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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing about generative AI models is they provide a service that's significantly better in both price/output and bests possible output.

In addition to being able to create completely novel, high quality images, they can do so at speeds that no human could ever hope to match. And image models of this quality have only been around for a year, imagine where they'll be in five.

I empathize will all the artists who feel cheated out of these models training on all their data, but the sad reality is these AI models are just far too useful to ever go away. The world's standards for art and text have gone up faster than they ever have in world history over the course of the last 10 months

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Honestly I don’t understand the doom and gloom with AI.

It’s going to make humans hella productive.

For artists that means less staring at blank screens and fishing for inspiration.

The future is that anyone will be able to whip up anything without needing that particular skill that is a blocker. Instead they can pull from collective intelligence and piece something new together.

If an artist wants to make games but can’t code they can make games like a boss in the future because they can funnel their productivity into all the things they were never capable of before.

It’s literally infinite possibilities. Like I’m a software engineer. I’m sure these AI systems will be boss tier at a lot of stuff I know.

That’s good. That means I can finally stop doing the things I hate the most when it comes to making software and do the fun part: solve problems. Just like you use a calculator and formulas to solve problems and not doing every calculation by hand from scratch..

Anyway just my 2 cent. All this doomer talk is being pushed by people to get people afraid. Honestly if you’re at the forefront of technology you should be striving to shape the future for better where everyone can make hella money.

Imagine how much stuff there will be to sell to everyone, and everyone can channel their true potential and creativity into building cool stuff. You like cars and want to make body mods? Can’t code? Don’t know cad? No worries someone has set up a service which helps you easily get those molds delivered to you. And if that’s your thing you can put that workflow together and make money.

Am I crazy for thinking that way?

You’re not crazy, it’s just that people are freaking out because there are many folks that do a lot of this for a living. If anyone can code a game, do all the graphics, music, voice acting, script generation etc. then no one is going to pay those people anymore.

so ideally a single guy with ultra-prompts can create a whole AAA game on his own, while all the other people you used to need don't have to do crunch-time but can do their own great stuff instead? of course the prices for stuff also go down rapidly, but it only needs to be enough for a single guy instead of a whole publisher/development studio chain, so there are several orders of magnitude wiggle room to go

you are only thinking of the first order effects

the main second order effect is that the middle class of knowledge workers ceases to exist

and the third order effect is that democracy no longer works and we either turn into saudi arabia or feudalistic medieval europe

I'd rather GPUs were banned

Some think entire categories of careers are at risk of being less valuable or eliminated. In a society that didn't treat obsoleted professionals like used condoms, that would less daunting. We don't live in that society and won't by the time many people have to deal with the ramifications of this.

Because its gonna eat people's lunch if it gets going. Many in the elite saw their lunch get eaten by the internet and are now against any further innovation, in stark contrast to the culture of the 90s and 2000s. Thus the AI doomerism and the broader techlash you are seeing today.

> The world's standards for art and text have gone up faster than they ever have in world history over the course of the last 10 months

This is a funny sentiment because to me, the exact opposite has occurred. Now that everyone can create work of comparable technical ability, never has it been more clear that taste and other conceptual skills are lacking in those who haven’t spent hours upon hours engaged with and making art.

I’m sure many will decry this as snobbery, but I think this is also obvious in the reliance on various famous artists names in prompts. I expect a similar phenomenon will emerge with AI generated code where things that look superficially impressive are terrible in other dimensions (architecture, efficiency, security, etc)

I agree, but according to some people this is just statistics too. Not sure I agree with this but yeah. Don’t be surprised if you get a response like that :)

Don’t get me wrong, what’s technically been accomplished with the creation of generative AI is amazing. It’s just that it doesn’t make your average person off the street suddenly think with the novelty or acumen of a Max Ernst or John Carmack. But I also doubt that said average person has those aspirations (Max Ernst or John Carmack wouldn’t be exceptional if they did) and also expect that those that do will get buried under the onslaught of pedestrian schlock.

The big problem is the variation. If you want a specific, complex scene it's basically impossible to get exactly what you want in my experience.

I've also found that some words and phrases will overpower the rest of the prompt, so it can be hard to get to specific areas of the latent space.

