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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

>This is one of the most important moments in all of art history.

I agree, but not for the reasons you imply. It will force real artists to differentiate themselves from AI, since the line is now sufficiently blurred. It's probably the death of an era of digital art as we know it.

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Making art is already not making much money for the vast majority of producers (outside of 3d modeling). There really aren't very many jobs in making art. I'd reckon most people are artists because they love doing it.

This is completely wrong, the digital art industry is enormous and, mind you, pretty uniformly pissed off that this model has been trained off of their non public-domain work.

They're mostly posting incorrect claims like "all it does it make collages out of other people's art" though. It doesn't do that; the model stores about 1 byte per original image it's seen.

Think of that 1 byte as a hyper-compressed essence of knowledge necessary to make said collage. Then it will be correct. Those models would not exist without the labor of the artist community - which in this case was used without consent and without pay.

These models would exist, just without painterly style. Most of the training data is photos of real things, a lot of which is stock photography that has been ripped off much in the same way like those artists. It is a challenge to copyright law, but if artists are allowed learn by looking at other peoples work, why treat an AI differently?

Because the AI is not a person and there is no reason to treat it like one, including by allowing it to "learn by looking at other peoples work".

It's probably okay to learn facts from copyrighted material even if you're an AI - you can't reproduce the text of a novel but you can learn the meaning of a word from context in it. Similarly you can learn to draw a hand from looking at a ton of stock photos with hands, as long as you produce original hands.

AI will need some favorable legal precedents to avoid getting banned though, or else they'll have to only train off CC0 Flickr/Wikipedia scraping.

I also think it's a more obvious problem that it can reproduce copyrighted characters by eg prompting for "Homer Simpson".

You're kicking the can down the road. Obviously, an AI is not a person, that's in the premise of the question. What makes an AI so different from a person that warrants differential treatment in this case? It's not that there aren't any good answers to this question, but yours is not much of an answer at all.

Did we say the same in the 80s when audio sampling became a thing? We accepted it (after obligatory legal battles) and moved on, giving rise to the Creative Commons.

Yeah, the fact that these models are necessarily based on existing works leaves me hopeful that humans will remain the leaders in this space for the time being.

Human works are needed to create the initial datasets, but an increasing amount of models use generative feedback loops to create more training data. This layer can easily introduce novel styles and concepts without further human input.

The time is coming where we will need to, as patrons, reevaluate our relationships with art. I fear art is returning to a patronage model, at least for now, as certainly an industry which already massively exploits digital artists will be more than happy to replace them with 25% worse performing AI for 100% less cost.

The generated pictures that are posted in the blog post are superior than the average artist work. Which isnt surprising, AI corrects "human mistake" (e.g. composition, colors, contrasts, lines, etc) easily.

Why would people want to consume art that says nothing and means nothing? While this technology is fascinating, it produces the visual equivalent of muzak, and will continue to do so in perpetuity without the ability to reason.

That's the problem for me too. This tech is cool for games, stock images etc but for actual art it's pretty meaningless. The artist's experience, biography and relationship with the world and how that feeds into their work is the WHOLE point for me. I want to engage, via any real artistic product, with a lived human experience. Human consciousness in other words.

To me this technology is very clever but it's meaningless as far as real art goes, or it's a sideshow at best. Perhaps best case, it can augment a human artistic practice.

It's easy to generate believable backstory. A large LM comes to write the bio of the "artist" and even a few press interviews. If you like you can chat with it, and of course request art to specification. You can even keep it as a digital companion. So you can extend the realism of the game as much as you like.

Oh, nice take! Reminds me of the chess world, long time ago chess entities that could beat any human in the world have existed, people wouldn't play them because losing all the time was boring.

But then came the neural network chess engines (powered by the same training technology of text to images generators), which even people enjoyed playing for some time due to novelty and how they learned how to play from scratch (Alpha Zero, Lc0, et al.)

In the process to get there, we got networks of all kinds of strengths, you could find one exactly as strong as you, and its mistakes were like the mistakes you would make.

And yet, they were missing the "human factor", people would rather play against other humans online, some even willing to pay for accounts in places like playchess and chess.com to play other humans.

As the networks became stronger and then stockfish assimilated them to get the best of both worlds with NNUE, nobody cared and there was even an explosion of human vs. human chess (when twitch.tv and youtube stars were playing each other and the audience didn't even care how bad the chess was, it turned out that it held up as a great spectacle despite, or thanks to the stars being novices - and the race to get better at chess.)

Now chess bots are just a curiosity and only used by people without online access to other humans, I wonder if it'll be the same for art, and if "show your work" becomes a thing.

You can ask an AI to produce a great picture... now try asking it to make a video of you making that art from scratch and the creative process - the whole art section of twitch tv is about the artist's process, and yes, there'S some people that get enough from that to dedicate all their time to their art.

Great example!

We want to interact with conscious entities for the obvious reason as well that we want to connect. A machine is a blind, dead entity. There's nothing to connect to. Also, even if the output is far superior to a human in limited domains, eg chess, the way it arrives at these outcomes is sort of banal (if clever). It's not intelligence and its not thinking, I think the 'intelligence' part is a misnomer in AI but perhaps its a semantic argument. To me at least, consciousness is fundamental to our type of animal intelligence. I'm a naturalist through and through, we might even be able to create animal-like intelligence and consciousness one day, but until then at least, interacting with Turing machines is a cold boring experience if you know what is really 'inside'.

The line gets blurry when a dead machine one day passes the Turing test, but if I ultimately knew I was interacting with a philosophical zombie, that would kill the appeal quickly.

