But do these artists have anything insightful to say about inequality or exploitation? No. It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal. The truth is that "statement art" is, almost without exception, just bad art, but people wrongly believe that: (a) there must be a deeper meaning to it that they don't understand or (b) people who say art is bad are philistines. And if art is just supposed to make you think, even when the artist didn't have any deep thoughts themselves, then SD art can easily meet that benchmark.
SD art will be good enough to decorate your home and office with. SD art will hold its own in art galleries, if it doesn't already. That's much broader than stock photography.
What I and some insiders consider the real art - that is, applying rare well-developed talent to production of unapologetically high-quality sensual artifacts of art - is mostly commercialized by now, with best people employed by the media corporations to produce assets for high-value games and movies. I have nothing but respect for the talent it takes to create something that is valuable on its own (contrast with modern art, not valuable without of the context of its social network), and feel a tinge of sadness seeing that SD will move the equilibrium here.
The real crux of the matter is that we should provide artists with some decent UBI guarantee, and this should be a humane solution to impending poverty, for each of the professions that are going to cease being commercially viable in the near future.
All art is only valuable within the context of its social network. If you leave the Mona Lisa in the woods, the only real "value" it will hold is as a shelter for bugs.
I think what really bothers you here is about which social networks define the value for certain kinds of art. High technical skill art in service of mass media artifacts like videogames and films is sort of the most "democratic" of uses of art. Almost everyone can perceive its value and it asks little of the consumer in return.
Contemporary art, the kind of stuff people here on HN hate, is different. It is deliberately created to provide value only to the small set of people with the context to appreciate it. It's sort of a continuation of a very long conversation that if you haven't been on the inside of, you miss out on. That leads naturally to valid claims of elitism. (The fact that it's also used as a large scale money laundering enterprise by the very rich certainly doesn't help.)
The unfortunate part is that the collateral damage this inflicts on the general idea of niche art. Anyone who has ever created can tell you that the more specific of an audience you target, the more deeply your art can move them. If you're trying to write a song that a billion people will like, it can only be about the most banal of platitudes. Now write a song about what it's like to lose one's spouse to alcoholism and turn to drinking to deal with it. Few people can relate to it, but the ones who can, well, you can pierce their soul.
The idea that you need context to understand a piece of art is totally valid and one of the most important tools an artist has at their disposal. Likewise, it's not a failing when a piece of art only aims for a small targeted audience. Don't let the snobbery and elitist trash of the contemporary art scene taint those concepts.
Let's notice the elephant in the room: HN commentariat is a biased sample with an obvious overrepresentation of autistic people. I'm likely not too much ahead of the curve here, as you can see.
I hope this pretext will add to your charitable interpretation of what I have to say. As they say "autism speaks, it's time to listen". Consider this a hypothesis.
I cannot say this condition is overwhelmingly beneficial - honestly I can interpret it as a bit of a handicap, something that, among other effects, makes the child disinterested in people around him in his early formative years (yes it's most commonly "him"). Instead the child is made to focus on the world and things in it on his own terms, as a one-of-a-kind being starting from the almost pure blank slate - with the blank slate here, perhaps, being an overgrown PFC full of fresh synapses. This makes learning one's world and one's inner depth harder compared to normal individuals - which have the right set of biases and heuristics to start imitating other people early on, standing on the shoulders of giants right away, learning the behaviors that passed through many aeons from parents to children and quickly arriving to a socially-bootstrapped form of self-awareness. And for the autistic One the world (and, apparently, the self) is an alien world which is being conceptualized for the first time ever, and the society is an alien configuration of beings which feel and behave quite differently from how one would expect them to, if they were kin to the autistic. Even when one grows up to like it, it's still like being an eternal foreign student everywhere you go - yet your relationship to the world you found yourself in becomes deeply personal.
