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.
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.
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.