labels | to pay into a fund that would benefit unemployed musicians in | order to end the strike. I didn't make the connection when I | heard this, but yeah, it does feel analogous to what we're | facing now. | | [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/one-year-the-day- | the-... | Pannoniae wrote: | Actually, it was only instrumental musicians being prohibited | to record. So singers weren't affected and that strike hugely | contributed music shifting from primarily instrumental | (earlier jazz, swing) to vocal-focused (jump blues, rock and | roll and so on...) | | It's interesting because it's something which is around us | every day but most of us don't know about it.:) | raincole wrote: | > huge resistance | | So far I'd consider the resistance from artists against AI | "small" to "practically none". | | If artists go on street and demain copyright law changes then | I'll say it's moderate amount of resistance. Luddites did smash | down machines. | Waterluvian wrote: | > Luddites did smash down machines. | | I feel like I barely knew this and now need to go read up on | that whole era. Thanks! | arvidkahl wrote: | Ive tried letting AI write my articles. It was horrible. I tried | ignoring AI-powered tools (such as grammar checkers, summarizers, | rewriters, speech-to-text apps), and the writing process felt | sluggish. | | The middle ground is what works best for me. I use generative AI | exlusively mid-process, but neither for input (ideas) nor output | (actual drafts.) | | Here's how I write: | | - I source my ideas from contemplation or conversations on social | media. Topics discussed there have at least some pre-validated | relevance - I sit down for ten minutes and dictate my thoughts | into a tool like AudioPen (no affiliation, just a fan) which | summarizes my 10 minutes in 5 or 6 paragraphs. THIS is the AI | step. The tool suggests a few paragraph structures that I cycle | through until I find a good one. - From there, I write my draft, | following that outline. No more AI tools here other than grammar | checking at the end. | | AI is a great writing partner. It's a horrible writer. | Invictus0 wrote: | > Producing a compelling image with generative AI is pretty easy; | maybe one in ten images it generates will make you say, "Wow, | cool!" But producing a specific image with generative AI is | sometimes almost impossible. | | I think this is the meat of the argument and a pretty compelling | point. I have definitely struggled to get mijourney to create | certain images that I had in my head and eventually just gave up. | grncdr wrote: | Completely off-topic, but if the author happens to be here: | | What is the system you are using to justify text? The "hanging" | parenthesis on "(Understand that what I'm about to describe, ..." | caught my eye, and it appears that every _line_ of text has it's | own padding and word spacing to arrange it "just so". I can't | imagine it was done by hand, but I've never seen it before. | Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: | I didn't look at the code but it looks like they are using the | Knuth-Plass algorithm. | zauguin wrote: | The site uses [unjustifiable] together with [Hypher]. | | [unjustifiable]: | https://www.npmjs.com/package/unjustifiable?activeTab=readme | [Hypher]: https://github.com/bramstein/hypher | diiq wrote: | Author here! As noted in another reply, I'm using a custom | justification tool I built almost a decade ago called | unjustifiable. | | The way it goes about it very silly; you can read more about it | at https://sambleckley.com/writing/text-justification.html | choppaface wrote: | I wish the article quantified the amount of SEO and 'irrelevant' | content procured in the wild--- it's a large number but also a | dark art for creators to produce cheaply. The author seems | somewhat content with the idea of using AI to generate garbage | content, but this essay might underestimate the profits of | leveraging existing art to train said AI. It strikes me in the | current Writer's Strike, studios probably have an estimate of how | profitable AI could be and aren't sharing that number. | | The essay focuses mainly on prompt-slot-machine-based generative | AI but there's a large suite of work that uses the same research | to more directly support the artist. Stuff like in-painting, | controlled diffusion, and re-stylizing.. as long as it's free | (compared to more expensive art equipment) it should have a | beneficial impact on artists. | 01100011 wrote: | Post seems very biased towards the now. Stable diffusion et al | are very successful with a certain technique but it is foolish to | think that is a method which will simply be improved | indefinitely. | | Generative "AI" will take many forms. Ultimately it will likely | remove much of the "technique" element to creation, depriving | artists and content owners of income and relevance. | | Will this happen overnight? No. I suspect over the next, say, | decade, AI will be a beneficial tool more than a threat. | | At some point, I expect generative AI to become multi- | sensory(sight, sound, touch). Such systems will work from | physical models of subjects/environments to produce novel and | accurate representations based on rich descriptions and deep | contextual awareness of culture. These systems will not think in | pixels but in objects and relationships which are then simulated, | rendered and filtered to match the desires of the users. | | I do applaud efforts of the writers and actors to protect | themselves from competition but I believe it will ultimately be | in vain. It will be interesting to watch the legal developments | in this space. It may be necessary for future generative systems | to provide an audit trail showing how they gained an | understanding of the world to prove no unauthorized training was | performed. This merely raises the bar slightly and does not | prevent future generative systems from deriving important | relationships via other means, such as 'clean room', high-level | descriptions being given(perhaps by other automated processes). | | For example, while it may be illegal to train an AI to reproduce | Harrison Ford using his copyrighted works or even images captured | in a public space, I can reduce Harrison Ford to a set of | characteristics which can be passed to a generative system to | produce something indistinguishable from the real Harrison Ford. | If I am able to document this procedure I see few ways for the | legal system to prevent it but then again I am no expert in this | area. | | For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of current "AI". I have found | LLMs to be particularly unreliable and mostly useless. I also | find most "AI" generated art to be either boring, inaccurate, or | in some way not compelling. That said, I think the trend is | becoming clearer. | [deleted] | justrealist wrote: | These posts are all written with this insane premise that the | moment in time the post was published, will continue to be the | status quo for more than a couple months. | | > If you've ever used a generative system, I can pretty much | guarantee that you spent an embarrassing amount of time making | tiny adjustments to your prompt and retrying. Producing a | compelling image with generative AI is pretty easy; maybe one in | ten images it generates will make you say, "Wow, cool!" But | producing a specific image with generative AI is sometimes almost | impossible. | | Who could possibly think this will be the case six months from | now? I mean, maybe some of the the content and warnings here is | fleetingly accurate, but it's truly not a hill to die on. You | could fire your illustrator and be inconvenienced for a couple | months until the next stablediffusion update. It's a disservice | to illustrators to make them feel safe. | iudqnolq wrote: | Why are AI people always trying to convince me to do something | now based on an argument that it will work later? Regardless of | whether you're right a working model six months from now is not | a working model now. Wouldn't your hypothetical person be much | better off firing their illustrator in six months? | jononor wrote: | Of course. But what should the illustrator do today? | Considering that there might be a higher risk of getting | fired in N months/years from now. Probably refine their | business skills. Maybe also get familiar with the | capabilities/weaknesses of the latest tools, and how they can | use them to be more competitive than before? | sillysaurusx wrote: | Six months isn't a long time. People were saying ChatGPT would | be replicated within that time frame (it wasn't). | | I'd bet more along the lines of 1 year. As for six months, | tweaky prompts might be here to stay. | probably_wrong wrote: | I think firing your illustrator to replace them with Midjourney | is like firing your developers and replacing them with Copilot. | You still need someone to do the job, but now you got rid of | the person who knew whether the result is actually good. We | might as well get rid of photographers and illustrate our news | with cell phone pictures while we're at it. | | If a company needs to generate illustrations at a big enough | pace to require an employee they'd only be replacing their | illustrator with a worse one. We all know what happens to GUIs | when programmers develop them, so why would this case be any | different? | jononor wrote: | > We might as well get rid of photographers and illustrate | our news with cell phone pictures while we're at it. | | Wait... Hasn't this already happened? | Professional/specialized press photography seems way down | compared to pre-smartphone era? Now a journalist/reporter is | expected to do a passable photo job on their own. Or a random | member of the public | hospitalJail wrote: | HN users are so strange with their AI denialism. | | You have total doomers aware of the AI potential. Horrified at | the long term consequences of these LLMs. Then on the other | side you have users saying "Its just another crypto bubble", | and when pressed, they admit that they never used it. | | There is just such a vocal population here that says 'Well its | not always 100% perfect, so its useless", and they are burying | their head in the sand that companies are already using the | OpenAI API to reduce the cost of business. | | I genuinely don't understand these people. They don't use the | technology and they deny how useful it is. There is news and | real world examples of its usefulness. I can only imagine these | people manage (money) terribly. | ska wrote: | History tells us that both the doomers and naysayers are | probably wrong. | | It seems to be pretty solidly demonstrated now to have some | limited efficacy across a broad range of areas today, and is | very effective in some niches (like the articles mention of | producing SEO fodder cheaply). | | Growth from that state though? The only thing you can bank on | is that nobody really knows. | iudqnolq wrote: | I don't understand people who think an imperfect product | provides linearly less value when it obviously provides | exponentially less in most use cases. | | If ChatGPT can replace a team of software engineers why | didn't you replace that team with four times as many college | interns years ago? Because you can't combine people capable | of doing easy coding and get someone who can do moderately | hard things. | IAmGraydon wrote: | This is more or less my opinion as well. This is a list of | current weaknesses of generative AI. No, right now I cannot | replace my graphic designers. I bet I can in a few years, | though. | seabass-labrax wrote: | > It's a disservice to illustrators to make them feel safe. | | It is also a disservice to encourage managers to make their | illustrators redundant when we don't yet _know_ that, in six | months, AI image generators will equal a human illustrator in | being able to create adequate pictures. This kind of article | has an important role, namely that of countering hype (often | based on PR from machine learning companies). That hype is why | more ignorant people think that AI can _already_ replace crowds | of employees, when the reality is more nuanced. | jefftk wrote: | I'd bet on this being true six months from now. DALL-E 2 came | out in 2021-01 (19mo ago) and Midjourney in 2022-07 (13mo ago). | While the quality of images has improved a lot, if you have | something specific and moderately complex in mind it's still | very hard to get there just from a textual prompt. | raincole wrote: | But the tech did improve a lot in the past year. | | One year ago we had textual inversion. Now we have LoRA and | control net. I know it might not be a scientific | breakthrough, but in practice it's day and night. | jefftk wrote: | I'd be happy to bet that the tech will continue to improve. | But "producing a specific image with generative AI is | sometimes almost impossible" seems very likely to still be | true in February 2024. | raincole wrote: | Depending on your definition of "specific". | | Of course an AI can not produce an image that matches | what's on your mind 100%. Because by definition it will | require you to provide all the information, a.k.a. you | need to make the image by yourself first. | | But I really don't think illustrators are as safe as the | article implies. Yes, the jobs won't disappear overnight, | but are there that much demands for illustration to | support a future where every illustrator becomes 10x more | productive than before? | | (I've done illustration commercially before, while it's | not my main source of income and I'm junior level at | best.) | jefftk wrote: | Want to try to turn this into something concrete enough | that we can bet on? | satvikpendem wrote: | I wonder why people take random internet bets, I've seen | this on Twitter as well from some prominent people in the | tech world, who just like betting on outcomes I guess. I | saw it most recently with the LK-99 "is it a real room | temp superconductor or not?" bets. | icegreentea2 wrote: | I think often someone tries to frame things into bets to | pierce the layers of instinctual contrarianism and "have | strong opinions weakly held" that often pervades internet | discussion. | | More charitably, reframing into a bet gives a relatively | neutral opportunity of re-stating the discussion/argument | to more clearly identify areas of agreement/disagreement | (since a clear definition of the disagreement is crucial | for forming a bet). | raincole wrote: | I was kinda tempted, but I don't think there is such a | good metric to measure it. (Since the job market is | heavily influenced by interest rate etc... and if I were | confident at predicting macro economics I would just bet | on stock) | jefftk wrote: | What if we picked 10 prompts that it seems like an AI | should be able to depict well, but it can't yet? And then | iff the best AI tool in February can do the majority of | them you win? | raincole wrote: | I'll bet against it tho. I don't actually believe pure | text-prompt-to-image will improve much (not in a few | months at least). I just believe there will be more non- | text tools to guide AI, like LoRA and control net, and | they will be more accessible. | | Control net kinda did what you said but in a different | timeframe: it was quite difficult to tell AI to generate | a person "sitting with their legs cross". Today, it's | relatively easy to do this with control net, but still | hard with text prompt only. | | Edit: and the sibling comment made me question myself why | I would ever take a random bet on the internet. | jefftk wrote: | We started this thread with: | | _sambleckley > producing a specific image with | generative AI is sometimes almost impossible_ | | _justrealist > Who could possibly think this will be the | case six months from now?