Is the insinuation that games are not actual art? Don't you feel the perspective of a machine is a thing to also marvel at?

How much is really being said by the highest dollar-valued modern music?

https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ and https://youtu.be/L2cfxv8Pq-Q come to mind for different reasons.

We can tell the difference between muzak and "real music"; we just dislike the muzak. But the real risk and likelihood is that we get to the point that AI will be generating art that is indistinguishable from human-generated art, and it's only muzak if someone subscribes to the idea that the content of art is less relevant than its provenance. Some people will, particularly rich people who use art as a status signifier/money laundering vehicle, but mass media artists will struggle to find buyers among the less discerning mass audience.

Marvel Studios makes billions of dollars every year

And I'm fairly confident in saying that AI will never be able to generate a Marvel movie! (Not in our lifetimes, anyway.)

Considering the phenomenal progression of Dall-E-1 to Dall-E-2 in just over a year, I'm not really understanding your confidence on the limits of AI content generation.

An AI would need to generate:

* Coherent video

* Characters with backstory

* Dialogue (including jokes and witty banter)

* Music

...among many other things. Plus, the training set for video is orders of magnitude smaller than for digital art. (And is additionally burdened with copyright issues.)

As I see it, there's simply no path from the DALL-E of today to something like that. And all for art that, essentially, "says nothing and means nothing".

Check out https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo - progress is being made on coherent video generation.

Characters and dialogue are effectively solved, just look at GPT-3.

The entity behind StableDiffusion is also supporting generative music art, so let's see what is coming out of that: https://www.harmonai.org/

We are currently far away from generating a production quality movie with AI, but I don't think it's going to be nearly as long as a lifetime. In my opinion, we'll have high quality AI shorts within the decade.

>Characters and dialogue are effectively solved, just look at GPT-3.

Is this the motherload of exaggeration?

Current language models cannot generate coherent dialog (and even then it's mostly bad dialog) spanning more than a minute or two. And their current capabilities in that area are definitely significantly below those of the average human writer.

We were talking about a Marvel action flick, I don't think incredible dialog spanning multiple minutes is much of a thing apart from exposition dumps. I asked GPT-3 to spit out some paragraphs from a hypothetical script for Thor 5:

INT. DARKNESS We hear a faint beating heart. A moment later, we see a light slowly growing in the darkness. As the light grows, we see that it is coming from a glowing object in a person’s hand. The object is a hammer.

We see the face of the person holding the hammer. It is Thor. He looks tired and beaten.

Suddenly, we hear a voice from the darkness.

Black Panther: You are not welcome here, Thor.

Thor: I know. But I must speak with you.

Black Panther: You have nothing to say that I want to hear.

Thor: I come bearing a warning. Thanos is coming.

Black Panther: We are prepared.

Thor: He is not coming alone. He has an army.

Black Panther: So do we.

Thor: Thanos is not like any enemy you have faced before. He is ruthless and he will not stop until he has destroyed everything that you hold dear.

Black Panther: We will stop him.

Thor: I hope you can. Because if you cannot, then all is lost.

Eh, looks real enough to me. Fine tune the model with all the specialities that make up Marvel movies and you'll crank out good-enough drafts in no time.

>cannot generate coherent dialog (and even then it's mostly bad dialog) spanning more than a minute or two

I think that was pretty clear and that posted dialog is a perfect illustration.

You cannot generate the entire movie script coherently without significant human input and that's not going to change in the next several years. So, your initial claim that dialogue is "solved" is indeed false.

GPT-4 is going to be released soon and blow everyone's minds again. And maybe you've been talking with GPT-3 in comments all this time /s

Or maybe I haven't and GPT-4 will be ~on par with PaLM, already exhibiting diminishing returns as expected.

That's true. But the thing with technology, and the reason we've kept up with Moore's law is that someone eventually has a bright idea that leaves current methods and improvement extrapolation in the dust, and then the real thing happens earlier than the most optimistic dates, and performs better than what people expected. The question is not if one day an AI can generate a movie that you can't differentiate from a human-made movie. The question is how long will it take for an AI generated movie to be better than all the human-made movies in history, if it's possible at all it'll happen much sooner than people think possible.

>then the real thing happens earlier than the most optimistic dates

Is this like with self-driving cars that were supposed to be a consumer product in 5 years...in 2012?

Or like when Hinton said radiologists will be completely replaced in 5 years...in 2016?

By the way, Moore's law hasn't been a thing for a while in its original spirit.

Can photography be good art? Is Marcel Duchamp (found object) art? Can good art be discovered almost serendipitously, or can good art only be created by slowly learning and applying a skill?

I think art is mostly about perception and selection, by the viewer. There are others that think art is more about the crafting process by the artist. How do you tell the difference between an artist and a craftsperson?

One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981875

Disclaimer: I am engineer.

For those who are lucky enough to make it, I foresee patronage as being much more stable than making art to sell to the masses/corporate ad contracts.

Humans are trained on other humans' work as well though. Is there a type of ideological or aesthetic exploration that can't be expressed as part of an AI model?

Maybe this will signal a return to "real" non-digital artwork and methods...

Wait here, this shit hasnt hit France yet :)

Those models are trained on artists work and put those same artists out of work. When people will register I dont think this is gonna fly.

> Wait here, this shit hasnt hit France yet.

What is special about France in this case?

Labour protections/willingness to strike, I suspect they mean. But I don't buy it. I've seen far too many people who "should" be worried about this technology instead be absolutely in love with it.

Case in point, the comic artist Jens K (who, f.d, I support on Patreon): https://twitter.com/jenskstyve/status/1560360657148682242

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