As mentioned by mrandish on the initial DALL-E post [1], disrupting the stock photography market is a big one.
From an artistic point of view, the value is zero. Dall•e pictures will never have any Aura to them. And for an artist to use them artistically Dall•e is “too easy”, as the artist won’t have produced or worked on the model itself.
All in all, Dall•e is the most exciting, technologically advanced, and beautifully useless AI project I’ve ever seen.
Why is DALL-E (or more likely its successors) not suitable then? It can produce a large amount of similar pictures based on a vague theme.
> Dall•e pictures will never have any Aura to them.
Debatable, I actually really quite like a lot of its art. Regardless, nobody uses stock photography for its "Aura".
Today my personal biggest use of AI is for generating photos of faces as profile pictures for tabletop rpg character sheets. I don't need them to be perfect, I just need quick, easy, cheap content that's good enough.
Tomorrow I might use Dall-E to create illustrations for my blog posts, or depict environments for my tabletop campaigns.
They might be "too easy", but they'll be cheap and quick and good enough for the purpose.
People who want cheap but unique abstract art for their house, small business owners who need ad clip art but don’t have the budget for a designer, even artists using DallE queries to generate launchpad ideas, I can imagine many reasons DallE would get used. But also don’t forget to imagine the future, this is one of the first and it’s bound to be improved until you can’t distinguish it from “real” art.
There’s a valid point in your comment about how artists currently look at AI, and a valid question about what AI produced art actually means, so I’m throwing you an upvote because I don’t think you deserved to get downvoted for sharing your opinion. Maybe more importantly, AI generated art could challenge and rekindle the age old debate about what art actually is, and bring a new perspective to the table.
You know what's really impressive, that just got out? Adobe's Premiere Pro Auto Color feature based on Adobe Sensei. Ask a colorist or a filmmaker how it works for them. Is that something that was possible because of fringe research like Dall•E? Honestly, no.
As someone who designs and makes fine furniture (not the way I make my living, but I do know the business), I know that there will likely always be some demand for custom, hand made pieces, because people assign value both to getting exactly what they want, and to the fact that something is human and hand made. When people who value those things have enough money, they'll spring for that value. But I'm well aware that the bespoke and hand made will never be more than a 3rd decimal place rounding error in the ocean of factory made furniture that fills our homes and workspaces. Images can go the same way, and will, if the price differential is right. Most images in the "image marketplace" are not art, after all, but rather anonymous commodity visuals augmenting the presentation of an idea, or product.
this isn't supposed to make designers useless but rather make them more creative.
dall*e can be used as an inspiration to combine multiple images & create their own. it can be used to steal color combination that is aesthetically pleasing on the eyes.
if you think dall•e is useless, you haven't seen the images shared.
the realistic ones are hidden by openai but they can generate a lot of stuff that we won't know until an open-source version comes along.