What I'm trying to say is this predicament makes one much more likely to learn the world on the world's terms, same with oneself and one's feelings - beauty sense included. Having developed in this way, the social concept of beauty you describe is a vastly alien thing to me - I can understand it, but it's like understanding physics of some abstract phenomena. Myself, I just feel beauty, as it developed inside of me as a palette of feelings resonating with certain structural patterns in the world's percepts I come across - something having to do with information-theoretic regularization in primate neocortex, as I may guess. No social reinforcement was necessary to arrive to this feeling, it has a sense of finality and self-referentiality to it - something basic and indispensable, something valuable.
Does it sound scary, cold and alien to you, or simply incoherent? That's how your idea of socially mandated value sounds to me - shallow repressiveness of one's social graph pushing supervised learning examples into your very soul, re-flashing it with the weights of the collective simulacra, of the lovecraftian entity - a disembodied communal sense of value (can't even call it "beauty" as in the limit it's completely arbitrary, a value-language defined by social custom) - to make you one of them, a part of the eusocial organism? This is 1984-level scary, reeducation camp-level, basically.
... And with these new neural networks I immediately felt some sense of commonality, as if they were from the same metaphorical planet I came from - tiny blank slates learning compressed sense of the world as it passes through them, their beauty and my beauty approximating the same information-theoretical Eidos.
However I must reject your claim that your experience of Autism gifts you with some sort of objective view of the world, art and aesthetics that allows you to judge all contemporary art as 'trash.'
Period.
We're watching the Third Industrial Revolution unfold live and in front of our eyes, and it will only take a few short years to fully sweep into all aspects of society.
Yes, Picasso and Banksy will continue to have value. But that's an infinitesimal sliver of the value that is about to be unleashed upon the economy.
The real value is that startups like mine will give anyone the power to generate new Taylor Swift songs [1].
New movies, new music, new games. All tailored to the nichest and most exacting of interests.
You want the steampunk vampires of Cloud City, featuring Sean Connery and young Eddie Murphy duking it out while riding on the backs of space whales? You'll have that in just ten short years.
If you think TikTok adequately captivates the minds of the population, you have no idea what a finely tuned search for people's true interests will do.
Humans won't be good enough at satisfying other humans anymore. Not without aid.
The new world is going to blow our minds, and it's already beginning to unfold.
In about a year, I don't know why anyone would dare work for Google, Amazon, or any of the other legacy businesses. They're going to be swamped and struggle to stay afloat amid the biggest single act of the Innovator's Dilemma to ever happen in our history.
[1] This is happening. My startup does it.
Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_0JjYUe5jo --> https://vocaroo.com/1hgjjnVNqWjk
(We'll have the Obama and Taylor Swift versions up on our site soon.)
Our video stuff is under development, but I'll show you something analogous that a skilled competitor is doing in the open (though they're underselling themselves) : https://imgur.com/seBTPG8
The whole world is about to be carved up and reallocated.
I'm going to get back to work. See you on the other side.
Well, at least your drug dealer is apparently supplying you with the good stuff. I'll bet 10k any day that the combined value of all companies purely in the generative space will not exceed the value of a single FAANG company in 5 years. Yes, including Netflix.
That the gilded creators of «the real art» want your pity? To be construed as without agency in all of this?
You elitist buffoon, you know not of what you speak. You know what you like, but you dislike and question the motives of that which you do not know nor care to. Keep it to yourself.
If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.
Much as I love my friend, after the exposure I’ve had to modern art I have to agree that it is almost without exception meaningless trash.
Look, let’s just be real for a moment here. Take a step back and ask yourself what’s more likely: that (A) there really is something deep and mysterious about the banana-on-the-wall or (B) most actual artistry disappeared with the invention of photography and modern artists are LARPing, sustained by taxpayer handouts and the financial fumes of the money laundering and tax evasion that high end art is used for.
Modern art is a joke, and everyone including the artists know it.
I can tell you’re the kind of thoughtful serious guy who likes good, tasteful and neccesary things, and yet! You dislike bad, tasetless and unneeded things. I do too, and so does everyone else, on balance.
Ps: I feel obliged to remind you to not say the quiet part out loud. Not because the elephant in the room might trample you, but because at least one reader had to muster heroic amounts of good faith to not dismiss out of hand the substance of your post due to form. And even still, I could not abstain from this disclaimer.
