Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
imhoguy
chmod775
Our vision of the future used to be one where every unpleasant job is automated, and humans are free to pursue higher callings such as art.
It's increasingly looking we'll all be working in construction, scrubbing floors, or performing maintenance on the machines that took our pleasant jobs.
The saving grace is it'll probably be just 10 hour work-weeks.
The_Colonel
I don't see how generative AI changes the situation.
Most people would always face an uphill battle, producing mediocre art which only a few (likely with some personal connection) would appreciate.
JeffSnazz
> Most people would always face an uphill battle, producing mediocre art which only a few (likely with some personal connection) would appreciate.
Now there's no need to care about them at all!
lwhi
You don't understand why people create art.
You're viewing art as a commodity in a capitalist society.
acomjean
It’s amazing you can ask a computer to create something and it does. But we’ve lost something too.
At work we have a social gathering run by different groups each week. They put up posters.
The past year it’s been very obvious the poster images are ai generated. It’s not like they’re going to hire artist to do this poster…
The older posters were know for sometimes being topical and sometime ingenious (movie poster photoshops where clever).
Now they have better custom images, but custom bland art. I guess it’s better than just clip art.
AStrangeMorrow
Ethical concerns aside (which is a big topic by itself) having been quite invested in the generative scene for years now, no matter what some people say there is a core of more power users that push to experiment with the technology, the styles, the limitations and the weirdness of it. Not that it has crazy complexity, but some still.
But at the same time the barrier to entry is really low. I now see AI art everywhere: in articles, on LinkedIn, on posters etc. But most of the time in the very most basic style. It feels like instead of searching for an image of X people just type "image of X" in MJ / DallE3 and co, and go with whatever generic stuff they get
keiferski
This tech became available to a mass audience a year ago, tops. I would be a little patient: it will take time for people to learn how to use it and not just use the default settings.
WA
Imagine you are an artist and have a specific style and one day you wake up and the computer program that ripped off your style gets credit for that particular style, as in "4000 midjourney artistic styles". Horrible.
rambojohnson
As an artist, your style is not the only thing that defines you. It's about how you use that style, similar to how one utilizes a patent. It involves adding your unique human touch, from your voice to your hand on the canvas. it's not the end of the world.
CamperBob2
Art is a bit like technology in that respect. If you got into it expecting everything to stay the same, well... that was a bad call, wasn't it.
The cracks forming around you aren't fault lines, they're growth rings.
weregiraffe
Style is not copyrightable. It is not, in fact, "yours" to begin with.
bjorglo
[dead]
gfodor
See it’s weird since I would consider this a form of immortalization. Some artists are seeing this way, but very few. It seems crazy to me more artists aren’t being amazed that their entire style is now “canon”
BadHumans
Being immortalized doesn't suddenly mean you stop paying bills
omnimus
See it’s weird when somebody is upset when corporation steals and uses their code I would consider this a form of immortalization. Some programmers are seeing this way, but very few. It seems crazy to me more programmers aren’t being amazed that their entire codebase is now “canon”
nness
I guess at the end of the day, they're just fakes like any other fake reproduction. They'll be sold on marketplaces, occasionally a few buyers will be duped. But most are buying the style, not the artist, and wouldn't care.
The issue for this site is that they're using the artist names against the reproductions -- that could be argued as intentionally misrepresenting the origin of the works. I imagine, in no short order, they'll remove the artist's names or otherwise change the language to reflect that these are not the artists original works.
I'm not sure what people would use these for, other than their own personal use? Maybe inspiration, mood-boarding, or concept art... Some printing at home? I don't know.
dudeinjapan
Names are clearly intended to mean “In the style of ____.” No one would see “Van Gogh” on this page and think it’s an original.
undefined
Brybry
The people who are motivated to create art made art before they were being paid to do so. I don't think they're going to stop.
They might release fewer pieces publicly out of style-copying fears. Or if they get paid less they might have less time to spend creating art.
Personally I think generative models enable more people to make art and may even let professional artists create more art.
croes
More art = less value.
Some people need to live off their art.
maroonblazer
Somewhat of an aside - it occurs to me there's an analog in population ethics here, e.g. Parfit's "Repugnant Conclusion".
