aenvoker

I find the test of “show me AI art that isn’t a rehash” to be a bit pernicious because I have a hard time coming up with any recent examples of non-AI art that I could lie about and claim was AI generated and you’d respond “OK, that AI art is not a rehash.” If everything is a rehash, what are we arguing about?

Instead, my goto examples of high quality creative works that are clearly grounded on AI tools is https://andreaciulu.com/projects/ and https://youtu.be/fyZhC2TXgcs

“model that doesn't possess any agency” implies a model acting on its own. Like a paint brush flying around the room painting the walls with no people around. Or a computer spontaneously turning on and publishing images to an online gallery with no on operating it. The creative process of using AI tools is one of exploration, pipelining and editing.

Commentators strawman image generators as magic paintbrush machine guns. But, the process of using them intentionally is more like nature/street photography. You can’t walk into the forest and declare “I will photograph an owl fighting a fox over a mouse today.” But, you can develop a sense for where to go to find good shots. Now imagine instead of walking in a forest, you can pop anywhere in the multiverse. You don’t know exactly what to expect each time. And, the space is infinite in many dimensions. But, you can still learn to navigate.

And, that’s just the process of direct prompting. One step past that gets you configuring pipelines of highly varied generative editing tools like https://www.runcomfy.com/comfyui-workflows/comfyui-product-r...

From there you get into integrations with 2D painting/3D modeling tools and video editors. Generating references which are used to generate style sheets, then characters, sets, blockings, dialog, motion, base renders, upscales, edits.

“Make me a pretty picture. Masterpiece, best quality” is easy to make fun of. And, it’s common because so easy many people are playing around with it. But, it’s tiresome to find all of the discussion assumes that’s all there can ever be.

I was a content moderator for Midjourney for many years. I’ve seen more AI-generated debauchery than I could ever hope to convey. I also saw 100,000x more joy, creativity, beauty and expression in that same community.

Unfortunately, millions of people playing around having low-key fun making low-effort art is a boring headline. One person getting caught trying to be gross with AI drives a million times more media engagement than a million people trying to be creative for once. So, guess which one the media focuses on.

Web devs gonna focus on web dev things. But, I’m more interested in the works of artists like https://www.rooperainisto.com/ and https://andreaciulu.com/ who embraced the glitchy aesthetic of early AI image generation and made it integral to their art instead of fighting it.

As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.

My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

I talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293

I know the founder through a lot of light discussion. If lots of for-profit alternatives become serious competition, he'd rather move on to something else than take on VC money. His POV is that he already has more money than he ever wanted. All he wants now is to do fun research.

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

I talked more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588293

Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.

The founder is a hardware guy who made enough money to retire young off of the sale of his company, Leap Motion. But, he decided what he really wanted to do was cool research with cool people. So, he started Midjourney. The goal for the AI image generator was to be cool research, pay for itself, and grow the lab. It ended up making far more money than ever expected.

I was a Discord mod for Midjourney when it was still in private beta. I got to participate in some of the discussions of "WTH are we doing and how should we do it?" DavidH is very much a smart hippie idealist. He isn't really motivated by even more money beyond how it enables more fun research. MJ actively refused investment. And, actively refused partnerships that would make them money but wouldn't help build the community or the lab.

So, put together: I can totally see how this looks weird from the outside. But, having spent a few years peeking inside, I'm only surprised it took so long for them to branch out like this.

Not on the VC path. Not even on the max-profit path. Just on the "Have fun doing cool research" path.

I was a mod on MJ for its first few years and got to know MJ's founder through discussions there. He already had "enough" money for himself from his prior sale of Leap Motion to do whatever he wanted. And, he decided what he wanted was to do cool research with fun people. So, he started MJ. Now he has far more money than before and what he wants to do with it is to have more fun doing more cool research.

I rather enjoyed some of these

https://reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1lq299r/postscarci...

https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1o6ickx/dreaming_on...

https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1n6mzig/how_to_buil...

https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1nwdjdn/the_perfect_bo...

https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1m8a9wz/pinkington_rop...

https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1n52kut/derek_the_agin...

https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1muwyah/still_here_...

https://reddit.com/r/DefendingAIArt/comments/1mttoi4/my_not_...

Having spent a lot of time talking to engineers working on AI tools, I find the idea that AI is intended to replace creativity comes entirely from internet comment sections and not from the engineers working on AI.

Having used lots of different image generators, so far the only one with a sense of humor has been Dall-e3.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/s/khb5XuNFdl

There’s probably some sort of connection to ChatGPT in there. But, I don’t know enough about how it works.

SD has a very primitive conceptual model. Basically “bag of words nudging pixels around for a while”. Words near each other influence each other. But, there’s nearly no understanding of grammar.

