LAION, a high school teacher’s free image database, powers AI unicorns
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Pinterest, "their content"... not sure I agree with that but if we're going to use the logic that things saved to Pinterest by it's users becomes Pinterest's content then isn't LAION doing the same thing and the content becomes LAION's content when it's saved to their database of images...
Edit: Apparently LAION doesn't republish the content, only the metadata, so it's not a copyright violation. Still, it would be nice if got permission or offered a way for artists to be excluded from the data set.
It obeys robots.txt, and the user-agent is documented.
"LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e. lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT texts found linked to those images."
I'm surprised link rot doesn't make this a big problem.
that the non-profit LAION is going as far as intimidating the creators of the images they used.
They don't publish the image, yes, and that is also their reasoning. However, in my opinion, the intention behind all of this seems obvious. They circumvent copyright claims by being a non-profit and not publishing, but with the clear intent that the image will be used to train some system further down the road. LAION appears to be a key player in how these text-to-image models dodge the copyright bullet.
Links are still mostly legal in Germany, if the link is to something which is not, it’s a different situation and different from "hey, I own the copyright of my images, don’t link to them!"
I very much disagree.
No, their reasoning is that they only keep a link to the image so there’s nothing to remove.
A more interesting angle would be copyrightable ALT tags in the form of poems or other creative content. But, the cat is already out of the bag as it’s probably easy enough to strip poetry or other copyrightable out of alt tags with the technology we’ve got at this point.
I'm well aware of it, and that's also what I wanted to say. However, as I mentioned, the dataset with the links (to copyrighted material) is provided for machine learning purposes. Saying "We only provide links" is a lazy excuse from a guy with a smirking face.
If artists don't want their work to impact the world, they're free to keep it to themselves.
This whole discussion that we should allow individual artists to opt out of AI art through contracts or some other legal vehicle is a non starter, because it'll be impossible to administrate and enforce at scale, and there's too much incentive and ability for big tech to just ignore them and steamroll artists. They aren't a unified bloc, and even if they were how would they ever compete against big tech?
So what to do? Looking at productivity gains over the decades, it's not clear why we are still working as hard as we are. It's long overdue that productivity gains should come back to the people. Maybe "artist" shouldn't be a job title associated with profit/income seeking. If you want to be an artist, maybe society can support that.
Maybe instead of using all those productivity gains to do more more more, we can just work less for the same. Because it seems to me the more we work, the more they get richer. What if instead, they didn't get so rich, and we gave that money to artists in the form of grants, like we do for scientists. You do some art, apply for some grants, and you get some money to do more art. It'll all be public domain, anyone can use it, and big business gets to make a profit on it just like with scientific advancements (I have issues about that, but at least there's precedent).
Once that happens, of course, the "black market" data aggregators won't care, but they're small and their product can't be used by legitimate channels so it can't compete in the mainstream market of ideas. What capital will do to screw over artists though is... Pay them. Once a framework for AI seed rights-granting is in place, a hundred or a thousand legit artists can produce enough AI seed-feed to legally supplant the work of hundreds of thousands.
There will still be room for the artist-as-celebrity with a unique style that makes their art worth owning as much for the fact that it came from them as for the content of the canvas or the sculpture, but a huge, guaranteed-work, bread-and-butter space for the visual artist, advertising and entertainment media asset creation, will dry up as companies backfill their art needs with functionally-free-to-them mass-generated close-enough assets (advertising in particular is going to be full of this... Remember when "head first" photos of people were a thing for awhile? Look forward to trends like that, over and over again, forever).
This is the thing that will never happen, because all artists are interested parties, and as I said, they are not a unified bloc. So whatever solution big companies come up with for themselves, we all know ahead of time that they will 1) overwhelmingly benefit big corporations and 2) but insufficient to address artist concerns. When they coalesce around whatever standards they end up with, artists will still largely be making the same complaints.
Plus, LAION is just an index, whereas Pinterest actually hosts it.
If you'd now go and do the same, create a website that rehosts known content, Google will simply delist you.
But magically, not for Pinterest, they get a boost instead. I've always wondered what kind of under the table deal makes this possible.