Would you rather have a few people thriving and the rest not doing so well? Or is it better to have more people doing marginally better, at the cost of those few thriving exceptionally?
drivingmenuts
And the people most likely to use AI to copy artists probably wouldn't have hired the artists in the first place. Some people are losing on opportunities, but I think. in most cases, those opportunities didn't exist to begin with.
johnnyanmac
>And the people most likely to use AI to copy artists probably wouldn't have hired the artists in the first place
I mean, sure. Hollywood has screwed over artists for decades now. But I don't think that's a good excuse to stop trying to make them pay.
To be clear: however many new indie prompt artists come out of this will be swamped by large studios. I hope this isn't a take I need to elaborate on.
sheepscreek
I think artists who create art out of love and passion will be valued even more. Much like how handicrafts in an industrial and mechanized day and age still have their place. Also the countless “amish furniture” references I’ve encountered are a testament to that.
ethanbond
The artistic record is going to be stunning. “Now you can see an explosion in craftsmanship and diversity of perspectives from the Renaissance, when art became professionally viable outside of the patronage of religious/political institutions, to about 2020, when a new technology made it totally unviable for anyone to dedicate their life to developing artistic works. But hobbyist artists kept making it in their free time, so this is what we’re left with!”
Brilliant.
The_Colonel
Making a living as an artist is often more a function of building a brand, having interesting personality rather than of the art itself.
I don't think AI will affect "high art" much, it will rather destroy careers of "contract artists".
omnimus
There is a difference in material. Mass industrialised processes clearly can’t always replicate what small artisans produce. But when the output is digital most of material differences are gone. There is no reason AI cant generate 100% same digital image or text as human would do. But if you wanted to recreate “amish furniture” you probably can automate some parts but you still end up having the person/artisan. Industrialization didn’t go all all the way as AI did yet if you read people like William Morris it’s clear we’ve lost so much.
octacat
idk, social networks are kinda brutal to artists nowadays. In soo many ways. And too much ai art would make discoverability harder. Even now sometimes if you google some style/artist/a character, top sites on google are AI generators...
pawelduda
A lot of these are very pleasant to look at.. yes, it's easy to spam them so it can get old very fast. But I'm in Midjourney socials and not gonna lie, everyday I see something that stands out and amazes me. Should I feel bad because I'm looking at a flashy AI fake?
jprete
Yes.
throwaway743
No.
johnnyanmac
Maybe
nkozyra
> Dunno, I feel sad about artists a bit.
Well this is coming for every other profession, so ...
ethanbond
A lot of other professions produce essentially solely economic value. Art and journalism are sort of inverted: people happen to be willing to pay for it which allows it to be produced, but the real value to society is external to that transaction. Thus: museums and archives.
It doesn’t make sense to preserve analogous records for most other professions.
deadbabe
As we go deeper down this path it makes sense to me why they destroyed and banned all the “thinking” machines in Dune.
smusamashah
Here is a list of various artist/style cheat sheets available for SD 1.5 and SD XL. There may be other sheets for MidJourney but I have been into SD for a while and that's why I have collected these. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/218e602d508e891a123929ce...
makomk
I do wonder how many distinct artistic styles Midjourney and other similar image generators actually have. Say that you you were to cluster all the styles it knows about based on similarity and then generate images of the same things with all of them - how far apart would the styles have to be before the difference between them is larger than the normal variability in output? It's my general understanding that getting a reasonably decent imitation of a particular artist's style is usually a lot more difficult than just putting their name in a prompt, that what that copies is generally fairly superficial and high-level stuff.
thih9
What would happen if a platform focused on a company like Disney, offering images in the style of Frozen / Cinderella / etc?
Midjourney can already generate fire Elsa[1] and zombie Elsa[2]. I wonder if this kind of usage ever grows enough to start bothering corporations.
[1]: https://prompthero.com/prompt/be1b58e6fef
[2]: (nsfw cartoon gore) https://prompthero.com/prompt/00e7433fb1a
ilaksh
Yes, you can get Disney style and a lot of other copyrighted stuff. Yes, they are very bothered.
thih9
> Yes, they are very bothered.
How? Do you have any examples / sources?
dudeinjapan
If someone generates Elsa wearing Princess Leia’s bikini in Jabba’s palace, do the two Disney IPs cancel each other out? Asking for a friend.
itronitron
I think you would need to combine Elsa with Princess Peach for the IP to cancel out.
