Hacker News Reader

Comment by smaudet | Hacker News Reader

> I feel so happy and excited just thinking about the possibilities these techs are going to bring.

Like what?

I should preface by saying I think art is great, I know a lot of artists who struggle to make a living, and it is somewhat heartbreaking to think of all the poor art students who I guess we should pay for their educations and will never have careers now?

View on HN

If you wanted one original character and you wanted shots of that character from multiple angles with a consistent look, Dalle 2 would already fail.

But a variant of Dall-E that output a textured 3D character model would work fantastically well.

Only if you're sure it didn't memorize a copyrighted input, and only until everyone gets bored with its style or you want your assets to look the same in a predictable way.

True, but artists also sell artwork - my question could be reframed as, if Dalle 2 can produce a Rembrandt, is a Rembrandt worth anything, even emotionally?

I think it's worth pointing out that DALL-E 2 mimics the style of famous artists. The artists had to come up with the original style in the first place!

There are highly competent artists that can create highly convincing copies (fabrications? forgeries?) of famous paintings. Are these paintings worth anything? No, because people find value in the specific contribution to the field of art that the particular painting represents.

I think we should look at DALL-E 2 like a highly competent artist that can produce convincing forgeries and even mimic the style of famous artists, but cannot replace the artists themselves.

I don't know that the metaphor works out in your favor here... if you were to catch an art theif you might send them to prison. If you have automated the process of producing art theives, that seems like a problem you have caused. You HAVE replaced the talented artists, because you didn't need to consult the original artists.

How does this benefit society? Even in the case the artist themselves uses the generator, is the artist better off for no longer needing to create art? It's not like there is an economic advantage, and so there isn't as much incentive to create even original art anymore, someone can just immediately mimic it.

People mimicked art in past, but at least for the artist there was the value of honing their own skill, and remixing or enhancing it, maybe tools like this have the potential to destroy creativity itself.

> I think we should look at DALL-E 2 like a highly competent artist that can produce convincing forgeries and even mimic the style of famous artists, but cannot replace the artists themselves.

We don't know that. DALL-E must encode its knowledge about art styles somewhere in a way which permits applying them to almost arbitrary contents, similar to style transfer. So, what do you get when you 'just interpolate' between artists in the high-dimensional space defined by a multi-billion parameter model? It is vanishingly unlikely that that point in the style latent space will correspond to the output of any artist who has ever lived. What if you manipulate the encoding to push it far away from the latent points of a large set of real artists? And so on. We don't know what that looks like or if the new styles would not be considered 'original' by critics unaware of the machine origin.

We will still need people with taste to drive the machines and curate output.

Also, like, this is how the world works. To cite a hackneyed example, people who worked with horses had to figure something out when new tech displaced them. So will graphic designers, illustrators, et al, if indeed AI is a more competitive option for their services.

Not just graphic designers. In NLP, what used to take years of data labelling, architecture design and model training now is being done zero-shot by GPT-3.

Simple automations can be driven by GPT-3 as well. It needs a representation of the screen and it will automate the task described in natural language.

AI generated images are not art. They might use the same medium visual arts do, but they lack a meaningful vision of the world.

Of course defining art is a subject in itself, but I think that being afraid of AI replacing artists is comparable to thinking photography would when it was invented.

This is a good point - all of the DALL-E images are interpretations of human prompts.

Human insight and imagination will always be needed to create meaningful, useful prompts

So we should halt progress just so people can keep their jobs? I hate this argument whenever AI or automation is brought up, it's probably one of the worst ways to deal with it.

As long as it is progress. What usually happens though is we get a watered down version of what we had before, but since it is cheaper and far more profitable the big companies exploit it to maximum effect. So in reality we lose a lot.

I'm hopeful but skeptical at the same time.

No thought is put into the effects of technology. You can have progress without trampling all over people and their livelihoods, but we don't often see any effort to do this.

Why are we focusing on image generation as the target for AI automation? It's not like there is a shortage of artists, expect perhaps amongst programmer bros. Why are there no efforts to automate away positions such as executive offices? Are CEOs so much difficult to replace than artisans?

"I invented a method to kill people, what are supposed to halt progress because more people die now? I hate it when people bring up that I'm a serial murderer".

There are things I would be doing with AI and things I would not. Being happy about making a even just a particular type of art redundant, well it if it doesn't benefit anyone then why would you care?

Besides, we have banned certain types of research before, precisely because we decided they weren't ethical. Your argument for "progress" is a poor one.

> No thought is put into the effects of technology. You can have progress without trampling all over people and their livelihoods, but we don't often see any effort to do this.

Sure it is, and sure we do. There are ethics in AI boards for a reason at the major AI research companies, as well as many other technology-producing companies.

> Why are we focusing on image generation as the target for AI automation?

Who is "we?" Individual researchers focus on what they want because they like that topic of research. There is no committee out there who figures out, "what industry can we put people out of jobs this week?" No one wakes up thinking, "oh boy, time to put artists out of work."

> Why are there no efforts to automate away positions such as executive offices?

There are. See abstract thinking AI research.

> Are CEOs so much difficult to replace than artisans?

Yes? Abstract reasoning, allocation of abstract resources like engineers (not widgets or manufacturing) is not an easy task to create an AI for, if a CEO is automated then that means we've reached artificial general intelligence. In contrast, like you see with DALLE and others in this link, art is much easier to automate. This doesn't even get to the notion of artists being in a surplus, they choose to do art as their livelihood. Now, you could ask whether it's fair and whether we need a UBI or something like that, but that's a different question entirely.

> "I invented a method to kill people, what are supposed to halt progress because more people die now? I hate it when people bring up that I'm a serial murderer".

Funny you say that because the military has invented many things that are now used in civilian life [0]. Even the smartphone you use is in part due to their innovations. This is not even to bring up nuclear weapons, which while horrific, have effectively been used as MAD, not to mention a highly efficient energy source via nuclear energy.

> There are things I would be doing with AI and things I would not. Being happy about making a even just a particular type of art redundant, well it if it doesn't benefit anyone then why would you care?

You don't speak for everyone. Why wouldn't automating image or video generation be beneficial to "anyone?" I could imagine at least several use cases off the top of my head, such as a unique streaming service for every individual. Artists themselves can also be influenced by such media, it's not like they stopped after photography was invented. Art just changed.

> Besides, we have banned certain types of research before, precisely because we decided they weren't ethical. Your argument for "progress" is a poor one.

Perhaps we shouldn't be banning research just because of some subjective morality. You've shown no argument for why "progress" is a poor incentive, merely that you personally don't know or care enough about it.

And one more thing, art isn't done as a livelihood, it's done because the artist has a deep appreciation for the works they want to create. That some do it as a money-making endeavor is immaterial to this fact.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_inventions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com