The reason I don't use AI is because it gives me far less reliable and impossible to specify results than just searching through the limited lists of human made art.
Today, for undisclosed reasons, I needed vector art of peanuts. I found imperfect but usable human made art within seconds from a search engine. I then spent around 15 - 25 minutes trying to get something closer to my vision using ChatGPT, and using the imperfect art I'd found as a style guide. I got lots of "huh that's cool what AI can do" but nothing useful. Nothing closer to my vision than what I started with.
By coincidence it's the first time I'vr tried making art with AI in about a year, but back then I bought a Midjourney account and spent a month making loads of art, then installed SD on my laptop and spent another couple of weeks playing around with that. So it's not like I'm lacking experience. What I've found so far is that AI art generators are great for generating articles like this one. And they do make some genuinely cool pictures, it blows my mind that computers can do this now.
It's just when I sit down with a real world task that has specific, concrete requirements... I find them useless.
Other than stock photos, porn is the killer app for that, but most of the AI companies don't want to allow that.
https://yosefk.com/blog/the-state-of-ai-for-hand-drawn-anima...
Maybe this multimodal thing can fix that?
There has been a lot of progress since then: https://doubiiu.github.io/projects/ToonCrafter/
This is arguably a good thing because if production cost drops it should mean either higher quality or more content.
Even if technological progress on AI were to stop today, and the best models that exist in 2030 are the same models we have now, there would still be years of social and economic change as people and companies figure out how to make use of novel technology.
Only because the free ones slow things down.
Noticed tht.
Maybe it's my algorithm but YouTube is seemingly filled with these videos now.
True, I do enjoy watching the LawTubers and sometimes they talk about HOAs but that is a far stretch from someone taking a reddit post and laundering it through the robots.
What's frustrating me is if I tell the Youtube algo 'don't recommend' to AI music video channels it stops giving me any music video channels. That's not what I want, I just don't want the AI. They need to seperate the two. But of course they need to not do that with AI cover images because otherwise it would harm me. :)
I've produced my own music recordings in the past and I've hired musicians to play the instruments that I cannot. Having exasperated recording engineers watch my 5,000th take on a drum fill that I absolutely cannot play is not the fun part. Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part.
Is having the ai spit out idea after idea fun in the same way for you?
May I ask what you use? I'm not yet even a paid subscriber to any of the models, because my company offer a corporate internal subscription chatbot and code integration that works well enough for what I've been doing so far but has no image generation.
I have tried image generation on the free tier but run out of free use before I get anyway pleasing.
What do you pay for?
I made a logo for an internal product that wouldn’t have had a logo otherwise at our company. I also make a lot of shitpost memes to my friends to trash talk in the long running turn based war game we’ve all been playing, like “make a cartoony image of a dog man and a Greek giant beating up a devil” and the picture it gave was just hilarious and perfect, like an old timey Popeye cartoon.
Two years ago I was spending three hours using local models like Stable Diffusion to get exactly what I wanted. I had to inpaint and generate 100 variations which would have been insanely expensive if I wasn’t powering it with my own hardware.
Now I get something good in minutes, it’s crazy really.
ChatGPT is far, far superior (especially now) when you want something more specific that you've already imagined. But it's slower, and unlike Midjourney you don't get four versions to choose to build and iterate on, you get a single image that takes longer to load.
> four versions to choose to build and iterate on
If you're still not sure let me know and I'll show a screenshot.
They're learning to expect to skip the most important part of creating something.
> they were laughing and we had a ton of fun
I'm a parent so I think I get the appeal, but this to be is like saying "they were laughing and having fun while reading and composing legal briefs." I don't see the advantage, and any momentary benefit comes at the cost of a longer-term loss.
If a classroom of 14 year olds are making a game in their computer science class, and they use AI to make placeholder images... Was a real artist harmed?
The teacher certainly cant afford to pay artists to provide content for all the students games, and most students can't afford to hire an artist either.. they perhaps can't even legally do it, if the artist requires a contract... they are underage in most countries to sign a contract.
This technology gives the kids a lot more freedom than a pre-packaged asset library, and can encourage more engagement with the course content, leading to more people interested in creative-employing pursuits.
So, I think this technology can create a new generation of creative individuals, and statements about the blanket harm need to be qualified.
