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As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation

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114 points valgaze | 3 comments | 14 Aug 22 17:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.946s | source
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adamhi ◴[14 Aug 22 19:02 UTC] No.32461913[source]▶
I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.

One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good".

There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks".

There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right.

It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.

But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore.

If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.

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Aransentin ◴[14 Aug 22 20:05 UTC] No.32462452[source]▶
Considering the staggering speed that image generation is improving, that 10% gap will only continue to close.

Starting e.g. an art education right now seems likely to be extremely nerve-wracking as your talents may very well be woefully obsolete by the time you graduate; the exception perhaps being those top-0.1% talents that will feed the models of the future with new material.

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1. p1esk ◴[14 Aug 22 22:53 UTC] No.32463866[source]▶
So an art training will become more like pro sports training where “success” means to be top 100 or so in the world. Note it does not prevent one to do arts (or sports) as a hobby. People didn’t stop playing chess after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.
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2. apatil ◴[15 Aug 22 00:03 UTC] No.32464371[source]▶
Given how quickly AI image generation, and creativity generally, has progressed, I think it's perfectly plausible that within ten years we will be able to tell an AI "create a work of art that is unique, highly meaningful and that would be very difficult or impossible for most humans to create with their hands," and will get a work of art that is, in blinded assessments, competitive with the work of any master.

If that happens, I agree that the top 100 human artists in the world will likely have jobs, but they won't be successful in the sense that their work is uniquely valued by society. We pay to see the very most talented humans perform tasks that have been successfully automated, such as chess and lifting heavy objects, not because we need the service they provide but because we get an emotional kick out of seeing other humans perform way outside the normal range of human abilities.

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3. archagon ◴[15 Aug 22 02:12 UTC] No.32465131[source]▶
I’m willing to bet money it will never happen. People said the same about self-driving cars, but the initial razzle-dazzle blinds people to the actual dullness of the algorithms, and obscures their limitations. AI can only recombine what has already been created. It has no ability to imbue art with meaning or to push the medium forward.

What you describe can only happen with general intelligence, not these fancy neural nets. If anything, they will become powerful tools to help artists augment their creativity.