Brave is this man for going against the current Zeitgeist (and the obvious financial temptations).
The key is finding quality source material.
It may become necessary to:
1. Fly drones around to gather data in the world at present time
2. Direct humans to take high-quality photos of particular subjects. Fiverr for photography
I've been wanting this for quite sometime
It will send you a link to an app that only runs on an iPhone so it can verify you actually took the pics from the phone.
(We don't have 'crosswalks'. 'Fire hydrants' don't look like that. 'Parking meters' don't look like that (or any one standardised thing really). Traffic lights don't look like that and how much of them am I meant to click anyway. School buses don't look like that. Trucks don't look like that. I'm sure there are more.)
Lot's of things where you might think you know what you're doing, but are actually doing it wrong because you lack cultural context..
I'd heard it in films before captcha, but had to guess it's the zebra crossing looking (the meaning is different though, I understand) things. Now it's just something I'm familiar with because of captcha, even more so 'parking meters'. Which is just weird, why do I have to learn something mundane about a specific country in order to prove I'm human and allowed to use a global website?
Right now we own all of the datasets on the site and the idea is to license them out to companies while making them available to researchers under a non-commercial license. The market might take it a different direction to be more of a marketplace or Github style hosting. Email in bio if anyone wants to chat about this.
Also, if anyone wants to get paid 10 cents an image to take pictures of North American license plates, get in touch. Need about 1000 from each state. It's probably below most people's pay grade on here but there is a whole reverse bidding system, so you can always bid higher than 10 cents. Some user studies with a shared screen would be super helpful as well.
The firearms one is tricky and I'm not sure it will ever be licensed commercially since we don't own the footage that the images are taken from. Valuable dataset in terms of what it could provide though, like an early warning system for active shooters.
Some day I'll have enough free time and just make a billiards dataset to help me find shots.
https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/automated-...
Maybe partner with such a system to gather your data?
I have several thousand images of vehicles on the roadway and parking lots that I used to understand the backend ML of an ALPR system. Selecting cameras was the most difficult part of the project. I did not attempt to determine the make/model. My patience for labeling had worn too thin.
Overall, as invasive as ALPR system are, the cat has long left the bag. I doubt the cat will ever return.
It is restricted to US only right now (Stripe setting) but I will change that if there is non-US interest and the country is supported.
I've only run through the whole process once so hopefully there are no hiccups. Thank you!
The datasets are also available and a non-commercial Creative Commons license. You can pay $5 for a download and rehost it elsewhere, or just wait for me to upload it to Kaggle or Hugging Face
Your blatant disregard for privacy is shocking, but perhaps unsurprising in the field. I guess you also didn't through the enormous risks for the photographer.
I guess the answer is legal liability.
Because it originates in the public sector? As opposed to the private sector (where, as we know, everything is done to the highest possible engineering standards)?
I meant that it does not have the refinement you would expect for such a critical tool. A substantial portion of LAION is composed of duplicates. If you have ever browsed it, you will find that many annotations are quite basic and in some cases incorrect. In ChatGPT's case we know there was a small army of people going through their dataset to filter and refine issues that are presumably similar to those.
Indeed. The answer is in the article. He gets offered jobs all the time, but nobody offers to buy the data itself. Clearly because nobody wants to own it, it's all plausible deniability.
Is it open source? If thats the case, you already own it.
Does the Common Crawl data already take care of the copyright issue? Or else how does the LAION crawler deal with that problem?
I mean, it's not too hard to write an image crawler. Also, scaling it up it a bit of a challenge, but it's a technical one. But the real difficulty is how to deal with all the legal strings attached...
Sorry, only in German:
https://www.alltageinesfotoproduzenten.de/2023/04/24/laion-e...
And translated via Google translate:
https://www-alltageinesfotoproduzenten-de.translate.goog/202...
[0] see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35681085
Which is not surprising but guys, it's everywhere it's also not optional to understand this.
Source: https://entwickler.de/machine-learning/laion-open-source-ai (found in another post).
Unlikely to power anything for-profit in europe
This is so ingenuous and naive to think that the reason Google didn't release Imagen is because of racial stereotypes.
