The post-art world is here! Just think about how history books will remember this period! The styles that will be borne of necessity, of the need to break down art and find what makes it tick.

Also about desktop publishing.

Remember all the printers (ie. people working in the printing industry operating printing machines) that were put out of a job when you could just buy a (electronic) printer for your home computer and just print whatever you wanted yourself?

People were wringing their hands about that too back then... now we take it for granted that we can instantly print whatever we want whenever we want, without having to pay an expensive professional to do it for us (something most people couldn't afford).

Has it resulted in more junk being printed? Absolutely. But it also let people print all sorts of fantastic not to mention useful things that would almost never have seen the light of day without cheap and easy access to home printers.

The xerox copier was similarly revolutionary... as was the printing press itself, which put a lot of scribes out of business.

Photoshop put a lot of airbrush artists out of business, and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?

As with photography, printers, copiers and photoshop, artists who embrace this technology will be able to use it to enhance their creativity and speed up their creative process.

There'll be a lot more competition, a lot more junk but also a lot more fantastic art that we can't even dream of yet.

When I was finishing high school in the early 2000s, we still had teachers who made worksheets that way.

I remember one history teacher in particular. She used a photocopier to get sections from books, cut-and-paste them together, and then use the photocopier again to make the final sheets to distribute to the students.

I was very surprised at the time, but also admired the ingenuity. The process is much more physical than using a PC.

Besides having an ai doing the legwork is no much different than Veronese giving large swath of paintings to his novices while focusing on the two/three major parts.

Did they? Because I don't think they did. I think most people were amazed by all these technologies.

Research beats idle speculation.

Google "photography skeptics early history"

> As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving.”

Ha, dissing engraving at the same time as photography.

Though I wonder if the 'write' meant engraving of a design someone else already produced, or any engraving work at all.

These hot takes generally tell you more about the opiner (or the audience they're playing to) than the reality to come. It turns out it's hard to model en entire universe using 3 pounds of meat.

[1] Heinlein listed some of them way back in 1952: https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1952-02/page/n19/...

Others are interpreting my original comment as "this is not art", but I'm not really trying to make that argument. Art is entirely subjective and i don't presume to define what is or isn't art.

I guess my point is more specifically "what itch does this scratch"?

It's really cool, and that may well be the answer tbh.

That’s 99% of the people. I mean even to learn prompt engineering will probably be too much for majority of those 99% people, but it’s a huge step forward in user friendliness, compared to, say, photoshop.

”what itch does this scratch"?

How many people post pictures on social media? Many of those pictures are not personal, they show something pretty, cool, or interesting in some way. All of those people can potentially use image generators to achieve the same effect.

I hate arguments like this. Even ignoring how dismisive it is of the achievement at hand, why would you assume ingenuity is transferable like that? Someone who makes a breakthrough in physics is by no means likely to have made an equivalently ground breaking advance in biology if they had decided to study that field instead.

I guess my musing was hypothetical but I was careless in communicating that. I get that we can't centrally plan innovation or human effort - and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where this was the case.

I could absolutely see an AI model doing the job of an entire film crew. I have issues with this, but only with respect to the longer term aggregate affects on culture in the broad sense. I cannot honestly believe that much would be lost from the perspective of one project or another.

Most artists spend their lives not refining their brush stroke, but rather their eyes. The way I see it, the impact of curation and artistic direction will matter more and more in the future.

For me it's exciting to use as placeholder art and then have a 'real' artist review it.

I'm biased: I've been working on an image generation app. But the beta users I've had so far will generate fifty or a hundred images in a day. That isn't a use case traditional artists support.

It will; I think the reason we're seeing diffusion models applied to image generation first, is that it's a task that meshes well with the models. But also in general I think people will still be guided by the principle "use the right tool for the job" - this is just another tool. I doubt that the set of paths toward realization for any given needed creative imagery collapses to just "use a model"