Voyage Through Time | Hacker News Reader

Voyage Through Time

twitter.com

98 pointssblank23 comments

There's a lot of negative angles towards AI art generation, many of which I personally agree with. But at the same time we should not be blind to possibility.

I think this example, even if rough around the edges here and there, looks incredibly promising to me in the field of education. To make dry subjects far more engaging. We're visual creatures after all.

A visualization like this, if done the traditional way, would be completely out of reach for most. Now/soon anybody can do this, whether it is a teacher, Youtuber, small documentary maker, etc.

It may not be long before you can feed a novel into one of these and get a graphic novel as the output. That's quite exciting.

AI might easily be a complement, not a substitute, to traditional artistry. It'll enable schmos like me to think up a cute illustration for our blog, corporate brochure or lecture. Meanwhile the real artists can get on with doing innovative work - which will still be distinguished from the AI stuff by its originality (at least until we get AGI, of course).

Sure, but what about all the people who currently get paid for creating cute illustrations/photos for blogs, corporate brochures, and lectures?

I feel like they will go the same way as people who had their jobs replaced - or improved - by automation. I mean at the moment they can expand their portfolio with AI-generated artwork and sell it across their existing customer base.

What about all the blacksmiths, farriers, coachmen etc who got displaced by automobiles. Or certain famous textile workers who got displaced by knitting machines...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Luddites were hanged, I hope you are not suggesting we hang illustration artists.

They were hanged for murder (in retaliation for deaths) after protests and then judgment for capital crimes.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

Where exactly in this current situation are you seeing murder and retaliation taking place?

Or are you being funny?

I don't think it's fair to just wave away such concerns. Automation lowers the number of people necessary to create something. This shrinkage of the available labor pool only happens faster with computer automation. The way the world currently works, this is a problem - people need jobs for money.

As entire classes of skilled labor evaporate, there will be significant societal implications. There is also the problem of the significant centralization of power and money that comes with a future where AI performs the work.

All major changes have significant societal implications practically by definition. And luddites were having real problems too, people needed jobs for money then too, and the concentration of wealth was also a problem. Recognizing that these are old patterns repeating is not waving away the problems, but understanding that such problems should not paralyze us from making progress. Similarly it is important to understand what were the issues that luddites (and other movements before and after them) were fighting against and learn from what has happened in the past so we might best avoid the worst pitfalls.

Those people will have to work out how to adjust before the web developers, accountants, paralegals, etc. -- but not much before.

I think eventually some of today's illustrators will not find employment. They'll have to find some other work, maybe some of them will operate these programs.

I feel like not enough attention is on the future of AI or computer automation to devastate many types of employment. It already allows increasingly automated factories to produce more without needing so much human intervention. Did you notice that McDonald's wants you to order with a touch screen now, and you can check out your groceries with one harried clerk managing 10 checkouts instead of doing one at a time.

I expect that entire industries will shrink their workforces. Because the us is this place where we don't have very good social safety networks (because half the country thinks that makes us strong or something), the poor will find it harder and harder. There will be ever fewer people working in farms, many other kinds of physical labor will pay less with low demand. What's the end game? We in software are lucky for now, we tell those displaced to get educated and get a better job. What happens when/if there is a need for fewer of our kind? The world will be happy to save money for our labor if or when tools like GitHub CoPilot become more usable.

I think you're severely underestimating things. You should project the current state (which has some shortcomings) into an exponential rate of improvement.

This was amazing. At first I wasn't sure what to expect. I guess most AI art is kind of like that.

Once buildings were introduced it kind of stayed there through different ages for about 2p seconds. I guess this represented f The 1300-1800s, quickly went modern but the post modern and hyper future/dystopia to utopia vibes was pretty unreal. Love the piece.

There are beautiful collaborations happening where artists are taking AI art-generation as part of creation:

image: https://twitter.com/Mathieustern/status/1557723720386772994

video about image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYJwb2m_Vq0

I thought it was really cool and I noticed towards the end, it shifted away from organic evolution to architecture and structures. Then I saw farther down he posted another one projecting into the future the evolution of man and perhaps his replacement. If you did not see that at first, skip ahead on the second one to around 2:45 in.

It’s cool and all, and I don’t mean to knock it in any way, but how is this not entirely “about novel aesthetics”?

The author wrote the text and the AI did the drawing. It's a new tool, and a powerful one that's likely to get more powerful and refined over time.

Their time dimension feels logarithmic.

Cause our perception of time it is. And the sequence was created by the author. Paleozoic? Mesozoic? It seems equal close for our mind.

i'd like to see something like this done with music.

Check http://melodysheep.com/ to tickle your brain in that way.

Jsosdnnxjddk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com