This is a nice strawman you've put up, but students and teachers are not entitled to nice assets. As you mentioned, there's plenty of free and open source content on the internet, like open game art or kenney, that can be used ethically, or the 14 year olds can make their own assets and understand how much artistic labor is involved in making games. Having them use the theft engine would stifle their creativity, not enhance it.
I kind of think you're also showing an implicit bias in your comment that bothers me a lot in the tech industry. If using AI is okay for the creative labor, why shouldn't the students also use it for the programming too? Why do anything at all?
It feels too me like a lot of people in tech feel that their labor is implicitly more valuable than artistic labor. You think it's fine to use AI for the art because you think that isn't the important part. The importance for you is in the programming only.
Games are massively technical, multi disciplinary works of art that require a wider variety of skills than just programming, yet programmers always assume their contributions are the most valuable, and the most worthy of being taught and passed down to the next generation. The aesthetic value of the art is just an afterthought.
It's kind of why I'm always so disgusted by this conversation. These image generators wouldn't exist without artistic labor, and that labor is arguably the more important contribution compared to the technical labor that produced the training algorithm, but rather than revere that contribution, the members of this community seem almost annoyed that artists are upset with them. It's just so ungrateful. And then you invent these scenarios to justify that theft like this, telling us an artist wouldn't get paid anyway so why are you so mad?
I'm mad because you're telling me this is going to lead to a new generation of creatives while you smother the economies and information ecosystems that support the training of creative skills, and you're too ignorant, deluded, or malicious to stop.
I disagree. When you publish your work, I can't copy it, but I can do nearly anything else I want to with it. I don't need your consent to learn from your work. I can study hundreds of paintings, learn from them, teaching myself to paint in a similar style. Copyright law allows me to do this.
I don't think an AI, which can do it better and faster, changes the law.
Maybe because AI is ultimately nothing but a complicated compression algorithm, and people should really, really stop anthropomorphizing it.
If I wrote a program that chose an image at random from 1000 base images, you’d agree that the program doesn’t create anything new. If I added some random color changes, it would still be derivative. Every incremental change I make to the program to make it more sophisticated leaves its outputs just as derivative as before the change.
You've yet to present a convincing argument regarding the ethics. (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)
If you really can't think of a reason, I don't think anybody here is going to be able to offer you one you are willing to accept. This isn't a difficult or complex idea, so if you don't see it, why would anybody bother trying to convince you?
> (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)
This is lazy and obnoxious.
The idea I expressed is also quite straightforward. That the act of copying something around in RAM is a basic component of using a computer to do pretty much anything and thus cannot possibly be a legitimate argument against something in and of itself.
The audience on HN generally leans quite heavily into reasoned debate as opposed to emotionally charged ideological signalling. That is presumably sufficient reason for someone to try to convince me, at least if anyone truly believes that there's a sound argument to be made here.
> This is lazy and obnoxious.
How is a clarification that I'm not blind to the existence of arguments regarding ethical issues lazy? Objecting to a lazy and baseless claim does not obligate me to spend the time to articulate a substantial one on the other party's behalf.
That said, the only ethical arguments that immediately come to mind pertain to collective benefit similar to those made to justify the existence of IP law. I think there's a reasonable case to be made to levy fractional royalties against the paid usage of ML models on the basis that their existence upends the market. It's obviously protectionist in nature but that doesn't inherently invalidate it. IP law itself is justified on the basis that it incentivizes innovation; this isn't much different.
Just a quick example, what's my proper compensation for this specific post? Can I set a FIVE CENTS price for every AI that learned from my post? How can I OPT-IN today?
I'm coming from the position that current law doesn't require compensation, nor opt-in. I'm not happy with it, but I dont see any easy alternative
The appropriation argument is somewhat unsound. Creative endeavors, by definition, build on what's come before. This isn't any different between code, creative writing, drawing, painting, photography, fashion design, music, or anything else creative. Creation builds on what came before, that's how it works. No one accuses playwrights of appropriating Shakespeare just because they write a tragic romance set in Europe.
The hyperbolic way you've made whatever arguments you had, though, is actively working against you.
It remains unclear if they needed permission in the first place. Aside from Meta's stunt with torrents I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.
> They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy.
A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
Most of the larger commercial entities seem to be doing the work themselves and being quite upfront about the entire thing.
Because all the litigation is currently ongoing.
> A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
Yes let's sacrifice all production of cultural artifacts for the market. This is honestly another thing that's being litigated. So far these companies have lost a lot of money on making a product that most consumers seem to actively hate.
Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.
I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.
Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.
I'd like to suggest that you might be better received on HN if you were a bit more direct about making an argument of substance regarding the ethics.
You've presented all sorts of wild assumptions and generalizations about the people who don't share your vehement opposition to the use of this technology. I don't think it's the person you're responding to with the implicit bias.
You've conflated theft with piracy (all too common) and assumed a priori that training a model on publicly available data constitutes such. Do you really expect people to blindly adopt your ideological views if you just state them forcefully enough?
> If using AI is okay for the creative labor, why shouldn't the students also use it for the programming too?
They absolutely should! At least provided it does the job well enough.
Unless they are taking a class whose point is to learn to program yourself (ie the game is just a means to an end). Similar to how you might be forbidden to use certain advanced calculator features in a math class. If you enroll in an art class and then just prompt GPT that likely defeats the purpose.
This is the view of most people outside the industry.
The ones that pay attention to the markets appear to believe some very questionable things and are primarily concerned with if they can figure out how to get rich off of the associated tech stocks.
This is your opinion. I don't see how these statements connect to each other.
You might have heard this: it's helpful to strive to be someone only a few years ahead of you. Similar to this, we give calculators to high-schoolers and not 3rd graders. Wolfram-Alpha is similarly at too high a level for most undergraduate students.
Following this, giving an image generator to kids will kill their creativity in the same way that a tall tree blocks upcoming sprouts from the sun. It will lead to less engagement, to dependence, to consumerism.
Scams beget more scams
Practically speaking, the work described would most likely never have been done, rather than been done by an artist if that were the only option - it’s uncommon to employ artists to help with incidental tasks relative to side projects, etc.
The market is saturated and the way it works means ten get rich for every million artists. I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history.
Of course there's a lot of talent out there, "wasted", but I think that's always been the case. How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease?
I actually decided I'd probably never write music again after 1-shot making a song about the south Korea coup attempt several months ago. I had the song done before the news really even hit the US. Why would I destroy my own hearing writing music anymore when I can prompt an AI to do it for me, with the same net result - no one cares.
here's the 3-shot remix, the triangle cracks me up so much that i had to upload it https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/coup-detat-symphony-remix
the "original" "1-shot" is on my soundcloud page as well. https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-a...
it's in lojban. That's why you can't understand it. Yes. Lojban. Brings a tear to my eye every time i hear it. fkin AI
[0] more my style - hold music for our PBX https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music also all my stuff is CC licensed, mostly CC0 at this point.
(Just a small comment out of context of the remaining discussion:)
Maybe not many? It could be that "cultural attention" is limited and there's not much space at the top anyways. In other words: It might be that there's always a few famous artists that get remembered and the rest is forgotten. Same as winning the world cup: There's always a team that wins and it says nothing about the quality in a universal way. At best it says something about quality relative to the competition.
(Not sure I'd fully get behind the argument i composed here. But I found it interesting.)
Or maybe they just really were that good.
It hasn't. Look up the collapse of the viability of music as a career. Jaron Lanier has written on this.
So stating that people shouldn't need to worry about starving (metaphorically or otherwise) would be roughly equivalent.
And many fold more than that are forced to drop out to "get a real job".
Of course all of the above is a good thing from the perspective of maximizing the quality of life across society as a whole. But wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to do (as much of) that?
It was largely a solved problem though. Companies did not seem to have an issue with using stock photos. My current company's website is full of them.
For business use cases, those galleries were already so extensive before AI image generation, that what you wanted was almost always there. They seemingly looked at people's search queries, and added images to match previously failed queries. Even things you wouldn't think would have a photo like "man in business suit jump kicking a guy while screaming", have plenty of results.
To think any/all combined stock services would be the end all is just unrealistic. Sure, someone one might have settled on something just because they got tired of scrolling (much like streaming video services), that does not mean they are happy with their selection. Just happy to be done.
Now, with generativeAI, they can have squirrels doing anything in any setting they can describe. If they don't like it, they can just tweak the description until they are happy. It's an obvious plus for them.
I never drank the kool-aid to be all gung-ho on this boom/fad, but I'm not going to be so obstinate that I refuse to accept some people find it quite useful. May someone make all the squirrel attending highschool generative art they want, but you can't tell me some stock place is good 'nuff for everything.