I don't think it's problematic to be worried about that!
Especially when getting it wrong once might mean Europe makes AI illegal. Making things illegal is their favorite hobby.
Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community moderation methods like Midjourney, simply force every generation to be tied to a paid account, and made in the public eye (posted on discord channels).
So in reality, its not Google's risk conservatism, its Google's utter lack of imagination and creativity, and the lack of organisational incentive for anything other than ad money.
SDXL is available at https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/ though they say they're going to release more variants.
I think ControlNet is a lot more interesting than just "better tuned models"; it means there's no line between creating something yourself and asking an AI to do it anymore.
Automation is associated with increased employment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
> Revenge porn and CSAM are trivially solved by community moderation methods like Midjourney
Please don't go around saying things like entire safety departments being trivially solved by anything. Community moderation isn't a legal solution to CSAM, it's arguable the community users are committing crimes by looking at it. (Extra difficult because this depends on the country.) And they're certainly not getting healthcare benefits for it, so they could probably sue you.
This is the reason they're on Discord though, it's because Discord handles the legal compliance for these things.
It is NOT surprising that larger companies would behave with an abundance of caution. Leave it to the startups to rush in head-first, cause a bunch of problems, make a cool product, get a consent decree, and capture the market. Large companies that act that way get PR problems and lawsuits.
When actually powerful AIs got released, the 'bias' angle got overwhelmed 100x by the "trained on copyright data" and "Are we going to lose our jobs" angle. Your average black artist doesn't care if SD defaults to drawing white people, because A: he cares about not being able to draw for a living, permanently, 100 times as much. B: He can always add 'dark skinned' to his prompt
The bias problem is also relatively easy to solve (Midjourney has already made massive improvements), while the copyright/job loss problem is extremely hard.
The AI ethics people have had shockingly little to say on copyright/job loss issues. Which is why they got fired en masse.
Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks from bias, and underestimated the actual AI risks that society actually cares about. I think the answer is also simple, because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large company their job. Being accused of automating millions of jobs, will earn them prestige and a promotion. Smaller companies can ignore those accusations because they aren't vulnerable to activist pressure, they answer only to their customers.
It only seems easy to solve on the surface, it’s a deep problem. It’s also not just the bias thing, Bing and ChatGPT have been saying some truly unhinged things.
> I think the answer is also simple, because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large company their job.
It takes more than an accusation, otherwise you could go around accusing executives you don’t like of racism and getting them fired.
Ethics is a tenuous job position at best, even in a large company. It’s seen as a cost center. I don’t think there’s much to read into why AI ethicists would get laid off.
Also, we are talking about social and business impact here. Its now proven that vast majority of society cares about job loss 100x more than bias. For a research field that focuses on social impacts of AI, its damning they have little to say on this area.
AI bias is going to be a huge problem when morons in court systems start using it to convict people, or businesses use it for hiring decisions or firing decisions
not only from the stupidity but since there are some shreds of the civil rights laws of the 1960s still active, AI companies could be liable for de-facto racist decisions that they informed.
Those "morons" are also biased.
>businesses use it for hiring decisions or firing decisions
If businesses realize the AI is doing a bad job with hiring unqualified people they will not use it for hiring.
The problem I have with every discussion of AI risk is that people seem terminally underinformed on what is actual reality now, or why some risk is a risk.
"AI" isn't a problem which can destroy the legal system: because it takes regular human institutions to allow such a miscarriage of justice. Which as noted, they started doing, are still doing.
So you get this weird "perpetual future" perspective where everything "AI" is going to do is solely something that the technology will cause, not its users, and the solution is always to prevent the technology existing rather then fix the system - as though the US and other jurisdictions don't have long history's of injustice for all sorts of groups.
The problems aren't new, and the solutions have nothing to do with whether you can create predictive algorithms. And "oh but what about the scale..." is just a declaration that you're aware of the problem but were pretty sure it wouldn't happen to you - because absolutely nothing else prior actually prevented it except the social privilege you inherited which means you could ignore it.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/police-violence-prediction-n...
Did you ask these black artists? Because if you didn't, you REALLY need to shut it and keep your ideas out of their mouths.