KolmogorovComp
Can anyone share artistic projects that have used generative AI? Where it is used as a tool, and not as a goal.
ie something that’s not:
- Poster/illustration where stock photo would have been used beforehand
- NSFW
- Experiments trying to display model quality (like on /r SD)
The closest I’ve found so far was Rock paper scissors (found from HN) [0], but it’s unclear if it was really less work than usual CGI/animation techniques, and for worse quality.
I’d be particularly interested to know it has been used by (amateurs?) webtoons/comics, and how they have solved the issues related to consistency of style and character.
jmilldotdev
https://www.bcad.one/project/7
we produced a connection card game in a couple of months end-to-end using AI. text is a true mixture of our ideas and GPT's 'ideas'. we gave GPT the vibe we wanted, let it generate tons of new stuff, then we heavily curated and remixed it.
art is created and curated by various AI tools. it does not rely on any particular artist's style. we bootstrapped the game using our own money, and this was only possible because we were able to produce our own visual assets.
AI is a tool in our kit just like figma and photoshop. people consistently have fun with the game in our playtest, and we're bringing our first print run to the world soon.
KolmogorovComp
Not to diminish your visuals, but this is typically a non-artistic case of generative AI, where it was only used to cut costs, not by choice.
jmilldotdev
Not necessarily. Both of us (the creators) enjoy using AI in our free time to make images and creating and curating aesthetically pleasing images.
It was not used purely to cut costs.
maroonblazer
Your EI card game looks intriguing! Can you share an estimated ship date?
jmilldotdev
We’re going to get a first run printed at the start of March. Ship would probably be April-May. Doing some final content polishing and playtesting before then.
You can sign up here if you want updates! https://bcad.substack.com/
Adrig
One of the best projects I saw was made during the “early” days of generative AI (2022) and the strange output fits perfectly the story.
Summer Island by Steve Coulson [1] is a short comic book made by an art director who can't draw well. He used the AI to its strengths.
[1] https://ianetica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Summer-Islan...
KolmogorovComp
Thank you! This was exactly the kind of project I was interested in.
elpocko
Last year I used Stable Diffusion + ControlNet to create a ~8x3 in sticker for my pal's motorcycle. I won't share the result here for privacy (and possible copyright/trademark) reasons.
I created the basic design in InkScape, then used SD and several ControlNet adapters to render photorealistic images from the design until one was deemed perfect. My friend loved the result, and since I can only do some sort of glorified programmer art, I wouldn't have been able to deliver a high quality image like that without using SD.
ianbicking
My example is kind of trivial, but I've used Midjourney with its --tile option to make backgrounds for web pages. One case is an internal tool where I just wanted to spice up the homepage and so I put in a rotating background, and another is a game where I put in one of ~50 backgrounds based on the environment.
I don't think many people use the tile option in Midjourney, but it's fun because it's not easy to make tiling images, and the result is generally aesthetic and not representational so the AI aspects are fine.
I have a friend who is using Midjourney to illustrate some instructional material she's writing. It's a little like stock photography, though without AI she wouldn't have used stock photography, and the art itself is more like graphical design. She keeps it fairly abstract but has artists and themes she uses consistently (lots of Ezra Jack Keats). She's probably creating dozens of images to get one usable one. But both of us enjoy the process, there's something a bit meditative to making Midjourney images sometime... a quirk of their Discord interface too, I suppose. Dall-E is much more instructable, but doesn't have any feeling of flow.
I've toyed recently with the idea of creating a massive number of pre-built avatar images for NPCs: https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/111740198056655468 – for my use case the most consistency I need is to change the age of characters, which works well with a fixed seed and no other pose changes. I'd probably use Stable Diffusion because Midjourney isn't scriptable and Dall-E is too expensive and lacks controls for aspect ratio and seeds. Obviously lots of people do live character image creation, but the cost and operational complexity kind of annoys me.
dpiers
I’m creative but have never been adept at sharing visual ideas in my head with the rest of the world. I’ve found genAI image tools empowering because for the first time I can turn an idea into my head into something other people can see and enjoy. I’ve used it for everything from portaits and memes to recreating scenes from my memories that I don’t have photos of to help me remember.
The_Colonel
I use a website with good night stories for children, the texts are written by humans, but the illustrations are AI generated. There's no consistency in style between stories and it doesn't matter. My daughter loves the illustrations.
nomilk
This is really lovely. Care to share the site?