_ | | _me > I'd bet on this being true six months from now_ | | I thought you disagreed with me on this, but it sounds | like maybe not? | raincole wrote: | I was just stating the improvement on SD we've seen since | DELL-E 2 and Midjourney came out wasn't just about | "quality of image", but also about "have something | specific and moderately complex in mind". Thus I | mentioned textual inversion vs LoRA/ControlNet. | GaggiX wrote: | Dalle 2 was out April 2022. | | I don't think it will be true six months from now. OpenAI has | been red teaming a new version for months that goes way | beyond anything we've seen today. You can see some leaks from | this video: https://youtu.be/koR1_JBe2j0 | gwern wrote: | I don't know if that's 'way beyond'. Those samples look | similar to Imagen and Parti in terms of quality and | following complicated text prompts. (Look at the | PartiPrompts for the absurd prompts Parti can execute | accurately.) | | I'm glad to see OA does have a successor for DALL-E 2, | though: the service seems to have somehow gotten _worse_ | since release. | GaggiX wrote: | I shouldn't have said "goes way beyond anything we've | seen today", but probably it goes way beyond anything we | will be able to try in this 6 months period. Parti 20B is | really good at language understanding, more meh Imagen. | | >the service seems to have somehow gotten worse since | release. | | Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that they probably | lowered the number of steps or used a similar strategy to | reduce the computation. | jefftk wrote: | _> Dalle 2 was out April 2022_ | | Sorry, thanks! I accidentally gave the date for the first | DALL-E. | | _> OpenAI has been red teaming a new version for months | that goes way beyond anything we 've seen today._ | | Any sign that it's better at understanding complex textual | prompts, and not just at making high-quality images? | GaggiX wrote: | >Any sign that it's better at understanding complex | textual prompts, and not just at making high-quality | images? | | The video I have linked. | iudqnolq wrote: | But in general the better something is the harder it is to | improve. | | From an outsiders' perspective it looks like we've had a | series of achievements where AI worked impressively well | considering it isn't a human. But afterwards we got an | incremental grind that never got close to an AI that's just | good, period. | | I'm very impressed people got self-driving car demos working. | I couldn't do that. But year after year self-driving cars | remained a demo, albeit an incrementally improving one. | jefftk wrote: | _> year after year self-driving cars remained a demo, | albeit an incrementally improving one_ | | You can get a ride in Phoenix today. Order a Waymo from | your phone, it shows up with no driver. | https://waymo.com/waymo-one-phoenix/ | | The number of cities is still small, but it's not a demo | anymore. | iudqnolq wrote: | It's limited to a small number of cities with optimal | conditions and every ride has a human supervising. | They're still spending R&D, rather than making a profit. | That's a demo. | gedy wrote: | > While the quality of images has improved a lot, if you have | something specific and moderately complex in mind it's still | very hard to get there just from a textual prompt. | | I think this gets to an important point. If whoever is paying | the bills has something very specific in mind, they won't be | happy with AI (or frankly many artists) at this point. But as | a creative interpretation of something more general, it's | actually really good, and I think with many low-importance | works like the author describes as "furniture" - we really | don't need to be that exact. | tasogare wrote: | [dead] | samsartor wrote: | Overall this post is a pretty fair take, but I'm not sure | intuitive the "latent space" explanation is. I work with | diffusion models full time and really appreciate how easy they | are to explain at an introductory level (assuming you don't get | distracted by the mathematical derivations). But I don't feel | like I've seen that many good explanations online. I made my own | attempt in a presentation last year | (https://youtu.be/c-eIa8QuB24?t=86) but haven't had time to clean | it up. I keep hoping I'll see a better series from a real | communicator pop up in my feed but I'm not sure this is it. | catgary wrote: | Honestly, as a mathematician-turned-ml-researcher, Song and | Ermon's mathematical derivations based on SDEs are what sold me | on diffusion/score-based generative models. This | (https://youtu.be/wMmqCMwuM2Q?si=fvujznGDHjKH2yUi) is probably | the best ML seminar talk I've ever seen. | samsartor wrote: | Oh definitely. I think that 2021 paper was what sold me as | well! But I don't think it is very approachable to non- | technical audiences, and there are a number of other was to | interpret diffusion models which are pretty intuitive. That | is also why I like the alpha-(de)blending paper from this | year. | csours wrote: | I don't want any more Disney live-action remakes, but I'd like to | see more variety in art styles, like the latest animated | Spiderman and Ninja Turtles movies, which I understand are made | with the assistance of generative models. | duckmasterflexy wrote: | I have been using stable diffusion for my web designs and it's | been working great for me but I always build my figma designs | separately. I use the generated designs as a palette where I | sample from. It's a glorified Behance or Pinterest vision board. | Chat GPT is similar with code as it's a glorified stack overflow | where I get inspiration or quick fixes. The AI tools haven't as | of yet been so cohesive enough to replace the aggregator of these | pieces of inspiration. Being classical trained in not CS and | design will always be needed to filter AI suggestions. AI will | eventually get proficient enough to reach that stage, but as it | is now, it's not even close. | kwertyops wrote: | I wonder if you could elaborate on how you use ChatGPT to | generate web designs? I'm about to teach a course on web | technologies and I want to integrate ChatGPT into the | curriculum. | seeknotfind wrote: | Yeah, you can create stuff, but the work to do editorial review | or clean up is still huge. | asutekku wrote: | And editioral review would not be huge work on generative art? | seeknotfind wrote: | It's about the details. You need to iterate a lot or fix | pieces to get a cohesive whole. | aaroninsf wrote: | Evergreen: | | Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that | contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved | upon. | | Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to | preclude some feature from future realization is false. | | As the Magic Eightball says, ask again later. | nottorp wrote: | > Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that | contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved | upon. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter | | I wonder why... | jononor wrote: | What are you saying? That those that claim critical | improvements won't happen are well justified? Or that they | are not and just stuck in the 90ies? Or that a hype cycle | will happen, but massive impact on trades/jobs will still be | had? Or something else? | nottorp wrote: | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat | it. | jononor wrote: | That does not clarify your claim about what will happen | much. Are you predicting a 20 year pause in AI RnD | funding? When will it start? | yieldcrv wrote: | Very pragmatic view from Sam, he is missing that the "gacha" | nature will go away | | People will prime their image generation with a specific series | of image and combine them with new prompts, packages will be made | to prime their AI and then they'll go from there | dragonwriter wrote: | > People will prime their image generation with a specific | series of image and combine them with new prompts, packages | will be made to prime their AI and then they'll go from there | | Whether its finetuning checkpoints, creating | LoRa/Hypernetworks/TIs, etc., that's already the status quo. | joshstrange wrote: | > Finally, an opinion popular with no one: Commercial | illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn | to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace | of work. | | > This doesn't mean illustrators will stop drawing and become | prompt engineers. That will waste an immense amount of training | and gain very little. Instead, I foresee illustrators | concentrating even more on capturing the core features of an | image, letting generative AI fill in details, and then correcting | those details as necessary. | | I'm not sure why they think this is unpopular with no one. This | seems like the logical path forward. In the same way that CoPilot | isn't going to replace me but it's makes certain boilerplate much | less painful and avoids the "blank page"/"writers lock" that can | happen when I go to write a function sometimes. It's just nicer | to start from something then modify it until I have what I need | (even if I end up replacing 80-99% of it). | | In the same way I imagine it would be nice for an artist to see a | couple of examples of what their line drawing could be which will | spark some creativity and then they can do what they want. | simonw wrote: | Right, that opinion is popular with me: I love the idea that | commercial illustrators can add generative AI to their toolbox. | Those are the illustrators I most want to work with: people who | can produce the best possible images using the whole suite of | tools available to them. | Animats wrote: | If your idea of illustration is some irrelevant piece of clip | art, it hardly matters. If the illustration actually illustrates | the content, you probably can't generate it with current AI | anyway. | thelazyone wrote: | Well put. Big fan of the "Commercial illustrators will keep their | jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a part of their | workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" part. | | I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what | Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game | manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a | "proper" illustrator because the MDJ images lack character, but | it's also true that in a few months from now this might change: | I'll stick with the illustrator to have more consistency in the | images, but probably the AI could do a fancier job there. | | Besides, the "things will change in 2 months" point is a good | one, but it's been used since a year and a half and things | haven't changed yet. Sure, the quality of the produced images | improved, but not in a qualitative scale. | | Side note: the link civitai to leads to | https://sambleckley.com/writing/civitai.com/images which is a | dead link. | rcarr wrote: | > I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from | what Generative AI is doing) | | Why not train your own personal AI on your artwork? Corridor | Digital did this in the latest attempt to automatise animation, | they hired an illustrator to create an animation style for | them, then trained the AI on their drawings. | | Link: https://youtu.be/FQ6z90MuURM?t=329 | toasted-subs wrote: | Seems kind of shady imo. I know businesses is businesses but | that's seems a bit too mean for my tastes. | rahkiin wrote: | This could have been all with consent and adjusted | payments. AI does not just replace an artist, it can also | speed up the work tremendously. It gives new possibilities | using volume. | rcxdude wrote: | Ethics of the use of generative AI in the first place | aside, I'm pretty sure the illustrator was aware of what | they were intending to do with their work (they even were | interviewed about it in the behind the scenes video) | __loam wrote: | I view this in the same way I view the use of an actor's | voice for ai generations. Even if the person knows what | you're doing with their data, it still feels really | scummy and unethical. The idea that we can sample someone | else's labor and be able to own that and generate shit | from it in perpetuity (probably without paying them) | feels very alienating. | rcxdude wrote: | Like being employed to write some code which then is | owned by someone else? | Bjartr wrote: | The illustrator was aware their work was going to be used | in that way. | breischl wrote: | I'm not in illustration, but isn't it already common to | hire someone to create a "style book" of what it should | look like, and then have other illustrators follow that? | eg, I recall animated shows working that way. | | Doesn't seem so incredibly different from that. | throwuxiytayq wrote: | Care to expand? I have no idea what you're on about. | woolion wrote: | I've actually done it [0], I'd like to have an AI assistant | that I could directly use the results from, and the results | were really terrible, mostly laughably terrible. I think it | was too far from what the models handled correctly at the | time, and given that issue it was not enough training images. | Although I had also tried with a model that was better at | handling stylised 2D. I'd like it to work, but I don't think | it's viable for most people. | | [0] https://woolion.art/2022/11/16/SDDB.html | atleastoptimal wrote: | The question is, since commercial illustrators can be more | efficient using AI, will the total number of jobs in the space | lower, or will the expectation for commercial illustration | increase, thus increasing the workload and keeping the number | of jobs the same. | satvikpendem wrote: | In all of human history, work has always increased. This is | akin to Parkinson's Law, where work expands to fill the time | (and now resources) available. | LordDragonfang wrote: | In most of human history, the type of jobs available were | relatively stable century to century; today, the types of | jobs aren't even stable decade to decade. | | The automation of physical labor let us turn to | intellectual labor and creative labor. The coming | automation of intellectual and creative labor is _not like_ | the previous automations of physical labor, because it | leaves human jobs _no where else to turn to._ | | CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video[1,2] covered this | almost a decade ago: | | > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about | technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles | will make horses unnecessary. | | > The other reminds him that everything so far has made | their lives easier -- remember all that farm work? Remember | running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding | into battle? All terrible. These city jobs are pretty cushy | -- and with so many humans in the cities there are more | jobs for horses than ever. | | > Even if this car thingy takes off you might say, there | will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine. | | > But you, dear viewer, from beyond 2000 know what happened | -- there are still working horses, but nothing like before. | The horse population peaked in 1915 -- from that point on | it was nothing but down. | | > There isn't a rule of economics that says better | technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds | shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses | for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right. | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [2] | (transcript) https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not- | apply | bsder wrote: | > In all of human history, work has always increased. | | _Production_ has increased. It 's not clear that _work_ | has increased. | | Mills and factories used to employ people by the hundreds | of thousands and maintain people in a blue-collar standard | of living. Now, no manufacturer even exists in the top 25 | employers in the US--it's all service industry. | | The vast majority of the decendants of the people working | those manufacturing jobs are _not_ working in better jobs | than those were. | atleastoptimal wrote: | Work has always increased, but work in a specific | profession doesn't necessarily increase. There are | certainly fewer phone switchboard operators today than | there were 100 years ago. | satvikpendem wrote: | Indeed, but that just means that humans will have to find | new jobs, not that jobs will become obsolete. How well | they will find new jobs, though, is another story, based | on socio-politico-economic conditions of the country they | reside in. | singlow wrote: | I don't disagree, but concerning particular trades this is | not true. In the mid-19th century there were more than | seven thousand blacksmith shops in the US, which employed | over fifteen thousand people, but today there are fewer | than one thousand professional blacksmiths. Many of the | products they produced either have lower demand or are | produced by other means. If you consider the entire | metalworking industry, we have many more total workers, but | very few have the skills of a blacksmith. | | The number of people who do the current work of an | illustrator might go down eventually due to AI, but there | will likely be more total people employed in the process of | producing illustrations. It is just likely that fewer of | them will have the skills that today's illustrators need, | and also likely that fewer of them will command | extraordinary wages. Many of the jobs that replace it will | likely be closer to the median wage than today. | | Also we will eventually turn the corner and start having | population decline. For the US this might be just a few | decades away. And some time after that, work would | eventually decrease. | addcommitpush wrote: | This is completely false; working hours per worker have | declined after the Industrial Revolution [0]. | | [0] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#are-we- | working-more... | satvikpendem wrote: | That does not say anything about how much work exists in | aggregate. The human population has gone up, so it can be | simultaneously be true that the amount of work being done | increases even as each worker works fewer hours. As well, | this also says nothing about the quality of work, as GDP | is going up, so it can also be simultaneously true that | the quality of work increases even as each worker works | fewer hours. | pizzaknife wrote: | Sam, your character arc reads similar to my own. Thanks for | putting yourself and your experience (and emotion) into this | write up. It gives me peace of mind to know others share both the | haphazard education -> career lineage and the existential | concerns which maybe are part and parcel with said lineage. FWIW, | I was a budding pen and ink illustrator when "desktop publishing" | was tipping past "expensive novelty." Love the write up - thank | you again, sincerely. | IKantRead wrote: | AI will only replace the work of creatives who have _already_ | turned themselves into AIs long ago. | | There are plenty of writers and illustrators out there who have | trained themselves to churn out reproducible garbage over the | years in order to fulfill the demands of content marketing. These | jobs will be replaced by AI soon, but by creating content from a | formula they've already be using a crude form of AI. | | I really love Stable Diffusion, but, as a means of creating art | (including the most common forms of popular art), it can only | supplement existing work not replace it. I pay for plenty of real | art in my home and the best works on my walls could never be | replicated by an AI because what makes them beautiful is | precisely the human touches that I have yet to see AI generate | (and suspect it can't). Latent Diffusion Models also have a | pretty poor imagination. | | At the same time Stable Diffusion has gotten me thinking about | creative projects I could undertake that would have been | impossible years ago. But it's obvious that all of these projects | will take plenty of work to create, and SD will ultimately just | be another tool in the creative process. | | I vividly remember when photoshop started to gain major | acceptance and there was a similar anti-photoshop sentiment among | "real" designers and artists. What's funny is how many webcomic | authors I see critiquing AI art, when I remember quite well pen | and ink comic artist similarly scoffing at web artists that used | digital tools to create their work. | | Hopefully we'll see SD and similar tools accepted as more tools | to create cool art, rather than a misplaced focus of peoples | career anxiety. | ilaksh wrote: | What are the artist names and descriptions of the art? Would | you care to share a few? I am curious as to whether your claim | that they can't be reproduced by an SD model can be shown. | orbital-decay wrote: | Posts like that nearly always assume the text-to-image and | "prompt engineering" being used, usually due to the lack of | experience with those models. This is categorically _not_ the way | to do it outside of having fun. The way it 's done for | predictability and control looks much more like "draw the rest of | the owl, in a manner similar to my other hand-drawn owl" combined | with photobashing and manual fixing/compositing. It's a hybrid | area similar to 3D CGI that requires both artistic and technical | skills if you want to create something non-boring. | | This has nothing to do with the model's poor understanding of | natural language, and will not change until we have something | that could reasonably pass for AGI, and likely not even then. | Your text prompts simply don't have enough semantic capacity. | jefftk wrote: | You might be interested in the "Commercial illustrators will | keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a | part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" | section of the article, which gets into this more. | orbital-decay wrote: | You're right! I've stumbled upon the prompt engineering part | and rolled my eyes, which was clearly too soon. | florbo wrote: | The post actually goes into a bit of detail on that process. | yieldcrv wrote: | This was essentially my post | | Its like you take your AI to school, or do a Matrix-style data | upload into your AI so its up to speed on a new concept | | Professionals will learn how to do that, the market will cater | to people that want to do that | danenania wrote: | "This has nothing to do with the model's poor understanding of | natural language, and will not change until we have something | that could reasonably pass for AGI, and likely not even then. | Your text prompts simply don't have enough semantic capacity." | | I don't think it's going to take AGI to get to this point. It's | 'just' going to take a top-tier model adding robust multi-modal | input imho. A detailed prompt plus a bunch of examples of the | style you're looking for seems like it would be enough. | | That's not to say it isn't really hard, but it doesn't seem | like it requires fundamental innovations to do this. The | building blocks that are needed already exist. | orbital-decay wrote: | There are two problems with this: a) natural language is | inherently poor at giving artistic directions compared to | higher-order ways like sketching and references, even if you | got a human on the other end of the wire, and b) to create | something conceptually appealing/novel, the model has to have | much better conceptualizing ability than is currently | possible with the best LLMs, and those already need some | mighty hardware to run. Besides, tweaking the prompt will | probably never be stable, partly due to the reasons outlined | in the OP; although you could optimize for that, I guess. | | That said, better understanding is always welcome. DeepFloyd | IF tried to pair a full-fledged transformer with a diffusion | part (albeit with only 11B parameters). It improved the | understanding of complex prompts like "koi fish doing a | handstand on a skateboard", but also pushed the hardware | requirements way up, and haven't solved the fundamental | issues above. | danenania wrote: | I think you're right about the current limitations, but | imagine a trillion or ten trillion parameter model trained | and RLHF'd for this specific use case. It may take a year | or two, but I see no reason to think it isn't coming. | | Yes, hardware requirements will be steep, but it will still | be cheap compared to equivalent human illustrators. And | compute costs will go down in the long run. | jwells89 wrote: | The biggest problem I see with LLM-generated imagery is a | near total inability to get details right, which makes | perfect sense when one considers how they work. | | LLMs pick out patterns in the data they're trained on and | then regurgitates them. This works great for broad strokes, | because those have relatively little variance between | training pieces and have distinct visual signatures that act | as anchors. | | Details on the other hand differ _dramatically_ between | pieces and have no such consistent visual anchor. Take limbs | for example, which are notoriously problematic for LLMs: | there are so many different ways that arms, legs, and | especially hands and fingers can look between their | innumerable possible articulations, positions relative to the | rest of the body, clothing, objects obscuring them, etc etc | and the LLM, not actually _understanding_ the subject matter, | is predictably terrible at drawing the connections between | all of these disparate states and struggles to draw them | without human guidance. | | You see this effect in other fine details, too. Jewelry, | chain-link fences, fishing nets, chainmail, lace, etc are all | near-guaranteed disasters for these things. | orbital-decay wrote: | It's mostly a problem of resolution, model size, and | dataset quality, which can be mitigated with compositing. | Larger models don't have problems with hands, and if they | do, it can be solved by higher-order guidance (e.g. | controlnets) and doing multiple supersampled passes on | regions to avoid to fit too much detail in one generation. | Even SD 1.5 (a notoriously tiny model) issues with faces | and hands can be solved with multiple passes, which is what | everyone does. | thebooktocome wrote: | Author conflates legal and ethical options for preventing | copyrighted work from being used to train ML image generators. | | There's nothing _legally_ inconsistent about passing a law | saying, e.g., "ML training is not fair use". Doing so will not | even reduce existing fair use rights being exercised by actual | people. | | The author's argument is that doing so is philosophically | analogous to human creative processes, but those are--and I can't | underline this enough--human. And the law is not (and cannot be, | should not be?) consistent in such a way. | diiq wrote: | I absolutely agree that an arbitrary line can be drawn; I _don | 't_ see that that line can be clear and bright enough that | forms the kind of precedence that can be relied upon by folks | who don't have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court. | | But would be overjoyed to be proven wrong. | thebooktocome wrote: | Can you give an example of a "clear and bright" line in | copyright law that does protect "folks who don't have the | money to fight an uncertain battle in court"? | | For context, I'm in the process of translating a work that I | know for a fact is in the public domain (sole author died 90+ | years ago) and I've still got legal questions that I'm going | to have to hire a lawyer to solve. | msla wrote: | > There's nothing legally inconsistent about passing a law | saying, e.g., "ML training is not fair use". | | Is it still fair use to take inspiration from another artist's | work? How can the courts necessarily tell if the art was made | using AI or if it's just someone stealing another artist's | style? Theft of style isn't currently recognized under the law, | but it could be. | thebooktocome wrote: | 1. Yes. Always has been, within the ambiguous limits of fair | use. | | 2. Discovery. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_educa | tion/resource... | | Some variants of "theft of style" are recognized by some | courts already, please see the legal literature on music | copyright and the recent 7-2 SCOTUS decision on Warhol's | Prince series. | Jevon23 wrote: | People in the US forget that passing new laws is even an option | because Congress is dysfunctional. | satvikpendem wrote: | > _Commercial illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly | need to learn to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a | higher pace of work._ | | This is exactly what I've found to be the case too. People | outside of this AI media generation community still think it's | entering some text and getting some output. In reality, there are | entire workflows constructed to get the exact type of image one | wants. | | Look at: | https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/14ye2eg/co... | | The second image is the output image, but the first is even more | interesting. It is a node based interface more commonly seen in | game development tools like Unreal Engine which has a similar | interface [0]. It is akin to hooking up APIs together to get the | resultant image. I see the future of image generation being more | akin to backend programming than actually drawing anything, which | is to be expected as the actual drawing part is getting automated | while the creativity now rests in the workflow itself (at least | until we automate the workflow part too, but that's a far ways | off as computers can't read minds yet to even know what the user | wants). | | [0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/nodes-in-unreal- | engi... | larodi wrote: | I've been using MJ and dalle to create actually used print | content for some posters. This process of ai assisted illustrator | work is very fast. More than 7 works so far, and I'm not a | designer, just know basic principles . | canvascritic wrote: | My partner and I run a handful of small internet side businesses. | One of our content-driven D2C businesses heavily relied on | bespoke illustrations for our display ad creatives. we found that | our ctr was decent, pretty average, but the CPC was killing us | and ROAS really sucked. | | Several months ago we decided to A/B test SD against our usual | illustrators. In our case the results were pretty dramatic, we | actually found that the ctr shot up by almost 20% and cvr showed | a consistent uptick. I don't agree with the blog post's claim | that AI generated images work best in businesses where the | content doesn't actually matter; this particular venture is a | fantastic counter example. In our case the AI-generated images | seemed to resonate _more_ with our target audience, as we were | able to achieve much more granular personalization at lower cost | than before. not only did it reduce the CPA significantly, but | the tight control we had over creative variations meant we could | optimize in realtime based on audience segmentation. | | Not to mention that our time-to-market for launching new | campaigns went down by half. no more back-and-forths over design | nuances, missed deadlines, or creative blocks. | | And I do feel a bit mixed about the diminishing role of human | touch in creative processes. But from a purely growth-hacking | POV, this was a gamechanger, and we have the numbers to prove it. | | Overall I think this is a net win, especially because I don't | think this needs to be the end of the road for human | illustrators, but this will force them to adapt and bring more | sensitivity to the needs of their clients. It makes no sense for | even a content business to be subject to so much friction in the | procurement of creatives, and this forces more consideration to | our needs | | Anywho there's efficiency, and then there's soul. Hats off to the | robots for (mostly) nailing the former, and sometimes surprising | with the latter. | thwarted wrote: | _no more back-and-forths over design nuances, missed deadlines, | or creative blocks._ | | This evoked, for me, the "can I get the icon on cornflower | blue" scene in Fight Club. | | How much of this reduction in back-and-forth is influenced by | the immediate/interactive response (dealing with fewer humans) | and how much is due to a level of trust-of/delegation-to the | machine? "A machine generated this icon based on my | description, there's no need for me to question its choice of | colors." -- really the classic problem of considering machines | as infallible and more expert than humans. | | It's probably some of both. | satvikpendem wrote: | What is your type of business and what kinds of images did you | generate? Curious as I was thinking of doing something similar | for mine. | thebooktocome wrote: | > Overall I think this is a net win, especially because I don't | think this needs to be the end of the road for human | illustrators, but this will force them to adapt and bring more | sensitivity to the needs of their clients. | | The advantages of AI that you crow over simply can't be met by | any human professional artist. A human can't do hundreds of | revisions profitably. There's increased "sensitivity" and then | there's needing to read the client's mind. | | If you think this isn't a death knell for human illustrators in | this particular market, you're deluding yourself. | jononor wrote: | A professional artist that is proficient in the latest | generative image models can increase their ability to attend | to client needs. | thebooktocome wrote: | The client "needs" in question here are low cost overall, | low marginal cost for each revision, and a totally- | interactive "do what I mean" interface. | | Shoving a human artist in the middle is a liability on each | front. | jononor wrote: | Your definition of the needs does not have any | requirements on the fitness of the output, nor on time | spent on customer side. That does not seem realistic. | [deleted] | chefandy wrote: | I think your usage of "matter" and theirs is different. It's | furniture. Furniture "matters" in a restaurant and having the | wrong furniture can hurt your business-- but compared to the | food, it's essentially inconsequential. | | There's a spectrum of how much furniture matters in any given | place ranging from very short stay waiting areas to architect's | offices, and commercial art is no different. If that image was | truly inconsequential, you wouldn't need one there. Non- | informational graphics on most non-professionally designed | power point decks likely matter less. I'd say there's about a | zero percent chance of a two page spread opening a feature | article in a magazine being ai-generated unless it's an article | about ai-generated images, and even then, it probably took | professionals longer to massage it into shape than all of the | rest of them. Specificity and per-pixel control is just so | important in professional graphics workflows and despite what a | huge stack of people who aren't professional designers will | tell you, they are simply the wrong tool for the job. It's | fundamentally the wrong interface. Maybe what Adobe or another | player who knows what the industry needs will nail it, but it | won't look like Midjourney-- that's for sure. | raincole wrote: | I'm more interested in how this "cross attention" part works. | | Being able to combine two different kinds of AI sounds too good | to be true. It sounds like AGI. Why does it work for SD? Why | aren't we trying to combine more AIs to create a super AI? Or | we're already doing this? | samsartor wrote: | Cross attention is not really a way to "combine multiple AI | models" but there are many ways to do that, and actually | diffusion models are really good at being combined with stuff. | Especially thanks to tricks like score distillation (see | dreamfusion3d.github.io). But it isn't anything like AGI | because the AI is not inventing the combinations itself, and | even if you could, there is no clear way to make it self- | directed. These are still processes that require lots of | programmers being very clever. | | Edit: typo | easyThrowaway wrote: | Another opinion popular with no one: AI will have on artists the | same impact that Spotify had on the music industry that is, it | will kill any revenue flow for anyone outside of the publishers | and big artists/players. | | Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical | distribution - Worse than piracy, which was inevitable too at the | time, but at least you didn't have to pay your lawyers to | renegotiate with your label on top of NOT getting any money. | | Adobe, OpenAI, whatever: they want artists to draw for them for | peanuts to train their model, sign a waiver saying "I'm ok not | getting any money from any AI art made from this", and then | resell the output for $$$ on something like Splice[1], at the | same time overtraining such models in ways that make extremely | obvious whose artist made them in first place. | | At the end of the day the model itself is going to be basically | irrelevant, while knowing whose works were actually used to train | it being the truly differentiating feature. | | But you know, "the AI did this picture, so we don't have to pay | you." | | [1] https://splice.com/features/sounds | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: | The music industry has always had a long tail. Its very much a | go big or go home industry. Do you have any data around revenue | change for small artists before and after spotify? | easyThrowaway wrote: | Sorry, no hard data. Mostly the perception of the industry at | the time. Lots of tales of people quitting, moving, or going | on "indefinite hiatus". | | TBH "Fly or Die" was way more common on the US side of the | industry. And even in the USA by the late '90s to the end of | the 2010 it was somewhat doable if you were skilled enough to | make a living solo (we're talking 60-80K/year max) as a | "jobber" opening for bigger acts on local venues. | | Like, the entire NYC indie scene got a start from this | premise. If you get a chance, give a look to "Meet Me in the | Bathroom"[1], which is a documentary specifically of this | timeframe. | | [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n71c1Szjv08&themeRefresh=1 | deskamess wrote: | > "the AI did this picture, so we don't have to pay you." | | If the court rulings hold and AI works cannot be copyrighted | then us end users do not have to pay for it either... but that | seems like a race to the bottom. Like the end of a craft. Why | would anyone create art if it has no/minimal downstream value? | | Artists need to band together in some sort of union or not | agree to do art with that AI clause or perhaps only do art with | a no-AI use clause. And have an allowed AI-clause that is | prohibitively expensive (like in the multi hundred millions per | piece). That way 'accidents that happen' have a prescribed | recovery amount plus other requirements like pulling the | generated artwork. "Hey, we understand it may have been | accidental, but here is the bill." | staunton wrote: | It's not the end of a craft, it just means that the prestige | of "made by human" will increase even more and _be pushed by | by companies_ as a means of making money through copyright. | That means that the few artists at the top will be rich while | the niche between "art" and "craft" disappears. Professions | involving visual art become like the music business. | biogene wrote: | Whenever there are implications to people's lively hood, its | always a serious matter - but I hope people are able to | transition to other roles. | | I think Gen AI will commoditize the mundane and "typical", and | heavily push people into creating something extraordinarily | unique. I think there is the same pressure even without AI, | when as a creator you have to standout amongst the sea of | people vying for people's attention. | | I believe GenAI can be useful in a way too. For e.g. If I'm an | artist looking for inspiration, I can have a GenAI tool create | some "random" works that I can get inspired from. | karaterobot wrote: | No offense, I don't think this is an unpopular opinion. The | comparison to Spotify is apt though. | bandrami wrote: | One thing that will really matter is that the output of AI | cannot be copyrighted. If producers really go all-in on | generation we're going to rapidly see a situation where huge | amounts of material will enter the public domain all at once, | and we don't really have a precedent for what happens then. | soligern wrote: | A human looking at someone's artwork is "training a model". | It's bullshit and anti progressive to say someone or something | that is creating derivative works is stealing. | leeoniya wrote: | not stealing the work, just stealing the revenue...for very | little investment. | | > A human looking at someone's artwork is "training a model | | sure, except that model often takes months or years to train | (wall clock years, not 1000-core cpu-years). and the end | result is not a human that can stamp out new/competing | artwork every 100ms. | | for any kind of creative/performance/art work, these are | watershed times. us coders are not super far behind. | Retric wrote: | The second half of derivative worlds is creating an imitation | of the original not just looking at it, but this isn't some | grey area. | | Even just training the model _requires someone to copy the | original work_ from somewhere and store it into a database to | use to train the model. If they don't have permission to make | _that_ copy then it's commercial copyright infringement | independent of anything done by the model after that point. | | Thus the companies themselves are frequently breaking the | sale even if nobody ever uses these systems. | d1sxeyes wrote: | Recorded music was going this way whether it was Spotify or | someone else that drove the final nail into the coffin. | | I remember when I was a child, on a Sunday afternoon, my dad | would put on an album and listen to it. Just listen. Very, very | few people do that now. | | Now we have a lot of demand for "incidental music". Something | you listen to while you do something else. Driving, reading, | surfing the net, coding, cleaning... | | There was a fundamental shift in how people consumed music that | started around the time music became portable. Spotify won the | race, but if it hadn't been Spotify, it would have been someone | else. | throwaway290 wrote: | No no. Incidental music and "music you listen to while doing | something" are not the same. | | Listening to incidental music all the time devalues music. | And we do it not because we wanted it but because Spotify, | Apple music etc promote it. Until then "just play random | stuff that this ML thinks is similar" was not a thing. But | subscriptions make them more money than if they just let you | buy albums and stream what you bought. I wish more artists | didn't sign up for this but unfortunately big labels did. | | But you can listen to non incidental music that you have | specifically chosen while doing something. Even your dad | could be doing something while listening to music (thinking). | btilly wrote: | An example of "music you listen to while doing something" | that is not incidental music are many sea shanties. | | The music had a purpose. | btilly wrote: | I'm curious. When do you think music became portable? | | The transistor radio was invented in the 1950s. And quickly | became used as background music as life progressed. | | Also incidental music is not a new thing. Tavern musicians as | background music have been around for centuries. It is hard | to prove, but likely for thousands of years. | d1sxeyes wrote: | Fair, I should perhaps have clarified that I meant music | chosen by the listener. Roughly I would say around the time | the Walkman was invented. | _glass wrote: | A positive effect for performers is that people still want to | go to concerts, but less and less people know how to play an | instrument. The market is really much better now than even 10 | years ago. | easyThrowaway wrote: | Also, if you're wondering "Well, I could get better terms for | my art" - Like I said, when Spotify arrived and you were signed | on a label you HAD to sign the part that said "Yes, you can put | my music online on Spotify and I will get paid peanuts" or | else, unless you were Madonna or Taylor Swift. | | Or, sure, you can also terminate your record deal. Hope you | have 500 grands around just for that. | | Frankly I don't see it ending much better for visual artists. | munk-a wrote: | There was another path here - collective bargaining. When | small individuals are bullied by large corporations it's | because those corporations want something from the small | individuals... they certainly don't care about one or two | small artists walking away from the platform - but if artists | can organize and bargain as a group they can ensure a fair | outcome. | | I think the modern world has become too complacent in terms | of labor organization - the time of plenty left a lot of | people content to take whatever was given to them because | there was such a glut of excess that it was freely shared. | That sharing is coming to an end and we're returning to a | time when we need to demand fair and equitable treatment. | EatingWithForks wrote: | Freelancers in the united states are not allowed to bargain | collectively for better prices, as that's considered market | manipulation/price fixing. ["Independent Contractors" are | literally banned from forming a union in the USA.] | Buildstarted wrote: | Serious question: Are actors, writers, etc not considered | "Independent Contractors" in the US? | vouaobrasil wrote: | I agree completely, and I have been constantly speaking about | how AI will be a wealth concentrator, replacing a mass of jobs | more diverse than previously seen. Unlike previous machines | which can take 1-2 jobs, when humans get REALLY efficient at | training AI, it will replacing hundreds en masse. | | AI will also have an additional effect: it will be isolating in | the sense that the need for other humans will decrease. | | These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have led | me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI and | that tech companies are ruining the world with their | abominations. | hnhg wrote: | Another side effect: the wealth will be concentrated in rich | tax-avoiding corporations and elites, meaning that the tax | burden for society will fall even harder on the remaining | middle and working classes, who will have to pay for the | upkeep of everything. | blibble wrote: | > Unlike previous machines which can take 1-2 jobs, when | humans get REALLY efficient at training AI, it will replacing | hundreds en masse. | | more like hundreds of millions | | > AI will also have an additional effect: it will be | isolating in the sense that the need for other humans will | decrease. | | unless there's a complete restructuring of our society then a | repeat of the late 18th century seems to be the likely | outcome | | with their stake in society gone: the peasant class get fed | up of eating dirt and storm the bastille | | (I really, really hope the AI revolution turns out to be just | hype) | tivert wrote: | > These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have | led me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI | and that tech companies are ruining the world with their | abominations. | | Do you mean "world is MUCH better off with _out_ AI. " | | What you wrote doesn't make much sense withing the context of | your comment, but I have to ask because there are some | software engineers that find abominations appealing for some | reason, or just lack the ability to tell the difference | between desirable technology and a technological abomination. | I think a big component of the latter is many software | engineers' overconfidence in their abilities that makes them | easy marks, and the willingness of many kinds of hype men to | exploit that to con them with propaganda. | HenryBemis wrote: | I am not a software engineer. When (for my work) I/we need | a decent chunk of development done, we get the pros. | | BUT, sometimes I want something that will automate the | fudge out of my PC (imagine command prompt on overdrive). I | usually DDG for the solution and end up in some 10yo | solution in StackExchange, which doesn't do the thing. | | My friends have all forgotten their DOS skills.. so I turn | to ChatGPT and boom! I get me 2 paragraphs script in | 30secs. | | Do I hire devs? Hell yeah and we pay well, and we will | continue to do so for many years. Do I use ChatGPT for the | small (personal) stuff? Hell yeah too. | | Now, if a company wants to outsource everything to an | LLM/AI then I wish them the best of luck, coz when | something will break (and oh IT WILL), Tthe contractor they | screwed over should charge them x50!!!! | ceroxylon wrote: | Definitely agree, LLMs are only as useful as the person | interpreting and implementing the output; if someone | doesn't have enough knowledge or context about the thing | they are trying to solve/create then copy & pasting | blindly while asking the wrong questions will lead | projects to disaster. | | I have witnessed this firsthand when I dove into the deep | end on something over my head, GPT-4 Code Interpreter | went into an error loop and I had to learn all of the | background knowledge I was foolishly trying to avoid. | firebirdn99 wrote: | There has to be UBI for A(G)I. Period. | HellDunkel wrote: | Should it say ,,without AI"? Makes no sense like this.. | badpun wrote: | > Unlike previous machines which can take 1-2 jobs | | There are many machines replacing hundreds or even thousands | of people- farm equipment, trains, tunnel boring machines | etc. | lancesells wrote: | Not a real equivalent. Those machines are made by many, | many people along the way. Industries exist from those | machines. | | With software you could say chip makers, developers, and | energy companies will get stronger but I don't think | there's a comparison. The keyholders will be a much smaller | group with a greater power if we stay onboard the AI train. | vouaobrasil wrote: | I meant KINDS of jobs. | wwweston wrote: | > Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical | distribution - Worse than piracy, which was inevitable too at | the time, but at least you didn't have to pay your lawyers to | renegotiate with your label on top of NOT getting any money. | | It's even worse than you say -- it was murder on digital retail | too, right at the time when it was on track to compete with or | exceed old physical sales. | | Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them with | the false veneer of legitimacy. | rightbyte wrote: | > > Spotify basically killed any money coming from the | physical distribution - Worse than piracy, which was | inevitable too at the time | | > Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them | with the false veneer of legitimacy. | | As a side note, in the beginning Spotify used pirated music | off The Piratebay without asking for permission from the | copyright holders. | patwolf wrote: | I used to purchase mp3s from Amazon, and there was one song | that had a glitch in it, like it was a bad rip. I always | wondered if they were using pirated copies as well. I just | re-downloaded for fun and the glitch is still there. | rightbyte wrote: | It wouldn't surprise me if e.g. people at Microsoft ran | pirated copies of Office or whatever. Or like Photoshop | at Adobe. Getting hold of licenses can be a nightmare, | and Microsoft products more so in the past. Nowadays, | every Microsoft license seems handled by some enterprise | admin account. | pdntspa wrote: | It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded | their library, so while that statement is true it is a | little disingenuous without further context | | There are lots of other examples of this happening too... I | believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were | emulators running pirated roms | ben_w wrote: | > It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded | their library, so while that statement is true it is a | little disingenuous without further context | | If anything, that feels even worse. | | > I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases | were emulators running pirated roms | | If Nintendo has a licence for the game that the ROM was | an unlicensed pirate of, while that's weird, it doesn't | seem fishy in the same way. | digging wrote: | That is not at all better. | amadeuspagel wrote: | Fundamentally, neither spotify nor piracy matter. People | enjoy making music. Today, there are more people able to make | and publish music then ever, but the day still only has 24 | hours, you can't listen to more music then before. Unlimited | supply, limited demand. | ddq wrote: | Fundamentally, the artists getting paid doesn't matter | because they enjoy making music? As a musician, your | comment is completely ignorant, self-centered, and totally | irrelevant to the discussion of people getting economically | screwed. | paulddraper wrote: | They matter. | | Also, like everything in the universe, they are subject | to supply vs demand. | | And fundamentally the supply exceeds the demand. | easyThrowaway wrote: | Problem is, Spotify is engineered to make sure the supply | stays concentrated in a very, very small amount of hands. | developer93 wrote: | What's your opinion of bandcamp? | raincole wrote: | No? You completely misread what he said. | | As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper | tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education, | etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow | proportionally, the average income of | musicians/songwriters would decline. | | The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence. | Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much). | skinner927 wrote: | That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in | price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper. | | You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy | tables. | | People still want to listen to quality music from