Mind if I use them in my gallery's modern art exhibition?
If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!
> It's always trite, reductive, and utterly unoriginal.
This is simply untrue, modern art is not "always" anything. And who are you to judge what is going on in the mind of an artist?
I don't know what decade you deem to be "modern" art, but there is a huge amount of 20th - 21st century art that is jaw drop. You are the same as generations and generations of people who have been wrong and stuck in the comfort of the status quo. I hate to refer back to Van Gough, but you are a version of the people who missed the point there. And I suppose the social commentary of Pop Art is just trash too?
AI art will hang in a gallery if it evokes a feeling, not because it's a bloody good execution of a painting of a tree. This is how ALL art has been since we moved beyond painting wealthy people. It has to capture an emotion, thought, idea, or whatever else is intangible. Being able to get that intangible feeling across to the viewer is what is special. Not the quality of the craft, that's artistry.
I truly feel sorry for you not having been moved by something more than a beautiful oil painting.
What would be some examples of that? Not disagreeing, would just like to have my jaw drop
Frank Bowling: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-drdu5rtf9kE/XVwj7nRK9_I/AAAAAAAAU...
Hew Lock: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/23/96/b5/2396b5b8e03a33aa62b6...
Tom Price: https://assets.yellowtrace.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/11... (more here: https://www.yellowtrace.com.au/tom-price-synthesis/)
If the art made you think about a deeper meaning, is it better the artist put it there for you to find, or that it enabled you to freely think? I think too many people have “High school English class” syndrome. There’s no single right answer to extract from looking at art to give you that A+. It’s about self reflection, reflection on the experience and context of the art, and learning about the world around you. Everyone has a different experience and a different perspective and everyone gets something else out of it.
Can this be accomplished with SD art? Yes, but the curation of the model, or exact wording put into the model is still needed to provide some expected output that evoked the emotion. Artists may even modify an output as a starting point or inspiration, but “gallery” type art isn’t consumed for simple entertainment value like an Instagram photo feed, but as a destination experience (for sufficient expense to fund human artists too).
I remember this specific example because the artist was paying the workers to do a pointless job. Technically, she was breaking the law. If only for that I thought it was interesting. I am not saying I always like this kind of performance art, but sometimes it reaches you in a way that a painting could not.
https://phantasmagoria.stavros.io/images/RSXTZVMjYhTdyTmE/
I want to hang this on my wall.
Sadly, the market for the kind of art that the these models cannot disrupt is relatively small compared to the kind it can. There aren't a lot of people making a family-supporting living doing installation art. Most people I know with art degrees do illustration, photography, or are part of a video game or film asset production pipeline (or they draw tattoos, but that's a different matter). If I were them, I would be looking at the next generation of this technology as a potential threat to my livelihood. I don't want to be alarmist, but it is a possibility, and it'd be weird to dismiss it.
One other thing I'll tack on here is that I find it fascinating that the kinds of skills required to be "good" at using these image generation models — "prompt engineering" if you like — are largely different than the ones required to create art from scratch. You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that. If AI generated art is determined to be a kind of art (as I believe it will be) the parameters of what we call artistic ability may change.
I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.
It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.
This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.
But then, if you're a great studio painter, SD doesn't threaten your livelihood in any meaningful way, whereas if you're the sort of artist that produces video game assets, you've probably already got a keen eye for spotting rendering issues, and prompt engineering and inpainting and producing concept images AIs can work with are all likely to be skills you pick up considerably better than the average person... and then it's just another tool.
As someone intimately-amateurly involved with AI artwork over the past six months, I've come to disagree with the term "prompt engineering" as a description of the skillset. It's not just feeding it a good prompt (which is not that much of a puzzle once you get into it, and is close to being a solved problem in my book), but instead a whole iterative pipeline of human-in-the-loop hacks and touchups in order to make up for the tech's existing faults and unwieldiness. Many aspects of this pipeline, interestingly, are already familiar to digital artists.