The_Colonel
It's a Czech crowdsourced site: https://www.pohadkozem.cz/
It's ad-supported, low budget (cause small market). There's a new story every day, I don't think the site could afford to hire an illustrator (which would also cause friction in publishing).
There's just one picture in every story, but they usually look nice, and my daughter never forgets to ask to see it, seems to be a highlight for her. I think it's a great use case for generative AI.
CaptainFever
- Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse (slightly, seems to be in-house): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n12kHKvesc
- Everything Everywhere All At Once (Runway AI): https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/artificial-intelligen...
Two massively popular films recently that used generative AI.
CharlesW
> seems to be in-house
This is key. The unethical part is not the use of AI (which is neutral), but corpos taking billions in profits from creators using creators' own copyrighted works. BigAI currently feels entitled to simply take these works for their own use, without permission or licensing.
This isn't hard stuff. Adobe Firefly is an example of an ethical, safe AI-powered art product that has been trained on owned stock images, licensed content, and public domain content.
GaggiX
>Adobe Firefly is an example of an ethical
For many people Adobe Firefly is almost as ethical as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, as the authors of the images were not let to decide.
pxoe
lineart tweening is not the same as generating a complete piece of imagery. seeing this used as a 'look, they use ai! ai good' thing is quite dumb.
johnnyanmac
>ie something that’s not NSFW
Well you eliminate a lot of examples with that criteria.
KolmogorovComp
You’re right, I meant porn rather than NSFW.
Zuiii
This will sound like a stupid question, but is there a downloadable list of all the art styles understood by these models as an offline PDF?
If there isn't, I'm very, very tempted to make one myself. Each style entry consists of a description and a list of models that understand it and any special tags or keywords the model needs to generate output with that style.
I know we have a lot of websites dedicated to this, but this information is more suited for a wiki
JeffSnazz
These are the styles the company's accused of stealing, right?
Legend2440
No. This is a fan-made user guide for people who want to make things with midjourney.
pg5
So...yes, a fan made guide for those
gumballindie
It appears like. Since ai doesnt create art, it relies on someone else’s work to generate novel looking content. But by looking carefully you can see the hundreds of intermixed originals and most important the unique styles they’ve stolen. Pretty sad how ai has been overtaken by sociopaths.
itronitron
All of these have an obvious tell and which happens to be very similar to most commercial photography these days.
nomilk
Site no longer loading (anyone else?). Possible hug of death from hn traffic:
> A timeout occurred. Error code 524. Visit cloudflare.com for more information. 2024-01-13 04:34:06 UTC
Wayback machine gives a snapshot as at a few days ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240113031449/https://midlibrar...
cobertos
They serve a _ton_ of images on the front page, can't imagine what the bandwidth/bill looks like
drewcoo
Mid-journey indeed!
ouraf
Cloning a style doesn't replace an artist. the AI doesn't get things like proper lighting, emphasis, motion, perspective and, above all else, intention.
They're also not copyrightable. if you use an AI piece in your product, anyone can take it and make a competing product with the same piece or prompt chain.
They're good to replace crude doodles or making some references to have a real artist work on your idea, though. that way humans keep their jobs and machine improves the process.
jakearmitage
How can I use this? For example: if I have a picture of my wife, how can I apply one of these styles to her picture? I've downloaded InvokeAI and it runs, but I can't get it to just apply a style to an existing picture.
I wanted to give her a birthday present and her picture using the style of her favorite artist in a frame would be amazing.
phyzome
You could try asking the artist if they take commissions.
ilikehurdles
I asked DALL•E 3 if he takes commissions and he said no. I tried screaming the question at photoshop too but it didn’t answer. I’m still awaiting MSPaint’s reply.
keiferski
Click on the style you want and then look for the text to the bottom left of the image that looks like this: Victorian era cabinet card --v 6
Upload a picture of your wife to Discord (to the Midjourney bot.) Copy its URL and paste it, along with the style words above.
I'm not sure what InvokeAI is, but I imagine the style terms are basically equivalent.
synesthesiam
Look into training a Dreambooth model. Huggingface has a guide for this.
GaggiX
The best way to do this is to train a LoRA so that the model knows the person's likeness.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
Dunno, I feel sad about artists a bit. I hope they won't stop creating. I am sick of these flashy AI fakes.