Is Stable Diffusion a big deal?
definiteoptimism.substack.com
definiteoptimism.substack.com
We live in a system that ties productivity to human worth, that (in the US, certainly) only gives basic human needs such as food, shelter and healthcare to those that are making money for the system. What happens when larger and larger percentages of the population are forced to choose butween uninspired, miserable work and a life of poverty and desperation? What happens when the productivity is locked to those with the wealth to purchase expensive automation tools to do the work, and the wealth circulates between the people making the automation and the people using the automation, with vast swathes of the population being excluded from opportunity?
I'm excited to see this technology move forward, but I'm more excited about what societal effects this type of automation will have.
I once read an argument that said automation would advance universal basic income (UBI) and free up people for leisure and creating art. So I suppose they’ll have more time to create art.
Newness is what gives art, writing, news articles, discourse in general, its value. stable diffusion, GPT-3, etc are simply generating aimless rehashes of what's already been said and done.
example: check out a daily newspaper, online or off. most every sentence of its news articles are based on new facts personally witnessed by the writer in the past week, expressed with the maximum of economy. where's the room for an AI there?
Or fine contemporary art (the kind people pay for). This category of art inevitably incorporates things like commentary on previous generations of art, rejection of previous forms, questioning what an art form is, etc. None of these things can be done by Stable Diffusion's pastiche of genres and influences.
Quickly artists will begin incorporating Stable Diffusion and its implications into their work - but they will create value only by doing things like commenting on it, questioning it, perverting it and rejecting it. And doing so will quickly become passé after it has generated some eye popping art sales.
Of course nothing ever generated by Stable Diffusion will have a dollar value on its own, what it outputs is the very definition of a worthless commodity.
For an earlier example of this phenomenon, check out the work of 80s artist Mark Kostabi, who created his own Stable Diffusion-esque entity in the form of a studio of hack artists who created an endless conveyor belt of oil paintings based on his whimsical, banal specifications. They were terrible and Kostabi was variously viewed as a genius and a laughingstock.
I'm not a visual artist, but just off the top of my head, illustrations in books, magazines, and ads, as well as a lot of video game art, might be producible using these tools.
Of course, while that might reduce work for artists it might make it easier for other people to create things like games.
Pretty bold statement based on nothing but your feelings, seriously doubt this will remain true across all AI-generated images.
As the capabilities, tools, and abstraction layers grow, I suspect we'll see a surge in the value of how the outputs are utilized as it lowers the bar dramatically for creating high quality visuals.
This is somewhat similar to how blogs lowered the bar for publishing text and images to the web. Same with YouTube and video. It's different in the sense that it is not a medium into itself per se, but from a creative production standpoint it has the power to be quite disruptive (case in point, art contests and Newgrounds starting to ban it). Once the copyright piece is made clear of course.
> "How can a human designer compete?"
and the (related, but as noted by @marc_io nearby, quite different) claim:
> "inevitable that this would impact on the demand for human artists, and I think this will start soon"
both need a more careful look.
Regarding the "designer" part -- most people aren't really very good at design and illustration, and adding computers doesn't always help. See, GeoCities home pages, or your favorite desktop publishing real estate agent ad.
People do get tired of sameness in images, and their eyes like new things, personal styles, clarity, chaos, whatever. That's one of the things designers do. See the Helvetica documentary for more [https://www.hustwit.com/helvetica].
Point of comparison: Geoff Hinton's careless claim, made in 2016, that radiologists would be displaced by 2021.
[https://towardsdatascience.com/why-ai-will-not-replace-radio...]
[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/06/07/ai-promise...]
This tech will have an effect, but thinking that design (or, breathtakingly, "art"), is now a solved problem and we can move on, seems premature.
A re-watch of the Helvetica documentary might help here. Desktop publishing changed print design but high-impact print (or 2D) design is still very important and not left to amateurs, for good reasons.
Thanks for the links to the doc as well, looks interesting, will have a watch!
Do you think they will be affected differently? (I have my own thoughts but curious to hear yours here)
I do. Design is more focused on practical problem-solving, so these AI tools are great for helping that, actually. I don't see this as a threat to these professionals at all. Yes, a design project can eventually be considered art, but this is a byproduct of the design process.
People that are invested in specific visual art roles – specially those involved in the creation of a single piece or artwork, like cover illustrators, painters, photographers, and the like – will probably be more challenged by that.