If y'all need a reason why people avoid this site, here it is.
I'm aware that normally one should keep an even tone. This is not one of those times and everyone else here needs to learn that.
But anyway, I wasn't complaining, just pointing out my view (since you asked about being downvoted) that by using that tone, however justified it can feel to lower to somebody else's level, you will get some people who take less note of what you're actually saying or who downvote without thinking about the subject beyond "I dislike seeing that tone in HN comments".
Trouble is, I genuinely don't know what to usefully suggest, because the obvious thing that comes to mind (focus on the actual question and strip the aggression) is a cliché to the point where I suspect I already know your response will be some form of eye-roll at my privilege etc.
And it would be a legit response, too, given that people presuming to know me is annoying enough even without it being a daily experience.
Just don't do it. or at the very least serve it up with a heaping helping of "I would imagine that many..." so we know that this is JUST YOUR SPECULATION.
The point you rised at "Serious question. Did you ask these black artists?" is a valid, reasonable point that merits discussion.
But the point raised by the parent post is also a valid, interesting point that merits discussion. And that point raised a valuable discussion EVEN IF they did not "ask these black artists", and if we put this bar and demand them to shut it, that's a bad thing for the discussion.
So in my view you made an insulting demand for someone to "shut it" without reasonable grounds to do so, and this definitely deserves a downvote or five. I'm not asking you to "shut it", you should participate in this discussion, but in a civil manner that also allows posts like the parent post to participate in the discussion even if they don't meet your demands.
I apologize for nothing; it is most everyone else here that needs to do better.
Framing this as "non-black people speaking for black people" carries the implicit assumption that all black people have the same/similar opinions; that an arbitrary black person would be able to meaningfully "speak for [all] black people" in a way that an arbitrary non-black person can't. That's wrong.
The previous commenter making an educated guess based on personal experience with zero concrete data points is only slightly worse than making that same guess based on one concrete data point, and neither situation would be justification for telling anyone to "shut it" or "do better" in my opinion.
Now to be specific, I didn't make any generalizations about black folks, I was telling others not to. But, even if, I'm still pointing out a specific issue that I can observe and give other examples of, and you cannot "both ways" it. White people making presumptions about what black people think is more harmful than black people making presumptions about what black people think.
This owes to the fact that frequently -- said white person will only be talking to other white people and now you've cut black folks out of the conversation. Black people talking about each other is much different. Skin in the game.
I've been monitoring artist forums since day 1 of SD's release. From various subreddits, to discord communities, to 4chan, to forums in other languages. I've never seen an artist complain even ONCE about bias, it is always, always, always, about jobs/copyright('stealing').
Again. cut it out.
One thing that everyone seems to ignore these days are that certain settings are inherently not diverse.
Until I was about 12 I didn't see non white people in real life except on holidays and once when I followed a relative who visited a refugee family.
Not because we avoided them, but because they weren't there.
Background: The country I lived as a child in didn't have a recent (last ~900-1000 years) history with keeping slaves and only recently experienced high living standards so there were few immigrants too.
In the large district I grew up I am aware of two non western groups until the Balkan wars in the 90ies: a single middle eastern guy who I can't recall meeting and a southern American family who I only started meeting after I changed school at some point.
For me, it is annoying that people insist that all pictures include some non-Europeans, because reality is not like that everwhere.
I imagine the same is maybe even more true for African or Asian communities.
Perhaps in big cities there were some, I don't know, but in many places in the country you would live your life without ever seeing a black person outside of TV. Just as you say, we didn't have a past of slavery and at that point the country wasn't rich enough to be an immigration magnet, we did have some immigration from Morocco but Moroccans aren't black.
Now it's very different, of course, and we do have enough black people that that character can be portrayed more realistically :)
I would assume a somewhat close analog, since Saint Nicholas (the name source, if only a small part of the overall inspiration, of the “Santa Claus” figure) is, in one major tradition of, I believe, Italian origin, typically depicted as very dark-skinned (probably originally as a sign of foreignness rather than literal racial blackness; as he was geographically from Asia Minor and apparently of Greek ethnicity.)
