Perhaps the depressing thing for some artists is that they need to adapt to this and up their game. We've seen the same with photography. Every idiot can now have a decent phone camera and there are plenty of people on Instagram doing not so interesting things with those. Does that invalidate what really good photographers do? No. But it does make their work less special when an AI guided camera in the hands of an absolute amateur can produce photos that are decent. And now with this, you could produce realistic looking photos of things that don't exist by simply asking for them in the right way.

More content means the quality standards are raised. There are not a lot of artists left that make a living scratching things in rocks. But there are more artists than ever. The only real limitation is their imagination.

That’s what we will see: a far smaller percent of people who have the pleasure of paying their bills by working in the arts. It’s all already so commoditized, I don’t know a single artist any more who can do it full time except one woman with a gallery I met the other day on a road trip. Is she going to have to go back to her old career of environmental policy soon?

Can I tell the AI "that looks great, keep the trees and house, but I need the door on the right side, and the sky a bit less cloudy". Will it be able to incorporate such instructions without "remixing" a very different image? Can it "understand" the suggestions the same way a human can without having to go into so much details that it essentially becomes procedural generation? Is this even something that's possible with the current approach?

If that's not possible, then I can just as well google and hope to find a matching image.

It’s not as sophisticated as you described, yet, but close.

In addition I can imagine that it is a matter of the training set. As of now, the AIs seem like jack-of-all-trades, so they know a bit of a lot of different styles and topics. But with Stable Diffusion being able to run locally, you could specialize it by training it with high detail on, let’s say, landscape photography. So then one might be able to direct the AI more precisely.

what you've asked for can be accomplished with existing techniques

All content is not created equal: we are social animals and what people around us do interests us much more, even if it is of lower quality. So, if anyone can generate professional-looking creative projects with relative little effort, we'll gravitate towards people creating content on niche subjects that interest us; thus creating small communities with high engagement. Even if they have low watch count, they'll matter to those participating in them. Fanfic communities already work that way.

There always be a place for conventional mainstream media outlets creating run-of-the-mill high-production-value works, with themes averaged to appeal to the masses; it's just that they'll have a lot more competition from communities of the first type.

Had they had to draw the episodes the old-fashioned way, they would have had to put a lot more energy into the animation even to get the same result.

People using Dall-E or Midjourney naively will be like those unremarkable classicism painters in the late XIX century doing realistic yet conventional paintings which nowadays you can create as studio photographs.

Meanwhile, brilliant artists will train new AI models throwing in data collections that have never been seen before as their training input, to generate completely new styles - just like the -ism movements threw all academic conventions away in pursue of new art styles, bringing us modern and postmodern art.

I too hope it gets better, but it's hard to replace a panel of experts that have sifted through their subject when it comes to quality recommendations in some fields.

When I had Netflix I remember being frustrated that Netflix would recommend me shows "based on" content I had watched for a few minutes, decided I didn't like, and backed out of. Why would you recommend me content if you have a strong signal I dislike it?

This is the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32482523

and it's well worth reading the article.

TL:DR; AI is good at something, but don't expect it to be aligned with what the user wants.

I don’t think DALL-E can even persist a single 2d object between scenes. For example, if you create an animated character you like, I don’t think it’s possible to ask DALL-E to render that same character in a different scene.

And you’d need 3d training data to create 3d rendered scenes, where a camera can pan/zoom realistically through a scene. There’s probably much less of that kind of data available. What we do have is artificially created 3d scenes in movies, but it’s not always very realistic, not to mention proprietary.

If VR kicks off and people can start easily recording 3d moveable scenes then we might start seeing AI creating similar scenes shortly after.

3D can often be inferred by 2D data, 3D training data could also be generated, etc. Think how fast the space has moved just in the last 3 years and extrapolate from that, don't focus too much on today's shortcomings.

Sometimes tech hits a plateau.

Animated movies make tons of money, so there’s definitely motivation to make their production faster. I just think the complexities are so intricate that I wouldn’t be surprised if AI-generated animation still seems “not quite right” in the near future.

There’s so much labor that we more directly need more of and that we could all benefit a lot more from automating it.