But even then, it's just too early to know the long term impacts. I think that the effects will be highly variable. I'm sure a lot of artists will thrive with these tools, using them as a springboard for their careers – or even participate in the creation of new roles and modalities in the art scene. We have to wait and see what happens.
Illlustrators - So much of the output that I see looks like illustration more than anything. Midjourney seems to love that digital / procreate illustration style. I think this area might suffer in the years to come once the details and strange artifacts start to go away.
Painters - Used for ideation. While I'm sure there are physical tools that can mimic some sort of painting on a surface I don't see it having much impact. A lot of painting is layers, push and pull, imperfections, brush strokes and a tactile surface.
Photographers - If you're a stock photographer you will probably suffer over time. Overall though I think talented photographers are very much going to continue to work. Open up a Vogue magazine and you'll see there's a gulf between what humans are creating and what these tools are outputting.
Others - If you do cheap (not neccessarily bad) work on Fiverr you'll soon be competing with these tools for work. I would be shocked if Fiverr itself isn't investing in these tools themselves.
It is certainly an earthquake for visual artists!
The big deal, or rather deals, are still emerging; and they are big because they are going to be far more disruptive and transformational than the relatively minor crises for working artists and designers that are relatively small. Relatively.
The big things are the things that you can see if you pay attention to the rough edge of what people are experimenting with and doing with these tools, beyond simply using them as drop-in replacements for talented artists/designers.
The first thing people do with new tools is what they are often conceived of and intended to be used for by their makers: drop-in replacements for existing tools, but "better" for some values of better. Faster, cheaper, more reliable, etc.
The interesting things that people do with new tools, are all the new things that can only be done with those with those tools. There is a multidimensional territory that StableDiffusion and MidJourney etc are opening up, and it's not just about media objects proper. It's also about renegotiations of our relationship to various classes of media object.
The word "flood" is used to decry the inundation of generated content. The real story though is that the cost, and half-life, of images of <whatever> quality is rapidly going to zero.
We are watching in real time as striking, thought-provoking, captivating imagery [and beyond], is becoming ephemeral and on-demand and tailored to an audience of one.
Another longer-term but even bigger non-linear projection of where these systems are going, is about the role they occupy.
In the last few days the stratechery.com article on AI "unbundling" has been making rounds.
The analysis is basically sound. But it falls short of identifying the big story, that the step by step automation of the entire "content generation" chain has not reached it its end.
Now, we are in the last moment when humans are necessary as collaborators at all. We still provide executive functions: intention, discrimination, filtering, ideation.
But automation of those things wrt to the media stream and cultural discourse (aka the Zeitgeist) which individuals consume permute and articulate their "own" ideas about, is quite obviously not just inevitable, but going to be done "better" for various values of better, by these seems types of systems.
Will that be "soon"? Well, no; but it's "a simple matter of engineering"—and it will happen.
So... the big story here is that in the near (sic) future, we will live in a world in which superhuman art (and design) is generated for us on the fly. Influenced by and steered, sort of, when we try, to our tastes—but mostly devised for us, on the basis of superhuman discrimination...
...and with intentions and aims we better get a hold of.
The Alignment Problem here is going to redefine society.
This is what I mean: consider for a moment the surveillance society we live in today; and what that surveillance is for: to understand and steer our behavior, for venal economic purposes—and venal political ones.
Now extrapolate to a world in which the discernment, and steering, are effected by superhuman tools.
That's the biggest deal IMO.
Sure, the leverage makes it dazzling and captivating or whatever, but it's still all subject to price constraints and diminishing returns. Youtube is pumping dozens of man-years of content into our eyeballs, has it taken over the world?
Counterpoint: contemporary social media streams, married to surveillance, absolutely has taken over the world, in most senses that matter; in terms both of mind-share and more importantly, in terms of the shaping of beliefs and hence actions.
Spend some time (in social media and its hangers on, natch..) amid groups monitoring things like the consumption of the American right by Q Anon and militia, and who funds and drives this, and (to the extent it is bring prized out and analyzed) how and it is IMO very clear that the world as understood by and acted in by a great many people is for all practical purposes steered (if "only" stochastically) via social media.
The tools for doing that today require craft and human innovation and effort. My point is that the need for human oversight is going to be chipped relentlessly away even as the efficacy of the outcomes increases and the cost of competing in the mindshare market decreases.
But admittedly breathless yes from excitement, and also, creeping alarm. The timescale doesn't justify the increase in pulse rate, admittedly.
But the projection does and I stand by it...