> Just as you say, we didn't have a past of slavery
Spain (together with Portugal) were the first to invent "put people in boats and ship them across the Atlantic" type of slave trade and had large numbers of slaves in their colonies.
And as with all other European countries that had big boats, they also brought many slaves back to Spain itself. For hundreds of years.
Also calling blackface "practical because there are no black people around" is missing the point of why people don't like blackface.
(I'm British, so I'm not going to claim less-awful-than-thou against any nation).
Regarding blackface, what do you suggest to do, then, if there is a tradition of someone portraying a character (whom children believe in) that happens to be black, if there are no black people at all to do it?
>By the 16th century, 7.4 percent of the population in Seville, Spain were slaves. Many historians have concluded that Renaissance and early-modern Spain had the highest amount of African slaves in Europe
As for what to do about blackface characters, the simplest solution is just to portray them differently. I believe this is gradually becoming a more popular option in the Netherlands, which has a similar problem with Zwarte Piet: https://raffia-magazine.com/2020/12/02/outgrowing-zwarte-pie...
But: I think that they were there. We just didn't see them a lot. They were cleaning, working in factories, tending gardens, looking after children etc. but they were not represented and thus were not visible. Of course they were a minority, but I'd wager they were there.
Upwards social mobility and thus equality is only possible with recognition and representation. Without "being in pictures" they don't exist. That's why pictures should include "Non-Europeans" (this expression in itself is very problematic btw: there is no "European" as something biologically inherent in a person).
No, they genuinely weren't there. Europeans regularly tried to move to my hometown, got depressed/sick from the lack of sunlight in winter, and left. Refugees coming from further south had it... worse.
Northern Norway isn't a place outsiders can easily move into. At least, not without installing grow lights in their living room...
There was a lot of noise a few years ago about a Norwegian band[1] who had a song "Neger på Ål stasjon"[2] ("Black man on Ål train station") describing the fascination of the author first time they actually saw a black person in their hometown.
I'm not from Ål at all[3](although I have visited it) but I can verify the feeling. Black people were very much excotic were I came from too, and if one of them had shown up we would probably have discussed it at school next day, wondering if they could speak our local language etc.
Edit: I should add that we had nothing against black people. A couple of stories to show what I mean: forsome reason we often ended up next to a black family at camping, and I remember my dad and their dad being friends and he took built a toy boat with us once and another time I met a black boy at my age at the beach who was actually from Africa (the first family was from somewhere in Europe) and I was existed that I had met someone from Africa and it was the first time I can remember using English for real.
[1]: Hellbillies, awesome sound and some interesting texts BTW
[2]: It is a very respectful song
[3]: Norwegians might find this funny as "Ål" and English "all" is pronounced about the same way (of course depending on how thick their "L"-s are.
No, its not.
> (Midjourney has already made massive improvements)
Maybe. But it hasn't come anywhere close to solving it even in its domain, which is probably the least concerning domain of AI bias, and not necessarily transferrable.
Actual ML systems that are deployed in production by governments in important roles have massive bias problems, as do SOTA LLMs (including, very much, GPT-4.)
> The AI ethics people have had shockingly little to say on copyright/job loss issues.
The AI ethics people have a lot to say about the first (well “ethics of sourcing without consent” is probably more to the point than copyright, copyright is a component, but that’s more legal than ethical).
They have some to say about the second (well, again “job loss” is the wrong framing; “skill devaluation” is probably more on point), but that’s frankly not an AI issue, its an economic system issue and effects all technological change the same way. Solving capitalism is mostly out of scope for AI ethics. EDIT: Specifically, increasing material output for labor input ought to be, in and of itself (and leaving aside ethical questions of how you do that, which the sourcing issue addresses) a good thing; if there are material losers in that, it is because the economic system to distribute output well, which is not an ethical issue of the system which enables the productivity gain but an ethical issue of the economic system.
> Large organisations systemically overestimated the risks from bias
No, they didn’t. Those aren’t even really risks any more, they are massive current costs of existing adoptions.
> and underestimated the actual AI risks that society actually cares about.
That society (as weighted by social power) doesn’t care about the kinds of bias problems AI manifests is exactly why it is an ethical issue.