I think the specifics of this pipeline will continue to change on a weekly basis until we reach a plateau in the technologies. But, novelty lies at the heart of all art: I don't think the pipeline will ever be replaced by one-shot, completely automated and brainless txt2img processes. Even if the difference between "beginner artist" and "expert artist" shrinks to a hair's breadth because of access to AI, it goes back to that xkcd quote, "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." We will continue to instinctually desire and respect the efforts of people who go the extra mile to create something just a little more perfect or a little more original.
This isn't a cheap shot on art (the same can be said for many things people enjoy, including much of fiction). It's to say that I think that this will replace "art as a low margin service" but not "the art world."
Indeed. There was a time in the past ages in which one had to wait for a certain dye to arrive in your local merchant, take it and mix it with another dye in order to be able to paint a color that you need painted in your painting. They also waited and scoured for brushes and other supplies.
Those tools and supplies becoming available widespread and easy did not reduce the quality of art. It made it easier to do art. Artists gained more time to express what they exactly had in mind rather than going through the mundanities of having to deal with tools and supplies.
Computers have done the same. A lot of the art that can be done through computers these days, including the much-underappreciated art of creating virtual worlds and tales in computer games, would be dreams for the artists of earlier ages.
AI won't be any different.
The artists now will be able to say "Put a distant view of Shangri-La, half visible behind a misty mountain during sunset, as the traveler gazes at it and wonders when he will finally arrive there". And they will have it.
Now, from this point on it gets interesting: Notice that how it was extremely easy for the artist to get a scene that conveys a particular emotion created. What was difficult now, and what was the final work of art in the earlier times, is now just a simple statement. Everything got much simpler.
Meaning that, the artist will be able to convey more complex emotions and situations, creating more refined art.
That's what happens when we give more tools to people and make a given level of doing anything simpler: People start building more advanced stuff, and the complexity moves to the newly emerging level. Like in software. Will be the same in art.
Not so fast. To me this is the part that people are glossing over a bit too quickly in those discussions.
How does the person making this know it's actually good art? How do they pick between the 40,000,000 variations of that composition they're capable of generating?
Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And people will need to refine their taste to extreme levels to get there.
It's the same with poetry. What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
Does it mean art essentially becomes a purely curation, taste-based endeavor?
Just throwing some random questions out there.
How did Van Gogh know he was making good art when he cut off his ear...
> Wouldn't they have to be familiar with principles of composition, color, dynamics, and so on?
It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
> As it becomes easier to generate the art, it becomes more important to be capable of differentiating it (except for purely "industrial" production where "good enough" will do).
And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
> What's the AI worth if it's supposed to generate Shakespeare-level writing, but no one is capable of assessing its quality?
If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
I wouldn't know, but I'm not sure what that point illustrates?
I'm fairly sure Van Gogh had a pretty good idea how his art was different/stood out from what existed, and could articulate why he did it a certain why (i.e. why it was good, to him at least). I'm far less certain about some random person with no art background typing a prompt being capable of the same analysis/understanding (that's also why 99% of AI art so far is transparently derivative).
To be clear — my point isn't that AI-art is bad or whatever. It's that it could displace/change the nature of what making art is about, and that incidentally it might require new skills or more extreme versions of existing skills, making the fear of the disappearance of "artists" overblown (and as a corollary making the idea that anyone can become capable of creating meaningful art exaggerated as well).
> It really doesn't feel like art is something that can be formulated and constrained as such. And it never was. All of those are techniques to effect certain results to convey the emotion or the idea. If the computer already does the technique part, what's left to the artist is to imagine, feel and express.
Right, but "expression" isn't something trivial, that's the point. If the prompt is "Harbor scene", there's a billion ways to realize that. Someone would presumably have to have the vocabulary/knowledge to navigate that space and produce something worthwhile in the end.
There's probably something to be said about the amount of control the artist gets on the output as well. The more we try to reintroduce post-hoc adjustments to e.g. an AI-generated image, the more we make "new art" look like "old art" (i.e. requires significant specific technical knowledge, albeit with different tools that paint and brushes).
