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optimalsolver
It's funny because art was the activity humans were supposed to be engaged in after AI took over the work we didn't want to do, but it looks like it will be one of the first things to fall to the machines.
dougabug
But graphics, design, and special effects were some of the first areas heavily influenced by digital technology, so it’s not super surprising that AI is showing early signs of future impact in the visual arts.
It’s becoming pretty clear that some people are much better at harnessing these emerging tools than others. Some people are already billing themselves as “AI artists,” and I predict that many will find success in this new art form.
quadcore
Parent is principal AI scientist (Id say a $1M+ per year position), his net worth (in billions) is very likely function of the success of these tech.
It’s becoming pretty clear that some people are much better at harnessing these emerging tools than others. Some people are already billing themselves as “AI artists,”
This is evil bullshit. Whatever creativity or value rather an artist creates with these "tools" will be sucked out by the AI directly from the photoshop canvas and recycled the next day except the artist wont be necessary this time.
and I predict that many will find success in this new art form.
Until the pupil has surpassed its many masters obviously.
At which point Parent will be on Mars.
dougabug
Planet ‘New Musk’ probably won’t be for me.
The artist is necessary for creating anything legitimately new that doesn’t suck. The critic is necessary to filter out all the crap the AI would be happy to create. Look at all these examples where the text prompts literally say which artist’s visual style to copy.
Making derivative artwork is in the process of becoming completely commoditized. That’s good in the sense that it allows novices to create visual content that they previously could only imagine (presuming they can adequately describe it).
But this also means the half-life for visual imitation will be drastically shortened, because even viral new styles will be done to death by artful copies in a matter of weeks.
Is XKCD art? Visually unchallenging (?), but certainly creative and thought provoking. What we’re mostly talking about at this point is giving kids (and some adults) who can’t draw well yet a chance to express what’s in their heads onto the page.
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t0bia_s
"AI artist" probably wouldn't be hired for specific tasks.
dougabug
It’s just a blob of paint until someone says (with conviction) that it’s “art.”
Creating compelling results which connect with people requires practice, patience, the willingness and ability to explore, a whole lot of cherry picking. Iteration.
There will have to be protections for content creators, which will have to evolve to accommodate AI’s increasing capabilities to mimic, some might say “steal,” the style and character of an artist’s work. It’s simpler in the case where the AI clearly imports entire assets from a single source, much harder when it almagamates tiny fragments of a large number of different artists’ works. Some kind of tax may be necessary to ensure that human creators of source materials are fairly compensated. Nothing happens without their work as the basis of creation.
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t0bia_s
You confusing art with images. Art is more deep than just digital generated image.
Do you thing that AI generated images will be bough by collectors or published in art galleries?
wds
Not to give credence to this space, but NFT art shows presenting Pixel Chill Monkey #9491 made with a coked-out doll dress-up game is a seemingly much lower bar
spaceman_2020
One of the biggest categories of digital art at the moment is algorithmically generated art.
Of course, the “artist” wrote the algorithm, but I can easily imagine an AI putting together something similar.
nodogoto
These image-from-prompt generators are themselves just a particular type of generative art.
I think it's obvious that the output of these AIs can be considered art. There is human input at multiple levels - the code, the artists whose works it was trained on, the researchers that scraped/pruned the training set, and ultimately the crafting of prompts by users to achieve a desired output.
What is not obvious is: among those human inputs, which are actually responsible for imparting artistic value on the resultant image, and in what proportion.
masswerk
Get ready for all artwork being of one of a few standard styles.
superzamp
Well if you can't tell, does it matter?
dougabug
It depends on who made it, and why.
dvfjsdhgfv
It's not that simple. The current generation wave of so called "AI tools" such as GPT-, DALL-E and the rest generate fantastic results because* someone did the enormous work of scraping a huge amount of someone else's work (texts, images). Of course you'd argue humans do the same: they absorb a huge number of inputs and generate content based on that. However, there is something else in automated solutions like this one that places tools like Copilot on the verge of more or less sophisticated plagiarism. And when you look closer at the images, you discover oddities just like in the faces of AI-generated people.
Real art, on the other hand, is all about innovation and exploration. That's one of the reasons there are fewer and fewer traditional paintings in modern art museums. The current generation of AI is still very much a copycat, not a creator. I believe this might change, but we'd need a complete paradigm shift for that - ML is almost useless as the core of such solution, as much as generative art algorithms.
green_on_black
I disagree. I believe that art is eternal, but we still fail to grasp what it means. I don't think art is limited to pretty pictures and poetic prose. For example, if a human laboriously produces a work that they could have simply asked an AI to produce, isn't that starkly superfluous? To me, a performance art.
bee_rider
Painters had to change their business model when photography was invented, but they didn't vanish completely.
awfulneutral
But at least photography created new roles for photographers. AI art promises to replace many creative roles for humans entirely, without creating any new roles.
dougabug
These AI art tools model distributions based on sample data. They don’t create the underlying distributions; they need to be given (many) samples from the source distributions.