I think they're really good for mood board kind of work and exploring ideas, but you'll probably still need an artist to create something that is specifically what you want.

Have you tried ControlNet with Stable Diffusion?

I have not! Only MJ.

It's a huge step toward getting the image you want, but like others said, MJ is ahead in quality right now.

So could one use SD + ControlNet for composition, then Midjourney image to image for the final result?

If img2img works in Midjourney the same way it does in Stable Diffusion, probably not. Img2img doesn’t put “guard rails” to keep everything where you intend it to be and will bleed over and make changes to the image. Civitai.com has some really great models I’ve been using to get some really incredible outputs lately. Generally takes me 1-1/2 hours to get something exactly how I want it, aside from things the model just absolutely doesn’t understand (getting a dragon to breathe fire or try making a woman have tusks like an orc, even with an image showing what it looks like the AI has no concept of what the heck I’m talking about)

> The big problem is the variation. If you want a specific, complex scene it's basically impossible to get exactly what you want in my experience.

The UI/UX of a proper workflow is still very janky (even in user-friendly UIs like auto1111), but you can get very specific, complicated scenes with a mixture of ControlNet + inpainting.

> I've also found that some words and phrases will overpower the rest of the prompt, so it can be hard to get to specific areas of the latent space.

I've also had this problem (particularly with multiple colored objects, like "blue eyes, brown hair"). Apparently Cutoff (https://github.com/hnmr293/sd-webui-cutoff) is very good at addressing this "leakage", but I haven't implemented it yet.

Right now, things are really good for mood board kind of work, but there's a lot of tech already available for enabling a lot of back-and-forth "work" on images to get them into exactly what you're imagining. There aren't a lot of good UIs for them all yet though; as soon as they get a little more user-friendly, I'd expect another boom in generative AI for artists (this time, with artists being the primary benefactor).

This is being worked on with a model Deep Floyd supposedly coming out this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlxnDNVkWFo

If working in Stable Diffusion, with ControlNet, Latent Couple, SegmentAnything, and inpainting, you can get incredibly complex scene composition. It's not just typing in a description and getting what you want in one step, but it's still a significantly easier skillset to learn than what would be needed to create the same level of artwork manually.

One shot random prompt stuff is better on Midjourney and I'm still subscribed to it, but I would say I do 99% of my playing around inside StableDiffusion these days.

That, and also simple image to image.

Using a simple drawing of single colour shapes as the original image and a good prompt, one can get quite far in terms of composition.

The desert dome city still blows my mind every time I think about it.

I drew literal stick figures in GIMP yesterday and went from weird lumpy dragon on a castle drawn by a 3rd grader to an epic terrifying dragon in about ten minutes yesterday. The value of both img2img and then Controlnet cannot be overstated for defining what you want in a scene. Literally my eight year old can do it, given I help her with the prompts.

> If you want a specific, complex scene it's basically impossible to get exactly what you want in my experience.

SD with Multidiffusion or another multiple prompts with (potentially overlapping or nested) regions tool, plus some inpainting, can do a lot here.

So can SD with ControlNet, to go beyond text prompting.

Counterpoint: they only generate novel differentiation but won't generate new detailed products.

This basically means you get thousands of different nostalgic triggering visuals but it's a visual trick the same way marvel movies all follow the same premise and eventually satiate the space.

Marvel movies however make more money on average than any other kind of movie. If that's where the money is, that's where the capital efforts of artistic creation will tend towards. Whether the art is trite or original is up to the highest brow critics to determine.

Once you arrive at Ant Man 3, the box office lemon has been squeezed. There is far more money in serialized content, which is also where all the creativity goes.

Partially true, I'm currently working with multiple clients in China where AI generated art is heavily utilised. But we are acutely aware of the limitations of AI, therefore human resources were hired for the purpose of clean up AI art.

Given the cost saving potential of AI art generation, I suspect it'll only be a matter of time before it becomes mainstream in the west.

Instead of having an "us" against "them" mentality, there might be a future where human artists can work alongside AI to push human creativity to a new level.

