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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

This is impressive, but at the same time can't help but notice art is kind of its way out when no skills nor time spent doing anything can be exchanged for just one click and generate art. I watched the intro video and the narrator was mentioning "no skills are needed", "anybody can do this", etc and I can't stop thinking how making art is at anybody's fingertips and yet means so much less. I looked through the generated images and wow, one and one are not bad looking, but after a few hundred images i said OK and closed the tab. I had a quantity overload. So where is the human if novels can be auto generated and have a plot and be good novels and where movies can be made in such a way too with auto generated music and dialogue and so on. You get my drift. It's cool but what is it for, art or entertainment? Is this just a phase that will go away?

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Hey! So I feel a lot of creativity is 'combinatorial', i.e knows what two things might go well together. Artbreeder kind of gamifies that by making it very easy. So many images may look similar but some people can really develop their own style with time.

Also, often my favorite part of artbreeder is when artists take what they save as the inspiration or building blocks for full works. It's really an inspiration tool, but saying inspiration-breeder is a mouthful.

More generally, I think computation can meaningfully augment human creativity by providing surprise and break us out of our loops.

Best, Joel

How was the training data acquired though?

Humans generate art by selection. There's no reason you couldn't have an art ecosystem where AIs do all the generation, humans do the selection, and that's how it bootstraps. AI Dungeon 2 and 15.ai are already taking steps to close the loop by using human interactions to score outputs and train on them ("preference learning").

> where is the human if novels can be auto generated...

not needed. That's where. Better hope you have ownership of some shares in the companies that are generating these things!

> I can't stop thinking how making art is at anybody's fingertips and yet means so much less.

art has always meant something, but only to those who feel it. There's no intrinsic value, no utility to art cept by the eyes of the beholder.

In a sense I agree, but think that some people used to make a living out of it and that is becoming less and less possible. In the long run fewer people are going to be artists and more will steer towards engineering. I wonder if that is a good thing or not.

It is a good question relevant to the big 3 creative mediums today, visual, music, and text... which are all seeing very interesting results with regards to neural net generation. Remember that we are still in the very early stages of the development of these techniques. The quality will end up phenomenal and you will be able to generate works perhaps on par of quality with a human, but in infinite more volume and lower cost. There may even be artistic techniques that are simply out of reach without these techniques. (Think of trying to make movies in the year 1000... it's not quite the same as today.)

I think we will also see that art is not entirely about communication, but also to a big deal simply created in the eye of the beholder.

But is it about quantity and speed though? I think, as human, lingering on a subject is actually working/brewing an idea subconsciously. If everything becomes possible with these tools and they become indispensable we;re going to end up with poorer writers. The effort and the hard stuff makes good writers...

I've had this vision that one day you may write a simple text and when done with it one will be able to choose a command and the same content of the text transforms to the style of Italo Calvino or Hemingway or GG Marquez or whatever you want. At the end of the vision I asked myself what it would mean. My answer was complete vulgarization of anything. This general trend we're heading to where anybody can do anything effortlessly reminds me of Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End. Great book btw.

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