Also, all of the time that people spend tweaking their prompts could just as easily be time spent learning to create their own art. The distance between absolute beginner and competent artist isn’t as vast as some people would like to believe. It’s just intimidating to a lot of people to get up the will to even try.
Nah dude, I can draw somewhat competently, but it takes a lot of time and dedication to get there. Tweaking prompts is orders of magnitudes easier and quicker than actually drawing something neverming learning to draw something.
I was awful at drawing and painting and now I’m not. I’ve walked that path, and I’m glad I spend the time learning those skills. I much prefer creating whatever I want to as opposed to pecking a word at a time, trying to coax something vaguely like it from an algorithm. That seems sad to me.
I mean, if it’s some attempt at a passion project I guess it could be? But I’m usually just letting my GPU churn out cool wallpapers or character art in the background while I watch YouTube. There’s no real soul going into it, but I’m not pretending to put in any, either.
And that’s totally fine. I could see using it for that purpose too. I think there are a fair number of people who might like to be artists, but they think it’s too hard, and so they look at ai as being a shortcut.
Prompting an AI to make something cohesive in art or music is a skill in itself. In the future it will be about who can prompt better. AI is taking the hand eye coordination out of these arts, and making it all about who can be more creative.
Think of all the people who can’t physically draw or paint due to disability. Now they can create these kind of arts with only their thoughts. It opens so many doors for people.
You can’t stop progress, but you shouldn’t be sad about it. There will always be a place for non AI art. It’s just that the people who embrace the technology are going to have insane output compared to traditional artists.
The notion of progress is too much of a catch-all positivity word here. If speed and efficiency is all we care about then, sure, ai will blow traditional artists out of the water. If however, we care about what the artist themselves brings in terms of their unique perspective, talents, and stories, ai art will only serve to muffle and homogenize that.
The notion of people with disabilities being able to use it to create something is a fair point. I think it’d be absurd to say that it’s only negatives. However, these kinds of cases, as good as they are, are often used to patch over the uglier aspects of what ai generated images is doing and will do. Kind of like how in Florida they’re talking about slavery teaching people valuable skills.
I think the people most excited about it are those who seem to have a resentment of artists at some level, likely because those artists are already doing what they wish they could do. That’s why I think there’s almost a perverse giddiness at the notion of crushing artist’s jobs and replacing them with these tech-oriented ones.
It seems like for some people, the ideal society is one in which humans have been made irrelevant and machines interface with each other in perpetuity, generating a heap of content that no one ever sees or thinks about. It’s the kind of sci-fi dystopian ending which we don’t want to acknowledge because there’s money to be made for someone and nothing is supposed to get in the way of that.
I mean I kinda agree with you that it sucks that AI is being used on the arts. That’s more than just a job, it’s a passion. The arts are a hobby for most that they are fortunate if they can make a living out of it. I would focus AI and automation on menial labor type jobs if I was somehow in charge of it.
The problem is that no matter how much we dislike it, it’s still going to happen, so we might as well embrace it and focus on the good in it. It’s here to stay until the electrical grid is taken out I imagine.
Also, you are going off on a tangent imagining rare people in the middle there. I don’t think there are many people out there that resent artists for having talent like you are saying. The few who do are narcissists, and are likely failed artists themselves. Not a common occurrence.
I do grant completely the valid uses for the technology which pertain to individual interests. I think there’s interesting possibilities there as well.
There’s a quote from the Tao Te Ching, which says, “why must you value what others value?” I think that’s relevant here. It may be true that those with money and power will always try to force their own interests (See the app formerly known as Twitter for reference). I’m not suggesting that we can or should try to shove this technology back in the bottle so to speak. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t so easily accept corporate interests as being in the interest of humans more generally and we should be skeptical of anything that sounds like happy tech industry propoganda.
As to the latter part, it’s just my perception based on what I’ve read. It may not be accurate.
I 100 percent agree with everything you say there. If only we can convince the rest of the world that. I hate what tech is turning into right now. If we actually focused it on doing what’s good for us and our future it could be so much better. We are using it for some good, but it is being vastly overshadowed by corporate interests and making numbers go up.
I’ve heard a prediction that in the near future there will be courses on creating AI prompts and that it’ll eventually become a job.
I’ve always explained it like this:
Every time you press that button, you’ll get an image. Maybe even a really good image. But it will never be the image you had in mind.
But sometimes you’re restricted by your own imagination and the image produced reflects your desire stronger than your vision. The ability to consistently generate meaning and purposeful images with generative ai is an art in itself. It’s just a different medium for artists to use.
I’ve only found that true for days I am prompting without a specific image in mind. The second something specific gets in my head, and even hours of fiddling and tweaking prompts won’t get the result that satisfies me (though I might get a bunch of cool tangential output along the way).