It certainly should not be an us-against-them mentality but artists aren't the ones that need to change their tune. Being both a career artist and a career developer, I'm privy to voices from both professions. Frankly, I find many developers' tenor disrespectful or even sadistic– gleefully proclaimimg and gloating about the supposed obsolescence of artists like they're taking about their favorite sports team beating a long time rival.

Firstly, this ignorantly trivializes the value, even commercially, of artistic talent (hint, tool usage pretty a small part of it.) The most important ingredient and biggest time sink in bigger high-level projects is the artistic minds that decide what goes on the screen to begin with... how they're made is an implementation detail. The images these algorithms pump out are dazzling to amateurs, but it's not close to precise, reliable or consistent enough to make content for these projects. People who do this stuff at a high level know that this tech will be relagated to supporting tools-- tools that copy one element manually made to many different contexts, mood board or story board panel generators, photo or compositing filters, etc. for the foreseeable future. Insisting otherwise is like saying github copilot is imminently about to replace developers, as if coding is the only important thing that developers contribute to software projects. Sure, it will eventually replace a lot of lower-end utility developers because the higher level developers will be so much more productive, but that's a very different thing. Speaking of that...

Secondly, in the market for the higher-volume, lower artistic effort commodity commercial art, tool mastery IS the big selling point, and that market will take a giant hit. These are people with mortgages, kids approaching college age, maybe carrying for sick relatives or relying on employer-sponsored health care for insulin. And it's not like you're getting laid off and can get another job– your entire category of employment is toast. Someone flamboyantly dancing on your grave in public and smugly telling you to find a new profession is pretty fucking good reason to get defensive or offended.

AI art is also currently cliched in an anti-novelty way. High-level image composition and low-level style are based on the training set and while you can mix and match and tween between different points in the latent space, genuinely novel stuff doesn't come out; you're stuck within a bounded space. They're kaleidoscopes of kitsch. If you want a seven legged demon with three faces all around its head, a monster that doesn't exist and hasn't been drawn in lots of poses in extant art, you can't reach it with prompts.

There's also a "terrain" in the latent space, with valleys of popularity and mountain ranges of novel intersections. Generated images can flip from one valley to the other with a small change in prompt, and it's hard to stay in the intersection. Fine tuning helps alter this terrain - that's mostly what fine tuning does. Rather than teaching genuinely new things, it mostly warps and tweaks what's already there to make it easier to target, at the cost of making everything else a tiny bit harder to get to. Teaching the model new things requires including lots of regularization images to ensure it doesn't forget all the other stuff, which is more expensive than fine tuning or dreambooth.

I like your mental model here, I’ve described it to friends as it feels like beach combing looking for the perfect seashell. I have a vague idea of where to go to find nice pictures through prompts but am not totally sure what I’ll find when I get there, a lot of them are weird and broken, but some can be cleaned up, polished and look really nice. I can’t really affect what comes out of the “ocean”, though, like you said.

Counterpoint: western music is a 12 note scale. Variations *are* "new."

I have a hunch based on no insight or rational thought, but it is that the wall will be generic for AI apropos to art/creation. It will be doomed to uninventiveness.

Yes, it's basically true. For true novelty, you need to create a bunch of examples and teach a model (fine tuning). Depending on how novel it is, it may be hard to teach and teaching may damage a model's generality (over training), so you need to include examples of everything else and train at a lower rate, and it'll take longer and cost more. But it's possible.

> imagine where they'll be in five

We got jet engines in airplanes only 25 years after the first flight. Imagine where we'll be 100 years after!

(There's plenty of progress to be made in gen AI, but don't expect the speed of progress to be constant)

"Tools like Flash and Dreamweaver will render web developers obsolete in the new millennium!"

-90s tech journalists, amateur web 'designers', and other non-coders who assumed they understood software

Standards and expectations increase. People keep the same job title but do wildly different work now even in web dev.

Indeed, that's my point. Web development isn't unique in that respect.

The speed of hardware compute improvements has been on a constant exponential curve for the past 50 years. The speed of increased model capability has been on a consistent linear rate of improvement for the last 10. It would be the exception, not the rule, for this progress to slow necessarily in the near future.

They’ve got electrolytes.

We’re all going to feel like those artists soon I guess.

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