artists | who have years of practice and experience. You can't | reliably get years of experience unless you're getting | paid to do it. | | Sure, there are exceptions, but it's not the rule. | Michael Jackson would not have existed if there was no | money in the career. The money is why his father pushed | so (insanely) hard. | | The counter argument is trash music will just be the | norm. And maybe for a while that would happen, but | eventually we'll see someone (similar to the private | search engines we see today) come out with a new platform | with the selling point that artists get a living wage -- | as long as the people demand it, and I believe they will. | badpun wrote: | There's still money in making music, just not in selling | recordings. Biggest touring artists (the Beyonces etc.) | bring in millions. They, in turn, require skilled | producers to make their songs, who are also paid well. | ilyt wrote: | >That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in | price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper. | | >You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy | tables. | | Well, yes, and that's how IKEA and mass production in | general made many people that would be making furniture | out of the job. | | Even in tailor-made stuff good cheap tools does make work | of skilled maker far quicker. And you can get more people | trying to get into that if the tools are cheap. | | Hardware is cheap, software is free/near free so there is | far more people trying, when you no longer need to spend | small car worth of money just to say play electronic | music | | > People still want to listen to quality music from | artists who have years of practice and experience. You | can't reliably get years of experience unless you're | getting paid to do it. | | Most musicians got that by playing in garage bands and | doing concerts. | | And many of them did it entirely for free, out of | passion, till they were good enough, far before fancy | computers were in everyone's pockets. | | > The counter argument is trash music will just be the | norm. | | It is the norm far before Spotify happened I'm afraid | [deleted] | Terr_ wrote: | > You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy | tables. | | That's only true if you assume all the customers desire | (or are willing to settle-for) arbitrarily bad tables for | cheap. That isn't guaranteed, but even then... _why are | you so certain their decision is wrong_? Maybe they | simply care about something else more than their tables. | | Meanwhile, the section of customers who still desire | _good_ tables will find those good-tables more affordable | than before, even if they 're a relatively smaller slice | of the expanded table-market pie. | | Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy | silk and lace enough to embarrass a king. Terribly an | artful books exists to come up, but I could still | accumulate a library in my pocket that would be the envy | of any ancient monastery or place of learning. | foobarian wrote: | > Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could | buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king. | | Actually I think something has happened to the textiles | industry whereby demand must have driven a certain band | of suppliers out of business, and now try as I could I | can't get polo shirts in the same think quality cotton | weave I could 30 years ago. There is probably some niche | source possibly online but I don't know how to discover | it; the standard "throw money at luxury mall brand" route | seems to not work any longer as the brick and mortars | have watered down their materials as well. Sic transit | gloria mundi | raincole wrote: | > That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop | in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper. | | Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop | in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't | change, then they'll become cheaper. How much cheaper is | another question, as circular saws are already very cheap | today, compared to hand-made furniture. | | So yeah, you're right, it's just like saying that. | | > if there was no money in the career | | It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, | more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all | these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star. | [deleted] | ghaff wrote: | How would demand grow proportionately? People have a | limited attention budget to listen, watch, and read | things. | raincole wrote: | Yes, and that's exactly what the GP was trying to say. | ghaff wrote: | Ah yes, didn't read far enough upthread. | | Of course, this isn't new. Tim O'Reilly said something | similar in the context of book publishing probably | getting on to 20 years ago at this point. | bombolo wrote: | People being able to afford professional equipment and | professional session musicians vs a guy recording himself | in a bedroom over a MIDI karaoke track is not the same at | all. | | If you can't hear the difference, see a doctor. | ben_w wrote: | Most people are not professional music critics, and most | of their consumption is as a backing track to the rest of | their life. | | You could replace most of this category with a Markov | chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most | people even thinking about it, and I know because this is | exactly how I made music for my shareware video games a | decade ago. | bombolo wrote: | Most people are not professional movie critics and enjoy | more a hollywood film rather than me recording barbie | dolls and making them talk. | | Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with | a proper music score. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game) | | Does your game have a wikipedia entry? | | Could I assume that people enjoyed outcast more than your | hobby game? | ilyt wrote: | You can make great sounding music using nothing but free | or extremely cheap software. But yeah, still need a good | mic. | | Even when you go into hardware you can still get plenty | for cheap. | bombolo wrote: | You need time, which isn't cheap :) | deadbeeves wrote: | It sounds like you're saying that because one is more | expensive than the other it is therefore better. | bombolo wrote: | I agree that a 2 million $ guitar isn't better than a 2k$ | guitar. | | But a 2k$ guitar is certainly better than a 50$ guitar. | Not only in how it sounds but in how easy it is to play | it. | | My 1st guitar was bad so I couldn't do barre chords. I | thought I was bad and pros could do it. Turned out pros | just had better guitars. | | Better guitars also have less noise, better cables are | shielded. | | Yes, more expensive is better (up to a point). | deadbeeves wrote: | Yes. However, the _instrument_ being better just means | the _sound_ it makes will be better, not that the _music_ | the musician makes with it will be better. | ddq wrote: | No, I'm sorry but you are ignorant. | t0bia_s wrote: | Many don't see a difference. Just amount of coolnes. | | You can apply this on professional filmmaking or | vlogging. I guess amount of time consumed audiovisual | production today is much higher on amateurish production | thanks to antisocial networks. | bombolo wrote: | They might not be able to point exactly the problem, but | they will most certainly enjoy better produced content. | t0bia_s wrote: | If you are used to fast editing, loud music and cheap | filters, you'll get hard time to watch ie Malicks films, | listen concertos or go to photography exhibition. No | doubled about qulity. | | Nowadays most valuable is attention. Cheap stimuli is | easier to consume. That's what technology teach us. | kouru225 wrote: | An unlimited supply of unoriginal music because artists | don't have the luxury to experiment anymore. | matwood wrote: | Did you miss a /s? There is more varied music being | created every day than ever before right now. There are | sub sub sub genres you can seek out if you want. Contrast | this with when I was a kid and we basically had what the | radio played or what cassette we could buy with our $10. | | The problem now is that we have so much content (music, | books, movies, short vids, long vids, etc...), and not | enough aggregate time to consume it all. | jononor wrote: | That is not what is happening? There are soo many niches | and subgenres these days, and it is evolving year over | year. | easyThrowaway wrote: | We're talking about the business side of the whole ordeal. | It's not just about "enjoying making music". It's about | paying mixing and mastering. It's about paying NTS, Rinse | FM, and the constellation of medium-small distribution | channels. It's about distributing on labels like DFA, !K7 | or whatever. It's about making sure that Fabric, Rex Club | and Sneaky Pete can keep the lights on so they can play | your music, so you can get paid, so you can keep making | music instead of _ahem_ having to become a webdev and write | angry comments on HN. | | It's about keeping an entire industry, live or recorded, | and their milieu alive. | | The truth is that what happened wasn't a liberation. It was | a methodical purge of the medium-sized side of the music | industry. Now we're reaching the point of having 5-6 | industry giants taking all the money plus...yes, an | inordinate amount of people making mostly self-referential | music in their own bedroom on weekends, music that will | reach no-one outside whatever local scene they hang around. | But most of them were making music even before, and were by | their own choice irrelevant to the industry. (True, now | they can also become influencers on Twitch and maybe one | out of thousands can make a living by streaming their life | 24h/day. One ticket for the lottery, please). Whoever was | between them and the majors is being squeezed out of the | game. | t0bia_s wrote: | Imagine Spotify, rather than paying to musicans, just invest | and publish AI generated music. Sounds like more profitable | business to me. | | I'm not saying that I agree with this approach. | mr_toad wrote: | Without copyright protection anyone could copy their entire | library and set up a rival streaming service. It certainly | wouldn't be worth much investing in the AI part of the | business. | dsign wrote: | I honestly wonder if people would consume the music they know | is AI generated. And by "honestly", I mean "I don't really | know but I want to." | | I've been watching videos of Guy Michelmore in youtube. Not | because I will ever write any orchestral music, but because I | like his energy and envy his shed. Would I bother if Guy | Michelmore were an AI? | paul_funyun wrote: | I would. Out of the bands I listen to maybe 5 of them I | could name a single member. I'm a big reader but I couldn't | tell you one thing about most of the authors other than | their names. | ilyt wrote: | Entirely depends on how good it would become. | | It could also have some interesting avenues, like feeding | some variables to the AI from say a video game (number and | type of monsters on screen, mood etc.) to generate music | reacting to what is happening on screen | t0bia_s wrote: | It depends on how you define art. You can play music or | shoot film or paint a picture. AI could do it as well. But | the essence of what makes good art comes from soul, from | experience by living, from relationships between us... that | is created for stories that inspire. | | That is not what AI would ever generate. | yellow_postit wrote: | And absent some major technology changes Spotify in your | example has no way to do credit assignment back to the | training set for any attempts at royalties should they be so | inclined. | notefaker wrote: | This is factually incorrect. If you own your master recordings, | you stand to make $3,500 to $5,500 per million streams on | Spotify. Apple Music and Tidal pay even better. This is why | Taylor Swift is re-recording her entire Big Machine Records | catalogue. While Spotify did shift consumers away from buying | singles and albums as individual items, they also opened a new | revenue source for independent artists. | easyThrowaway wrote: | Can you point me to a current-day independent artist which | hasn't been signed to a label that is pulling this amount of | money just on streaming? | | If you're already big enough that, i.e., XL Recordings can | ask you to make a record without getting rights on the | master, I wouldn't count it as a good example of "indie | artist". | raviparikh wrote: | I make about $4,000 per million streams on Spotify for the | tracks I've released independently. For label releases I | make less, but the label promotes them so that sometimes | results in more net revenue. I have a bit over 10M Spotify | streams over the last 3 years. | | Also, Spotify promotes my music via editorial playlists and | algorithmic (eg Radio or Discover Weekly), so I'm probably | making a lot more total revenue than I would have on | iTunes. | franl wrote: | Russ | | EDIT: Not making Taylor Swift money, but not many are | easyThrowaway wrote: | are you sure he's doing 5k/month just by streaming? No | syncs nor shows? Also if Wikipedia is right he's signed | with Columbia Records. AFAIK the only artists making that | kind money just by streaming while having no strings | attached EVER (No label distro, no label A&R, no big tent | agencies) are Macklemore and Chance The Rapper. Just two | guys over millions of artists on Spotify. | franl wrote: | I can't find the article from before he signed with | Columbia (might've been a YouTube interview with him, | can't remember for sure), but yes, I'm fairly certain he | was doing well over 5k per month with no major label. | | Also note the terms of his deal with Columbia are unlike | most major deals in that he has a 50/50 profit split | after his advance payment got recouped, retains either | full control or 50/50 control of masters, etc. | franl wrote: | Here you go, he mentions it in the first 30 seconds of | this video. He says roughly $100k per month before any | label involvement: https://youtu.be/OebNTkTfzHU | franl wrote: | > Another opinion popular with no one: AI will have on artists | the same impact that Spotify had on the music industry that is, | it will kill any revenue flow for anyone outside of the | publishers and big artists/players. | | Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but how much money do you think | the 7500 creators on Spotify making $100k+ [1] would be making | without Spotify or other streaming platforms? My guess is | closer to zero than 100k. | | Also 0.09 percent of 8 million creators making 100k+ [1] sounds | horrible, but my guess is that should be taken with a grain of | salt. How many folks are included in that 8 million who | registered, but uploaded nothing? How many uploaded once or | twice? How many uploaded and did ZERO promo of themselves? How | many are just plain terrible musicians? | | A number of years ago when I stumbled on him, Russ was pulling | in a few hundred thousand per year from streaming. Looks like | he's making 100k per week as of a couple of years ago [2]. Yes, | he's probably an outlier. But he works his butt off on his | craft, handles production and writing himself, and markets | himself well. | | Headlines like "Big tech and AI destroying the indie music | industry" get more clicks and attention than "Streaming | platforms provide income where once there was none" so _shrug_. | | [1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/02/24/spotify- | artist-e... [2] | https://twitter.com/russdiemon/status/1325853093074923520 | wslh wrote: | The Spotify example is similar to the Google impact: the last | mile is the search engine UI that controls your access to | content. Spotify is another UI as they are streaming services, | etc. | | Seems like a natural iteration in the ordering of complex | systems. Beyond legal regulations it would be great to start to | think about new solutions, if they ever exist. | gamblor956 wrote: | _AI will have on artists the same impact that Spotify had on | the music industry that is, it will kill any revenue flow for | anyone outside of the publishers and big artists /players._ | | _then resell the output for $$$ on something like Splice_ | | This is silly. The USPTO and Courts have repeatedly stated that | AI-generated media is not subject to copyright protection, so | there are no licensing revenue opportunities for the big | publishers/artists/whatever. This means: AI-generated content | is not protected by copyright, so anyone can use a piece of AI- | generated art however they want without a license and unless | the law changes AI has no value to the content industries. | | EDIT: Also, the USPTO has noted that the use of AI-generated | content in a work will mean that the entire work will be | presumed AI-generated except for the portions the content owner | can demonstrate were generated by humans. The backend costs of | maintaining AI-supplemented works will almost as expensive and | burdensome as the costs associated with patents. | | Also, I think people on HN have a very glorified view of how | much money musicians make from streaming or cd/album sales: | basically zilch, unless they're popular enough to be in repeat | on the radio. Most musicians made their money from performing: | generally a little bit from ticket sales or venue incentives | (like % of booze sales) but the real money _for the performers_ | was from the sales of band merch, which is why it gets pushed | so heavily. | | _At the end of the day the model itself is going to be | basically irrelevant, while knowing whose works were actually | used to train it being the truly differentiating feature._ | | Yes, by lawyers, when they sue the owners of the AI model for | copyright infringement, because this would not be a use | protected by fair use doctrine. This will actually make human- | generated works _more valuable_ because now every work used to | generate an AI work is now worth at least $75,000, even if its | market value would be significantly less (or even commercially | worthless) today. | | Due to the costs associated with licensing of human works, if | AI-content becomes a thing, it will probably be more expensive | than hiring a human to do the same thing, because the model | will have to account for the cost of paying a license fee for | every work that was incorporated into a specific output. | adamc wrote: | Spotify has been a disaster, but unless the artists walk away | (very hard to do), I don't see our political system as caring | enough to do anything about it. | radley wrote: | Everyone overlooks the fact that it will still take _someone_ | (i.e. a graphic artist) to produce great AI imagery. | | First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll | get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You | can't build a campaign on it. | | Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff | competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing images. | | At the very least, you can seed the AI with a paid graphic | artist's work (seed-based AI images can be copyrighted). But | that artist will do it better than your unpaid intern. | karaterobot wrote: | Mmm, I don't know about this. At the very least AI lowers the | bar for how talented a graphic artist needs to be to produce | professional work, which means it'll be easier to undercut | them, which means it'll get much harder to make a living as a | graphic designer. It amounts to the same thing as killing off | the profession, as seen from the perspective of someone in | the profession as opposed to someone without skin in the | game. It's like saying push-button elevators didn't hurt the | profession of elevator operator, because somebody's still got | to push those buttons. | madeofpalk wrote: | This is the march of progress. Digital brushes in Procreate | lowered the bar for how talented an artist needs to be to | create an oil 'painting'. The camera lowered the bar for | creating portraits. | orbital-decay wrote: | It also raises the bar of what's possible. What counts as | "professional level" changes each time some new technique | emerges. A skilled artist will always be better than a | random person. | | The visual entertainment "supply" is not limited by the | current state of tools. It's always limited by the skills | of the top crop. Professionals are always ahead and hard to | come by. The industry's self-regulating mechanism is | novelty; what is abundant becomes fundamentally | uninteresting and dies. | radley wrote: | > AI lowers the bar for how talented a graphic artist needs | to be to produce professional work | | I think it's a different kind of talent, and not | automatically a lower bar. The key to being a professional | artist is being able to offer variants based on given | direction. Either way, it's much much more than pushing a | button or holding a lever in place for a period of time. | danenania wrote: | I think AI in general, across almost every industry, will | shift value away from technical proficiency and toward | creativity and taste. Implementation of an idea/vision will | be commoditized, but having a great idea, a unique insight, | the taste and ability to identify top-tier work will still | be highly valuable. This could well remain true post-AGI. | | In graphic arts, the overlap between people with technical | proficiency and vision/taste is probably quite high, but | it's not one-to-one. There are people with excellent taste | who can identify great art or design when they see it, and | who can perhaps imagine incredible masterpieces in their | minds, but cannot draw a convincing stick figure. On the | other side, there are people who can expertly make someone | else's concept real, but can't come up with a compelling | concept themselves. AI will be great for the former, and | bad for the latter (or at least force the latter to adapt). | | Whether this will have the effect of concentrating wealth | or distributing it more widely strikes me as a very | difficult question. It may be devastating for certain | professions, but could also enable a whole new class of | entrepreneurs. I could see it going either way, or the two | effects may cancel each other out and economic equality | stays about where it is. We're in the realm of complex | systems here, so I wouldn't put much stock in anyone's | prediction. | bsder wrote: | > I think AI in general, across almost every industry, | will shift value away from technical proficiency and | toward creativity and taste. | | The problem is that an artist still needs to eat in the | 10-20 years it takes to develop "creativity and taste". | | What AI will do/is doing is knock out the entry-level | jobs. If you can't train humans on the entry-level, you | will eventually have no experienced people. | prox wrote: | Also people cannot judge great art or imagery. Unless you | have had the training. But the average person? Nope. You can | tell what you LIKE but that's not the same. | charlieyu1 wrote: | I don't have much training but it is not that difficult to | spot AI arts which is pretty repetitive. The first couple | are awesome but it gets old really fast. | soligern wrote: | AI generated art may be disposable but it certainly is very, | very good. Midjourney makes plenty of impeccable art and | photorealistic images that have _no_ flaws. Also, even if | there are flaws a week with some YouTube videos can teach | anyone how to fix them, you don't need someone with five | years of deep experience. | michaelmrose wrote: | > Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff | competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing | images. | | No. First off trademarks exist and they found that work done | solely by the machine couldn't be treated as a work for hire | copyrighted by the machine and assigned to the operator. | There is no reason to believe that work couldn't be treated | directly as copyrighted by the human operator who has | creative input nor is the matter with the images used to | train the model truly settled. | | >First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, | you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then | what? You can't build a campaign on it. | | You can already get variations on a them and text driven | modification eg make the blank a blank or make the blank | blanker. | orbital-decay wrote: | Trademarks are different from copyright. | | Random variations aren't interesting, they just make | something abundant even more abundant and secondary. Unless | you have a model with sufficient intelligence that can | create something conceptually original (at which point | we're all fucked, not just artists or programmers), it's | not going to fly. Text driven modifications imply | conceptual human input; besides, they are inherently worse | than higher-order input, just like text to image alone is | worthless for anything meaningful. | michaelmrose wrote: | There exist systems where you can describe not only | initial scenes but successive textual modifications to | existing images and furthermore variations aren't random. | Successive selections are a way to zero in on a concept. | | You are about a year behind the state of the art. | orbital-decay wrote: | AKA tell me you haven't spent time with diffusion models, | without telling it :) | | I actually did figure out what works and what doesn't in | real artistic use. Which is the entire point of the | article in OP which nobody seem to have read - text | doesn't work well beyond the basic use or amateur play, | regardless of it being the initial prompt or editing; you | need sketching and references (and actual skill) to do | real work. I don't think anybody's using available | methods of textual modifications for anything complex - | they are cumbersome and unreliable, even worse than | textual prompts. In fact, I haven't seen anyone using | them at all. | | Besides the implementation details, natural language just | doesn't have enough semantic density and precision to | give artistic directions, even for a human or AGI. That's | a fundamental limitation. Higher order guidance, style | transfer, and compositing is how it's done. | gamblor956 wrote: | _There is no reason to believe that work couldn 't be | treated directly as copyrighted by the human operator who | has creative input nor is the matter with the images used | to train the model truly settled._ | | ...Other than the USPTO and the federal court system | issuing multiple ruling stating the opposite, including a | decision last week which specifically stated that the | _output_ of an AI model is not copyrightable, upholding an | earlier decision by the USPTO... | (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business- | news/ai-...) | michaelmrose wrote: | Except for the part where the court didn't find that. It | found that work only created by the AI didn't qualify. | Had it asked if a work created by the AI AND the person | qualified it would no doubt have qualified as is already | clear from using photoshop not serving to remove your | ability to produce copyrightable works. The case didn't | ask that and therefore it wasn't answered in any | meaningful fashion. | | The act of prompting and customizing iteratively | especially in systems which allow the user to submit a | prompt that modifies the existing work for example | "replace the human being with a monkey" "make the monkey | pink" etc are clearly creative works that USE an AI not | uncopyrightable. | | If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot do | so on the basis of a case that literally never addressed | that issue unless you would like to traverse the muddy | ground between actuality and fiction. | gamblor956 wrote: | The ruling stated that the Constitutional justification | for copyright (and other IP) laws was to incentivize | creators. AI does not need incentives, and thus AI- | generated content cannot qualify for copyright. Under | this line of