One of the best uses I’ve seen for this so far is tattoo design. It can get my general idea for what I want somewhat close enough to then show the actual artist more of what I had in mind much better than my ZERO ARTISTIC talent scribbles could
AI tools are support for professionals. For non professionals they are a toy, a magic box
The question is, could one million people reaching into the magic box at once pull out at least one thing better than a professional could make in the same time?
It is the same as science. Many discoveries are serendipity, they happen by chance. You need a professional to understand that that is a new discovery.
Anyone who manages to make something significant with AI is a professional.
In the same time? Yeah absolutely, I’ve put together some really cool pieces of AI art in like 5-10 mins. A “real” artists just couldn’t match that pace.
Same can be said about pre-industrial skilled physical labourers. Progress won’t change for you, you have to change for it
Spot on here! I’ve only just been using stable Diffusion for a couple of weeks now to help me visualise characters and locations in my world building. It’s such a great tool when you really have no artistic skill. But the limitations soon become apparent and a lot of problem solving goes into trying to regenerate the simplest things.
Can generate a near perfect image in a minute if the prompts are right and you get lucky. But the details take hours, where an artist would be able to simply visualise and draw it in.
I think the key is to develop basic skills to draw a really shit mockup of what you want, then img2img it from that… I’ll get there, maybe.
Exactly. At first glance it can spit out some really impressive stuff, but turning that content into a coherent piece of artwork still takes imagination and skill.
I can’t draw very well, but I’ve gotten good at compositing and image manipulation over the years. SD is amazing, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t spend hours and hours piecing together an image to be the way I wanted it.
I find that even with the best diffusion models, replication and character sets are virtually impossible. Also text does not work.
I don’t understand what this means.
I believe they are saying that the skill it takes a real artist to produce art is something to envy.
AAAAH!! Yes, that makes sense, thank you~
yea, specifically I envy the ability to form an original idea and then using your skills to create something exactly how you want it to be. Must be nice. Using those AIs is just unsatisfying, it’s never your thing, never your style and never your idea, never your vision, never your art – even if it might look kinda cool sometimes.
I tried really hard to “create” an older Version of Daria (from the MTV cartoon, so not even an original idea cuz I cannot form those) standing in front of a billboard in a slightly dystopian environment. Despite numerous attempts of prompting, the best I got was this hyper-attractive girl in a green jacket.
You need to work on your prompts.
Here’s a great example https://petapixel.com/2023/07/26/ai-images-titled-boring-america-photorealism-goes-viral-on-reddit/
this hyper-attractive girl
I swear, it’s actually really difficult to make ai women that AREN’T yassified. Is all the training data for what “real” women look like from Instagram?
No, just internet in general. There are a lot of sites/services that put the stereotypical “hot” women in the light and don’t even consider anything else. The same way text content is driven by the most vocal people, video are cut/tailored towards hyperactive squirrels, etc.
AI just averages all this out and asks you “do you want it tipped a bit this way or that way”. (I know it’s a gross overgeneralization, but it still stands)
Curating the internet as a “sane, balanced” data source raise two main issues : what does “sane / balanced” mean, and how much human power is needed to seep through all the garbage. This is the main reason I’m not too worried about “AI”. We will bend the thing to be a useful tool for a lot of usecases by using local training, but unless these two questions gets an appreciable upgrade, having one big “ubiquitous” AI model that will answer every need is not on the horizon.
Decades before the internet we knew that popular media does not depict actual women and tends to advance distorted ideals of beauty, often converging toward just one.
Lol totally! I started with subtle wrinkles around here eyes and gradually tuned it up to unattractive, old, ugly, sad, which is what you see in the pic I posted 🤣
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness
It just happens when you average faces.
Art is a language. And artists are communicating throught art. You will never be able to communicate your art to an AI with text because it needs art to communicate
Atleast thats what i belive
For data workers, AI is a lever, and a damn good one.
Whenever people call AI the next segway it’s an immediate flag that they don’t work in a field that uses it.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say. Are you talking about a segue or a segway? A leaver is much more useful than a Segway but they are both completely different things. Why are you comparing a machine to a leaver? Also, the Segway as a product wasn’t nearly as popular as the inventor hoped. Are you saying people who think AI will flop like the Segway did are wrong or are you saying that the Segway is some super tool and AI is not?
I honestly can’t tell if you’re trolling, idk how you could even come to the conclusions you did with my response.
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AI isn’t going to replace us anytime soon. Data entry will be first, in the next 5-10 years most likely. When I say it’s a “lever” what I mean is that for people like myself who work in IT, AI tools have multiplied our efforts and allowed us to spend more time doing and less time researching how to do. Even when it’s wrong, it’s usually good enough to get me on the right track and save me time.
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The Segway analogy was intended to illustrate how the average person who doesn’t work on or around computers sees the invention. They think it’s the next Segway (as in, a useless item that is supposed to change everything but disappears in months) because they don’t have an actual use case for it and spend most of their time trying to make it write smut or whatever else they’re dicking around with.
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