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Comment by KevinGlass | Hacker News Reader

Something about this makes me nauseous. Perhaps is the fact that soon the market value for creatives is going to fall to a hair about zero for all but the most famous. We will be all the poorer for it when 95% of images you see are AI generated. There will be niches of course but in a few short years it'll be over for a huge swathe of creative professionals who are already struggling.

Some of the images also hit me with a creep factor, like the bears on the corgis in the art gallery, but that maybe only because I know it's AI generated.

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I really don't agree. When I work with a creative I'm not working with them because of their content generation skills. I'm working with them because of their taste and curation ability that results in the end product.

The nature of creative work will certainly change, creatives will adopt tools such as Dall-E 2. In certain narrow cases they might be replaced, such as if you are asking a creative to generate a very specific image, but how often is that the case? The majority of the time tools such as Dall-E 2 will act as an accelerator for creatives and help them increase their output.

>I'm working with them because of their taste and curation ability that results in the end product. ... The nature of creative work will certainly change, creatives will adopt tools such as Dall-E 2.

Furthermore, tools like Dall-E seem like they'll lower the barrier of entry for more people to get into art, resulting in more artists, not fewer. Increased competition for the same dollar amounts might make artists, on average, "poorer" (when averaged across an increased number of artists), but this seems like the end-result of any new tool that empowers more artists to more easily make "good" work, not just AI-generated tools.

I'm excited for both 1) more art in the world and 2) in some cases, artists making "even better" art (by combining their existing experience + new tools).

By "creatives" you seem to mean "people who drum up the equivalent of elevator music for ads and blogs". This will not remotely replace any working "creative" people that I know.

Except it will only get more powerful with time, probably at an accelerating pace. Everyone always downplays these legitimate fears about AI, pointing out how "it can't do X". They always forget to put the "yet" at the end of that sentence.

The person I responded to literally made the claim that it would happen imminently...

Perhaps a more optimistic way of looking at it: When mass production became available to art, the idea of an "artwork" had to be abstracted from a unique piece (Walter Benjamin gives the example of a statue of Venus, which has value in its uniqueness) to the idea of art as the output of some process. Each piece has no claim to authenticity, and the very idea of an "original" would be antithetical to its production.

I think art will survive, just like photography didn't kill the painting, the idea of art might simply begin to encompass this new mean of production, which no longer requires the steady hand, but still requires a discerning eye. Sure, we might say that the "artist" is simply a curator, picking which algorithmic output is most worthy of display, but these distinctions have historically been fluid, and challenging ideas of art has long been one of art's function as well

Not exactly. All the ideas put forth in these demos are really arbitrary, with nothing whatsoever to say. Generating crap art becomes more and more effortless: we've seen this in music as well.

Jumping out of the conceptual box to generate novel PURPOSE is not the domain of a Dall-E 2. You've still gotta ask it for things. It's a paintbrush. Without a coherent story, it's an increasingly impressive stunt (or a form of very sophisticated 'retouching brush').

If you can imagine better than the next guy, Dall-E 2 is your new tool for expression. But what is 'better'?

This reminds me of an art class in high school in the early 2000s where I handed in a printout of a 3d generated image (painstakingly modeled and rendered in software over the whole weekend by me) and the teacher looked at me and told me that's not art because it's "computer generated" and I didn't "even use my hands" to make it. Even as a teenager, the idea that art is defined by how it's made versus it being a way for the artist to express intention in whatever way they seem fit seemed really reductionist and almost vulgar to me.

Maybe lots artists of the future will actually use AI models to express their inner thoughts and desires in a way that touches something in their audience. It will still be art.

'art' comes from 'artem' which means 'skill', which is the root of 'artificial' (https://www.etymonline.com/word/art and https://www.etymonline.com/word/artificial)

your teacher was wrong

i had a friend who didnt get credit for his design work because he used photoshop instead of using pen and paper for similar reason, i still find it amazing that a teacher would say such a thing

> 'art' comes from 'artem' which means 'skill', which is the root of 'artificial'

His teacher was wrong but "argument from etymology" is surely a fallacy.

Especially as I grew up in Germany where “Kunst” has different origins.