reasoning, _neither can patents_ (though | note that trademarks derive value from the resources and | effort spent promoting them, not from their creation, so | trademarks are unaffected). | | _The act of prompting and customizing iteratively | especially in systems which allow the user to submit a | prompt ...are clearly creative works that USE an AI not | uncopyrightable._ | | _If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot | do so on the basis of a case that literally never | addressed that issue unless you would like to traverse | the muddy ground between actuality and fiction._ | | The case literally deals with the _output_ of the AI | model, not the input. But on that note...under existing | law, code can be copyrighted _but not its output_. Thus, | it is logical to reason that prompts to an AI model can | also be copyrighted to the extent they are not strictly | functional. | | But with AI models and content generally, nobody cares | about the prompts/inputs. The output is what matters. | (For comparison: Deep Impact and Armaggedon were both the | results of the same input: disaster movie in which a team | of astronaughts has to go to the asteroid to blow it up | before it destroys Earth. The "models" were different | screenwriters and directors. Compare the outputs: one is | a blockbuster classic, and most people don't remember the | other movie.) | charlieyu1 wrote: | I agree with you, but the main problem is that illustrators | are under-appreciated. We are in a world where management | with no technical knowledge are having too much power and | stealing paychecks. | radley wrote: | I totally know. I started as an illustrator: | | https://radleymarx.com/work/elemental/ | The_Blade wrote: | sewing machine | SnowdustDev wrote: | > Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical | distribution - Worse than piracy | | Any sources for this? | | I'm of the impression physical distribution is on the rise | compared to the earlier days of digital music. This has nothing | to do with Spotify, and all about the digitization of music | itself. | | Anecdotally many people I know now purchase merchandise and | media as a way to support an artist they like, rather than | listen to the music they make in a physical format. | greatNespresso wrote: | Insightful, agree with the fact that AI will help to fill up the | "furniture" more easily, faster and for a cheaper price than any | human could. Regarding transparency of training data, this is | where I see huge opportunities in AI for the near future. | woolion wrote: | I used to think that the generative AI impact would be pretty low | because these images always have some artifacts that I find | pretty jarring, and that require fairly high artistic skills to | fix. However that was completely wrong: most people don't care! | Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming | it. | | The second point, "only spammy garbage content" will be happy | with AI generated content, is already proved wrong given the | quantity of high profile blogs that rely on it. They don't have | the budget for the maybe 5% improvement you can get by paying an | artist, and 0 of the risks common with artists (difficult to work | with, missing deadlines, etc etc). | | In a way it doesn't even make sense: the artist is also is also a | generative blackbox. It's better in understanding precise | prompts, but exactly as in software engineering the problem is | often that the spec is wrong, the commissioner cannot get exactly | the image they dream of because they cannot imagine it without | having pretty high artistic skills. Or a number of iterations are | needed, making the process quite long and costly. | | There are other reasons why artists won't be entirely replaced, | especially the highest paid, but a good chunk of their potential | income sources have already been wiped out, and the proportion | will only increase. | mr_toad wrote: | > However that was completely wrong: most people don't care! | Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming | it. | | For the people making and consuming on Reddit maybe. I think | that people who want this to replace graphic design work will | want more attention to detail. | raincole wrote: | > I used to think that the generative AI impact would be pretty | low because these images always have some artifacts that I find | pretty jarring, and that require fairly high artistic skills to | fix. However that was completely wrong: most people don't care! | Neither people producing the content, nor the people consuming | it. | | Sometimes I feel professional people are so good at their | crafts that they're disconnected from general audiences. It's | kinda like a programmer trying to convice a data scientist that | Python is not that good of a programming language, while the | data scientist is perfectly fine with it. | bugglebeetle wrote: | My takeaway from generative art as a former illustrator and now | data scientist is never has it been more obvious why artistic | skill and taste are necessary for making images, while at the | same time never have those things been more irrelevant because | of the audience for the work. | ilaksh wrote: | I'm hoping that someone comes out with an open source version of | Imagen or something similar. | | https://imagen.research.google/ | | Or Parti https://sites.research.google/parti/ | chankstein38 wrote: | This is almost exactly how I see GPT and code. I have seen smart | people who don't write code toss GPT a request and get a working | thing but going from "hey write me an auto presser for a key on a | timer" to "The client wants you to update the repo to handle this | business logic and do this functionality" is a huge leap. | | From my perspective, you still need a developer-minded person to | do the job, AI just kind of makes their lives easier in the | process. | | I agree with the sentiment that it's the same in the art world. | It's easy to get a compelling image but to get specific | meaningful images usually requires a lot of post processing that | a layman wouldn't be capable of doing. | ilaksh wrote: | True but I feel like people are assuming these limitations will | be long term. | | But we have seen progress in leaps and bounds. LLM-based coding | tools are getting better. LLMs are getting better. Context size | is increasing. And the interest in LLMs is even motivating | development of new approaches that will be more effective. | | Give it a few years, things like Lecun's JEPAs or whatever | hybrid supercoder DeepMind is working on, or some open-source | LLM, will blow GPT-4 out of the water for programming. | chankstein38 wrote: | I agree these things are going to move likely faster than we | can imagine and become better than we can imagine. That said, | last week I got a ticket that had no body but a title akin to | "Add a property for this" with no specifications about the | system. When I asked for clarity on the ticket the ask was | very different than the title implied. When I started the | work it started to look different than was described so I | went back to the requestor and explained the discrepancy and | we changed the direction of the change. | | I say this to say, one skillset I have as a developer is | taking the vague requests product owners have and figuring | out how to turn them into actionable code steps in a massive | existing codebase with several repos. I don't say this to say | I'm impossible to replace but to say that half the time | people don't even know what they want or how to describe it. | Then from there you have giant codebases that wouldn't fit in | anything but the biggest (current) context windows. | | I agree the accuracy limitations will likely evaporate but | these things aren't necessarily something an LLM can solve. | I'm probably going to be proven wrong over time but I use GPT | for code pretty regularly and right now I'm not too worried | about my job. | ilaksh wrote: | I don't know for sure if an LLM could do it. But | theoretically one could build a system that sends chat | messages asking for clarification and also eventually with | more context or something is able to translate vague or | stupid "requirements" into ones that make sense. | | In five years or so the capabilities may be pretty amazing. | chankstein38 wrote: | Definitely agreed! I'm both nervous and excited. I fear | for my livelihood but also if we continue to make even a | percentage of the progress we've made in the last year, | the next 5 years are going to be wild! | RugnirViking wrote: | I agree with most of this, but I do disgree with the thing about | producing specific imagery. It's absolubtely a skill one can | develop. I spend a lot of time helping people leearn to simplify | their prompts and choose the right language for image generation | AIs. For some reason people put a lot of unnessacary junk into | them, I guess a form of superstition (this sentence fragment | worked well the last few times). | | As the article mentions, the hybrid approach (using this as a | tool in a series of other tools) is the way forward | | There are concepts the AI simply will not grasp. For example | right now midjourney will extremely struggle with "bulldozer", | "centaur", "fantasy archer" etc. These will inevitably fixed (and | have in the past) be fixed with new model versions with better | training data. | | The real struggle comes with either small details or semantic | information. For example, its hard to ask it to make a | lifelike/photograph scene with everything including the | background in focus. Even with "focus stacking" type keywords. | "selfie" is about the best word we came up with but unforunately | that has significant side effects lol. Perhaps there just isnt | enough instances of people specifically describing that property | in the training data, but honestly its difficult to even learn | english words for these concepts to describe with! | | As for small details, it is indeed true that the current approach | will probably never scale to handle something like "six blue | cubes with a red triangle on each, arranged in a pyramid shape, | with a yellow ball balanced on top". But as the author points | out, such things will likely be handled with a minimum of | photoshop skill using assets made individually | ilaksh wrote: | There are new models such as from Google which work differently | and handle things like counting etc. much better than open | source models I don't know if any of them are available yet but | they have papers. Like Imagen and something better that came | out afterwards. | noduerme wrote: | None of which has anything to do with creativity or the | original (and visually trained) thought required to conceive of | imagery that's commercially useful - which is an actual skill | learned through years of study and experience, and which is so | routinely ignored by managers and IT people that you completely | failed to mention it in your take on the technical issues with | prompts. | | The issue with prompts is not stacked cubes. It's more like | this: Ask 10 software engineers or 10 people from the sales | department or 3 people from upper management to come up with | visual ideas for ads, and you will have a bunch of shit on | black backgrounds, robots, anime, bad copies of things people | have seen and subconsciously remember, and zero actual visual | ideas that fundamentally work. Designers and illustrators have | to fight against and override their unoriginality and terrible | ideas all the fucking time just to make a decent product. | RugnirViking wrote: | That's some real unwarranted hostility. I'm responding to a | specific point from the article? We can't just go in circles | having an "is it good or isnt it" argument... | | Once again - I agree with most of what the author says, | including the part about it being a tool in an illustrator's | kit | noduerme wrote: | I mean, I've spent 25+ years as an art director, a.k.a. a | diffusion model trying to generate what managers and | salespeople think they see in their heads, and I tell you, | they have no imagination. None whatsoever. As my brother, a | photographer, used to say: The problem isn't having a cheap | camera, it's who's behind it. | | Also, the hostility towards a prompt expert adding another | layer of technical "know how" into the process between | requests and art in the name of justifying a new job title | is entirely warranted. | chankstein38 wrote: | >Also, the hostility towards a prompt expert adding | another layer of technical "know how" into the process... | is entirely warranted | | I don't know either of you and I have no stake in this | but as an outside observer I think you come off pretty | unreasonable here still. You seem to think your hostility | was justified because you've basically made this person | the scapegoat for your frustration about this topic. | LouisSayers wrote: | Also an outsider - I don't understand how they're being | hostile here. | | They're relaying their experience and saying that there's | more to creating than describing something to be drawn, | and that most people lack the training and knowledge of | what goes into that. | | It's not about learning prompts, it's about learning how | to actually design... and then learning prompts. | | I feel like the original comment is taking things | personally instead of seeing the point they're making | through example of their frustration working with others. | chankstein38 wrote: | Interesting! From my view the responder came off as | attacking unnecessarily and very angry. Honestly not sure | how else to relay it though. Maybe it's all just how I'm | reading it. Have a great one! | RugnirViking wrote: | whatever man. I am not here to carve out a job title or | whatever it is you're accusing me of. I commented on a | post contributing with my experience of helping others. | | I feel like you're projecting a whole lot more onto me | than what i'm actually saying. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-21 23:01 UTC)