To give a mundane example off the top of my head- street cleaning. I live in a big city (Berlin) which is often filthy with litter. Obviously there are not enough people cleaning it (or it wouldn’t be). Can’t we automate that instead? How about automating construction? Part of the reason housing is expensive are lot prices but surely a lot of it is also labor cost.

It just feels like such a frivolous and relatively useless thing to automate, and a misallocation of resources.

This is the misallocation of resources I’m referring to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

Conclusions:

(1) Perhaps we should, winning at net zero games is very much a thing in the current way

(2) Didn't know it when I started writing this reply (not at all!), but I guess I agree with you

(3) I really miss Old Google, and how we happily trusted them (deservedly or not)

Otherwise these things are not connected in any obvious way and humanity has been known to work on many problems at the same time.

The whole point about Berlin (I live there too) is that it isn't Muenich. Muenich has clean streets, high cost of living, and is frankly a bit bland and boring. People are a bit uptight and conservative there. Not a great place for creatives to express themselves. You find a lot more of those in Berlin. And it's a big part of why Berlin is so awesome. Some Berliners, consider former citizens of Muenich gentrifying their formerly their neighborhoods a problem. Especially, when they start whining about how noisy, unclean and messy things are.

Lots of people losing their jobs over this also means more available workforce for those more important jobs of yours

Aren’t the machines supposed to make our lives better?

I wish we could spend our collective brainpower applying AI to fight disease, climate change and poverty instead. That would make life better.

Isn't this the case already?

For example, I have recently discovered science fiction poetry exists. The amount of stuff that gets produced in this niche of a niche is baffling already, and growing almost exponentially.

I feel human curation and editing will just have to be important again.

There being lots of low/mid quality games is, I think, a problem that already exists today on app stores -- on Steam especially between Greenlight & vast numbers of games 'releasing' in Early Access... and the more that a single writer with some dev skills can do on their own the more opportunity they have to develop their games as a brand, and get feedback to fire their creativity.

Or programmers who are bad at art, so, programmers in general ;)

I would have gone logoless rather than slog through trying to find an artist on Fiverr.

Imagine applying that same perspective to software, pre-github.

Like you say, this is an existing situation (I hesitate to call anything that lowers the barrier to entry a "problem"). The printing press opened up printing for more people. As did desktop publishing. Similarly, garage band and bandcamp make it so much easier to produce and publish music. Yeah, there's a ton of books and music out there, including a bunch of junk, but the cream still tends to rise to the top. I'd rather take my chances on having to find a masterpiece in a haystack than have it never get published at all, either because of lack of funding/lack of some specific skill that AI can handle/no willing publisher, etc.

This is not a problem, the issue is with Steam of whoever curates this content for us, with some good filters you can avoid the problem. My first program and game was garbage but it was not on GitHub or Steam to bother anyone, so the issue is not that people have access to good tools (I was using some Visual Studio for students edition) the issue might be that maybe some services have bad filters.

For new indie devs, please use whatever tools make your vision , publish them, ignore the haters, you will probably not make a living from Patreon or donations but if you love what you doa nd makes you happy that is the important thing.

I wonder if we might see something similar with these ai generation tools. People who become experts at crafting the queries to get back the results you are looking for act as intermediaries.

Iron Pineapple has an entertaining series he calls "Steam Dumpster Diving" which is similar to this, but it's very focused on Souls-Like games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KARY5ocvKo&list=PLuY9odN8x9...

It does sometimes include games many of us have heard of but there are a lot of unknown games, and plain bad ones (he has a soft spot for student projects too). I think he sees the value of new ideas hidden in jank, as do I, so I like the series.

I think the shift will be towards matching personalities, you get to know a reviewer and see what they like and how compatible they are with your own opinions. It doesn't have to be a one-to-one match as long as you're aware how they diverge on certain genres. The curator section on Steam seems to be an attempt at this, but any social media that allows following/subscription could serve too. It's still a significant time investment to keep up to date and to even find that matching personality.

I wonder if I actually bothered leaving reviews on Steam, would it suggest people with similar tastes to me?