I paid $1500 for a commissioned painting from an artist I respect and follow as a birthday present for a friend. The painting meant something to me because I worked with the artist to have some input about what kind of a person my friend is, what kind of features I want to see in the painting and how I want it to feel. The artist gave me 5 different sketches and we had tons of back and forth. The process and the act of creating the painting on a canvas from someone I respect is what I paid for.

Even if an AI could generate an exactly equivalent painting, I would pay $0 for it. It wouldn't mean anything to me.

You would still work with the model back and forth with editing the prompt and image to figure out what it meant, what kind of person your friend is, what you were looking for (even the things you couldn't verbalize and only knew when you spotted them in a large array of diverse samples, the sort you could never hire a human to do), how you wanted it to feel... And then you would also have $1500 for another gift. Personally, I would prefer the scenario in which I received a unique meaningful painting from my friend, plus $1500.

Don't entirely disagree with what you're saying - I believe Dall-E 6 or whatever will get to that level of sophistication. One more thing though - I felt the painting is worth more because the artist toiled for it. It's like a "lofi 10 hour soundtrack" on youtube vs. an album from an acclaimed artist. I listen to each song 100 times over from the latter meanwhile the lofi video just plays in the background. Knowing someone toiled over it and put their heart and soul into the art gives it the value, for me.

> Perhaps is the fact that soon the market value for creatives is going to fall to a hair about zero for all but the most famous.

But...that's always been the case for creatives.

  >  for all but the most famous

OK DALL-E, generate our logo in the style of ${most famous}

I disagree. I think it will be a lot like how technology has effected music production.

40+ years ago, it was hard to access the equipment necessary to learn music production, so only a small slice of the population was able to learn these skills. And availability made the process take years.

Today, you can download free software that enables music production, and if you have a good ear, can create something "good" in weeks. This has led to an explosion of musical experimentation by the youth: a teenager can now create a great electronic dance song with devices they already own if they have the right creativity, taste and dedication.

Similarly, everyone has an imagination - many people have visual imaginations. The gating factor of art production is largely the mechanical memory of how to transform mental concepts into the right shapes and hues to express that visual concept to others.

With these sorts of tools we are going to have an explosion of art hobbyists. I've played with some similar, more primitive AI art generation tools and it is a lot of fun. People will be creating works of art from their couch while watching TV that rival the quality of what professionals are producing today.

The same thing was said when book printing was invented, that we would lose the fabulous scribes that manually duplicate books with a human touch, while replacing them with soulless mechanical machines.

Or when synthesizers and computer music was invented, that they will displace talented musicians that know how to play an instrument and how now everybody without a musical education will be able to produce music, thus devaluing actual musicians.

Or when human computers were replaced by electronic computers. In hindsight it was a good thing, many more people are working in computer related fields today.

https://www.history.com/news/human-computers-women-at-nasa

Just wait until they figure out music.

I imagine it will affect artists much the same way wordpress has affected web designers.

Maybe everyone will have an AI image as their desktop wallpaper, but if you've got cash you'll want something with provenance and rarity to brag about.

Also, I think creatives are valued for their imagination. If you wanted something decent, would you pay someone to sift through a million AI generated images to find a gem, or just pay an artist you like to create one for you?

> you'll want something with provenance and rarity to brag about.

1) That is a tiny share of the market. Most of the market is - I have a game / online publication / book, and I need an illustration xyz. Which this AI seems to solve.

2) how do you even prove your rare art wasn't painted by an AI?

1) Sure there's a lot of work for that kind of thing but creatives typically earn a pittance. I doubt an AI could meet your specific requirements without having to spend hours(?) tweaking it or sifting through countless variations for the 'one'.

2) Because we haven't built a machine that can paint (etc.) with traditional materials like a skilled artist?

Can I opt-out from ever seeing AI generated images please?

Nonsense. This is merely a tool and helps lower the barrier of entry to be able to produce imagery.

By the same logic you should also complain about any number of IDEs, development tools, WordPress, game maker systems like RPG maker or Unity, after all if anyone can just leverage a free physics and collision system without having a complete understanding of rigid body Newtonian systems to roll their own engine it'll be too uniform.

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