Yes, it's obvious that if your use case is obscure enough, or you need a ton of unique images, they won't work, which is why I said "largely a solved problem".
Also, you're implying that a generative system is so fast that it could create so many variations of your prompt to fill in the search results page in an acceptable time. That's a joke
It’s the same with code. I don’t think software engineers will really be replaced, but small web dev agencies have a good reason to be nervous. Why would you pay someone to make a website for your restaurant when 3-5 prompts will get you there?
The key word is professional. A good restaurant website begins with taking good photos of the premises and the food. AI won't come around to your business and take professional photos.
There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.
HTML templates and themes have been around for a long time. AI can basically spit out those templates and themes, which is great. But there's still a lot to do before you get to www.fancy-dining.com.
I do this a lot, far more than I actually go to restaurants, because I like adding small business details to OSM. There are a few that have their shit together but the overwhelming majority do not.
"Most are generic crap" doesn't mean restaurants aim for that benchmark when they decide to get a website.
I'm not sure if you're refuting the point I was making, which I'll clarify. "Restaurant website" could be a stand-in for any basic small business website. The claim was that AI threatens small web dev agencies who make small business websites. I don't think it will, as millions of small businesses want something better than "generic crap" or cookie-cut AI copy paste; AND we've had site-building services, social media pages, and template-driven approaches for a long time.
Neither will a web developer?
> There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.
Bolt.new can handle all these quite easily. Although I know several restaurants with very simple websites that have a few pics, a menu and their hours.
And now these image-generating models are giving us the equivalent of stock photos without the pesky issue of attribution or royalties. What a wonderful time to be alive.
I can never think of anything to talk to an AI about. I run LM local, as well
Ask it to teach you a language.
DnD works really well (the LLM being the game-master).
I think this will change as more practical use cases begin to emerge as this is all brand new. For example, the photos you take with your smartphone can tell a story or be annotated so you can see things in the photos you didn't think about but your profile thinks you might. Things will get more sophisticated soon.
I have had use for LLMs and previous era image gens. I haven't got around to trying the last iterations that this article is about yet.
That use I have had of it is very esoteric, an art mostly forgotten in the digital modernity, it's called "HAVING FUN", by myself, for curiosities, for sharing with friends.
That is by far the greatest usage area and severely underrated. AI for having fun, enjoyment that feels meaningful.
If you're a spam-producer or scam artist, or industrial digi-slop manufacturer or merchant of hype, or some other flavor of paid liar(journalist, influencer, spokesperson, diplomat or politician) then sure, AI will also earn you money. And the facade for this money making enterprises will look shinier for every year that passes but it will be all rotting organics and slops behind that veneer, as it have since many years before my birth.
I'm in the game for the fun part, and that part is noticably improving.
If a local restaurant is using this stuff we're near an inflection point of adoption.
I've built a simracing tool that's about 50% ai code now, and ai is mostly the boilerplate, accelerating prototyping and most of the data structure packing unpacking needed
It never managed to did a pit stop window prediction on its own, but could create a reasonable class to handle tire overheating messages
All in all what I can say from this experiment is that it enabled me to get started as I'm unfamiliar with pygame and the ux is entirely maintained by Ai.
Working on classes togheter sucks as the ai puts too many null checks and try catches making the code unreadable by humans, I pretty much prefer to make sure data is correctly initialized and updated than the huge nest of condition llm produce, so I ended up with clearly defined ai and human components.
It's not prefect yet but I can focus on more valuable thing. And it's a good step up from last year where I just used it to second check and enrich my technical writing and coverting notes into emails.
With vision and image generation I think we're closer to create a feedback loop where the Ai can rapidly self correct it's productions, but the ceiling remains to be seen to understand how far this will go.
Well, that's because they suck, despite all the hype.
They have a use in a professional context, i.e., as replacement for older models and algorithms like BERT or TF/IDF.
But as assistants they're only good as a novelty gag.
On another note, and perhaps others are feeling similarly, but I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff, LLMs included. If, ten years ago, you told me I would have access to tools like this, I'm sure I would have responded with a never ending stream of ideas and excitement. But now that they're here, I just sort of poke at it for a minute and carry on with my day.
Maybe it's the unreliability on all fronts, I don't know. I ask a lot of programming questions and appreciate some of the autocomplete in vscode, but I know I'm not anywhere close to taking full advantage of what these systems can do.