Maybe it hits a balance, maybe it just goes back to the same situation as before.
> And you can be sure that people will differentiate themselves. Like how they did in every age before. Moreover, those who had a talent for art, but not a talent for all the techniques and the tricks that goes into making that art happen, will now start making art.
Yup, that's another important point. AI just becomes the new normal. But it will take skills to stand out given that new tool set. AI generated "art" will be seen the same way we see children doodles.
> If an AI is generating Shakespeare-level writing, and no one is capable of assessing its quality, then that's Shakespeare-level writing and its good.
Eh, disagree. If people had no knowledge of what poetry existed in the past or no understanding of it (think average college freshman essay), it certainly wouldn't follow that AI-generated crappy nursery rhymes would become Shakespeare-level poetry.
> Let's face it: Most of the 'high quality' criteria comes from our beautification and exaggeration of the arts of the past. There isn't any objective formula that is used to assess the 'quality' of any art.
That's why I made the point about curation.
If there's no "objective" quality to art, it's entirely narrative-based, whether on a past canon, or some sort of manifesto/principles something should stick to (think of modern art movements).
The job becomes completely different — it's not about the technical details of the work itself, but about how it's inserted in a larger cultural phenomenon ascribing certain values to art itself or certain principles in particular.
> If art creates thoughts and emotions in you, its good art.
To the person creating it, maybe, but then we're definitely talking about something different than ("high") art the way it's been talked about in academic discourse for the past ~2500 y. There has so be at least a common perception about the value of a piece of art for it to be considered as such.
The surprise is not because it’s furry — the art scene is such a large fraction of the furry economy that the introduction of AI art is approximately equivalent to introducing modern farming to, IDK, the 1850s or something — but rather because of that site’s lack of reputation with regards to technology.
Although, perhaps that explains why the quotation is “That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.” rather than the billions in the training sets.
I still don't really know what to attribute the attitude to, but it seems to be a pattern.
If they charged a small amount per submission probably the would stop users submitting 40 images per second.
I'd say the opposite. Seeing how shit SD was at generating placeholder products for a demo, and how it fails at stuff like proportions, depth, etc. the only good applications I've seen so far is abstract/concept art where you suspend disbelief because of the setting.
I think abstract art is lower hanging fruit. "High art" will be impacted as long as someone spins it into a story, it mostly reduces into social circles and selling bullshit to eachother anyway.
A note here, the term "modern art" is usually used to define a period of art produced sometime between 1860-1960. When discussing artwork created today (or since about 1950), most would define that as "contemporary art".
Do you happen to have a link? This sounds amazing. I wish more artists and mainstream would come forward to help immigrants. The way the states treat the immigrants is inhumane. We should open our borders, not build more walls.
To do a practical exercise, I just enter to The Atlantic website, which in my memory has some level of quality on custom illustrations and photos/collages to represent a concept of the stories. The Atlantic now is paying designers/illustrators and stock image websites to create this images. After the research, I believe that using AI will be useful in many cases and will reduce costs for sure. What do you think?
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AI + Human "AI querier"
AI is able to do this just from a text query and maybe a human tuning the query
* https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/crypt...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delon...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/free-speec...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/icebreake...
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AI + Human "AI querier" + Human designer/artist for visual adjustments (merge/remove stuff/retouch)
* https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/09/care...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
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Not sure
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/liberal-de...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/developin...
When talking about Stable Diffusion and art there are usually two different aspects of art. I am not going to try to define art, but sometimes we refer to art as illustration, or stock images (what SD puts in danger) and some as broad modern art.
I am no trying to say that one is more valuable than the other, but want to qualify these two, because some art is not painting pretty pictures.
In the modern art interpretation artists will not lose to SD. SD will enable them to do different things. There are many examples of famous artists that commission the execution of an artwork fully, without painting, sculpting or doing any other work. I remember an example of an artist paying illegal immigrants to hold a wall (that could not stand by itself) in a gallery, to touch on social issues.
I am not an expert in art. My point is, in modern art SD will be one tool more (although it might create new influences) at the service of the human that gives it meaning.