You need people even just to say if something is good or not. Standards will rise considerably as AI tools mature, and peoples’ skills with the new tools grow. Things get old real fast and people get bored quickly.
Here’s a new role: creating trademarked artistic styles. People will become tired of what eventually becomes seen as a limited set of “AI styles,” which are actually distilled from the techniques of a relative handful of human artists. So they will seek out “Natural” artists who are able to create new artistic styles. Also, the Disneys and the mega-studios will need and want to create distinctive and commercially protectable visual styles.
The legal framework and case law will have to be worked out. Think of it as “Look and Feel” on steroids. One thing’s for sure, it will create significant roles for creative IP lawyers.
navjack27
Seems like humans are still actively engaged in it. Just place a color blob here and a different color blob here assign those color blobs with different tasks and tell the AI to fill in those blobs with different descriptions.
Melatonic
Not at all - this is just another tool that artists will use.
t0bia_s
Agree. For me, as not very skilled artist (but still able to make living by creating art) it opening new layer to creative process. I can spend more time by thinking about content than just drawing or spending hours for researching specific images.
awfulneutral
You might be right (at least until the AI improves a bit), but even so it promises to make artists more productive to the point that we will need far fewer of them. Unless we are able to scale up the amount of art we need by a huge amount.
Escapado
This is a smart move and goes to show people move so quick on this. I wonder how long before these models overtake stock image websites, get used in games or video production, generate T-shirt prints and whatever other usecase people can come up with.
On that note: Iirc back when I learned about GANs, when they were still rather new there was a clear path towards improvements of them by making the model bigger and feed it _much_ more high quality training data. When I look at the outputs of stable diffusion or Dall-E there are still often visible artifacts and most prominently faces are often weird. Is there a clear path towards improvement here aswell or are we hitting a wall with the "just more" paradigm somewhen?
dougabug
GANs have a key (learned) loss called a discriminator which tells it whether or not the generated output looks real or not. GANs took many years of research to get to the point where they could get to the point where they could generate realistic, full sized images. Progress in diffusion models has been much faster.
But you can add additional guidance to diffusion models, for instance, (possibly pre-trained) discriminative models which detect if certain objects classes such as faces look abnormal or malformed. We’re still quite early in the evolution of this family of models.
in3d
Some Stable Diffusion repos are already using an additional specialized model that fixes faces.
bee_rider
When my friends and I play D&D, usually the host will quickly sketch maps on the fly (just, like, a floorplan or something). This tool seems like 1-2 iterations off from being perfect for that sort of thing.
tomalaci
I knew that eventually Photoshop would get some plugins utilizing AI image generation but I never expected it to happen this quick. From a brief glance at the demo (see reddit link from simonw) it seems to be of decent quality as well.
According to the reddit comment by alpacaAI the plugin uses cloud/hosted solution, however [1]. Locally-powered generation to be added as a feature later it seems.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho...
Still, pretty amazing (or terrifying for some) at how quickly we are advancing with this diffusion-based tech. I wonder what is going to be the next big AI method for creative-work generation?
Krasnol
I wonder how long it will take to get those algorithms to generate hearable music.
marosgrego
GIMP plugin when?
bovermyer
Looking at this, I'm not sure what it does. Something with AI. The image makes me think it's maybe layering results from a DALL-E like AI?
mpaepper
Check here for details about stable diffusion: https://www.paepper.com/blog/posts/how-and-why-stable-diffus...
ChildOfChaos
Yes, Stable diffusion is an open source AI image generator that runs on your own hardware.
RunSet
Gee, I always wanted to register for a product launch.
t0bia_s
Combining Human skill and AI generative power
Register for the launch of the Photoshop™ plugin private beta (More ways to interact with alpaca in the future).
9dev
While the video someone linked here looks incredible, the website has information density around 0. It’s a little annoying to having to research something instead of just reading about it on the project website.
I understand you’re in a private beta, but a demo video, some example images, and a little bit of descriptive text would do wonders in improving the website.
PankajGhosh
Possible name collission. “alpaca” is a ycombinator backed startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/alpaca
eis
Possible name collision: "alpaca" is an animal: https://www.getalpaca.io/_next/static/media/logo.30fd61b8.pn... :)
quantumduck
It's also a popular meta-learning algorithm: ALPaCA: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08912
Well no one cares unless one of the parties has enough money and interest to hire a lawyer.
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There's a video demo of this Photoshop plugin here: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wyduk1/sho...