Midjourney is similar with text prompts. But, with image prompts it is able to understand content separately from style. You can give it a photo of two people and it can return many images of recognizable approximations of those people in different poses.

SD can only start from pixels, blur and deblur those pixels in place.

MJ image prompts probably works via image-to-tokens added on to your text-to-tokens-to-image.

https://itsartlaw.org/2023/12/11/case-summary-and-review-tha... attempted to assign copyright to AI. I think it was mostly for the purpose of getting to officially work through the legal arguments around the issue.

> If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?

Initially, the someone owns the copyright. Then they agree to give it to you.

> If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to your specifications?

No one. It's public domain. As if it was painted by the wind.

This silly music video was put together by one person in about 10 hours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1hbnyi2/comment/m1...

Another more serious music video also made entirely by one person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdqcnRGzH5c Don't know how long it took though.

Check out

https://x.com/ClaireSilver12

https://www.clairesilver.com/collections

from the POV of fashion illustration. Her "corpo|real" collection took something like 9 months to create and was published nine months ago.

And, I am not a fashionista. But, I had a lot of fun creating this piece https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/072/757/0... That took a bit more than a prompt to make. Not a ton more, to be fair. Just a bit.

Best reply I can give ya I already typed up for someone else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743680

Right now there is a ton of stigma around AI art. That stigma fuels a ton of poorly-informed rhetoric against it. There is also tons and tons of casual use of AI art being shitposted for funsies everywhere that reinforces that rhetoric that AI art means "Push button. Receive crap. Repeat."

Meanwhile, as someone who has been engaged with the AI art community for years, and spent years volunteering part-time as a content moderator for Midjourney, the process of creating art via AI with intentionality is deeply human.

As an MJ mod, I have seeeeeeen things.... It's like browsing though people's psyche. Even in public portfolios people bare their souls because they assume no one will bother to look. People use AI to process the world, their lives, their desires, their trauma. So much of it is straight-up self-directed art therapy. Pages and pages, thousands of images stretching over weeks, sometimes months, of digging into the depths of their selves.

Now go through that process to make something you intend to speak publicly from the depth of your own soul. You don't see much of that day to day because it is difficult. It's risky at a deeply personal level to expose yourself like that.

But, be honest: How much deeply personal art do you see day to day? You see tons of ads and memes. But, to find "real art" you have to explicitly dig for it. Shitposting AI images is as fun and easy as shitposting images from meme generators. So, no surprise you see floods of shitposts everywhere. But, when was the last time you explicitly searched out meaningful AI art?

The examples given aren't trying to be artistic. They're demonstrating technical capabilities as simply as possible.

Try it sometime. Don't just type one prompt and declare the job done. Try to make something that invokes a reaction in yourself.

AI makes it easy to generate ten thousand random images. Making something of interest still requires a lot of digging in the tools and in your self.

Well, yeah. If you explicitly try to come up with a cute, gimmicky idea, it's not going to be serious. Taste still matters regardless of paint, cameras or computers.

There's already conversation in AI art about how "Y'all will miss all these weird AI glitches when they're gone!" It will become the new tape hiss. Something people will nostalgically simulate in later media that doesn't have it naturally.

> Did people complain when digital paintings became a thing?

Yes. A lot. All the same complaints. "It's low-effort cheating. The machine does all the work. It's soulless. Art requires a physical process. It looks like crap. It will put 'real' artists out of business."

But then, they also complained loudly when Impressionism became a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentle_Art_of_Making_Enemi... So, it's good to keep an historic perspective.

https://www.midjourney.com/showcase is funded by customers, not investors. Anything in there that's creepy, but not obviously intentionally creepy, is more a reflection on the viewer than the image :P

You don't need to train on pictures of canine golfers to make highly convincing pictures of dogs driving golf carts on Mars. https://imgur.com/a/EIWUJYp The AIs are extremely good at mixing concepts.

I saw a fun tweet recently claiming the main reason we don’t have an AI revolution today is inertia. Corporate structures exist primarily to protect existing jobs. Everyone wants someone to make everything better, but Don’t Change Anything! Because change might hit me in my deeply invested sunk costs.

The claim might be a year or two premature. But, not five.

I have a USB-C cable that only charges when oriented one way.

The rich text presentation is merely cute. But, the underlying feature is very nice. Being able to focus details on a specific aspect of an image without worrying about it leaking into other aspects would be greatly appreciated.

How about a plain-text interface like this?

> A girl with [long hair](orange) sitting in a cafe, by a table with [coffee](^1) on it, best quality, ultra detailed, dynamic pose. [^1](Ceramic coffee cup with intricate design, a dance of earthy browns and delicate gold accents. The dark, velvety latte is in it.)