> I think the answer is also simple, because accused of racism, will cost any executive in a large company their job.
The large companies that have supplied systems which manifestly suffer from racial and other class biases and which are, in fact, being used in production to implement government policy around the world have not lost their jobs, and neither have the government officials procuring them and responsible for the programs they are deployed in, so this is clearly false.
We haven't been able to remove biase in society. We just added more layers. The more you try to hide the truth to remove baise you start creating your own. The closer we come to accepting the truth the closer we get to solving bias by addressing it not erasing it.
AI ethics should cover economic issues brought on by AI. The already discuss sociological issues
There is a big difference between “no one cares” and “society (weighted by social power) doesn’t care”.
Entrenching and reinforcing bias against the already socially weak is something that society, weighted by social power, does not care about, but it is precisely that that makes it an important ethical issue.
> AI ethics should cover economic issues brought on by AI.
Capitalism’s failure to distribute economic gains well is not a issue brought on by AI, and there is already a much larger body of ethical philosophy directed at that problem with whose work anything the much smaller number of AI ethicists would direct at the problem would be redundant.
This is not a problem that remains because of inadequate attention by an appropriate set of ethicists, but, again, because it is one that society, weighted by social power, very much does not care about. Social power in capitalism is, in fact, very much concentrated in those for whom this problem is a benefit, and it is concentrated there as a direct result of this problem.
The point of large organizations working on AI/LLMs/whatever is precisely to reduce labor costs by reducing the number of human workers and replacing them with AI. Why should they care about this in their development? (I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, just stating the facts about capitalism)
It is the rest of society that has the interest to fight those changes back.
There is a reason those words are the ones chosen by racists in the first place. Not just because they're hurtful, but because there is an objective similarity that makes the rest of the comparison seem, however shallowly, to validate their views.
Removing bias with censorship at the training set level is silly, and will likely hamper the AI's performance. Better to train the AI to not produce problematic output at the higher level, and ensure class membership in the training data is representative.
This seems like the most productive focus area. Add in more variety in the training images and output should get closer to representing the global population.
Remember, Google is in the business of advertising, and the last thing most brands want is to be labeled as racist. Anything Google does that can be interpreted as racist is going to cost them, as advertisers pull away to avoid the association.
Databases like LAION are central to AI text-to-image generators, which rely on them for the enormous amounts of visual material used to deconstruct and create new images. The debut of these products late last year was a paradigm-shifting event: it sent the tech sector’s AI arms race into hyperdrive and raised a myriad of ethical and legal issues. Within a matter of months, lawsuits had been filed against generative AI companies Stability AI and Midjourney for copyright infringement, and critics were sounding the alarm about the violent, sexualized, and otherwise problematic images within their datasets, which have been accused of introducing biases that are nearly impossible to mitigate."
If you still believe that "AI generated = bad quality", you haven't seen some of the stuff that has popped up lately. SD is still new, so understandably it's taking a while for people to figure out how to use it properly, but some users are clearly getting the hang of it now, and the results are mind-blowing.
I'm asking sincerely, if we can I'll be genuinely impressed.
The devil, though, is in the details.
It’s hard to control the outputs. The scene will look 80% OK, but then you want to add some cat somewhere and that won’t be trivial (at the moment). There are already a lot of impressive tools to help you out, like ControlNet, but it’s a bit difficult still.
You also have to do cleanup, because some random animal in the background of the illustration will be horribly mangled. This all basically requires you to actually be a (digital) artist to fix properly. Again, for now.
Edit: I wanted to add that this, to me, is similar to AI coding. On a good day, it might be 80% OK, but you actually need to be a programmer to catch its lies and/or incompetenties.
right, this is my impression of the "graphic ai revolution": it will be a boon for actual digital artists that can take the output and refine it, much like Copilot can help programmers while not replacing them. for now, anyway.
The only reason people feel otherwise is because when you look at human-made digital art online, you tend to only see the best of the best of the best. The one-in-a-thousand artists who make it to the DeviantArt or ArtStation frontpages.
But most artists aren't anywhere near as good as those few geniuses, and neither are they as good as what Stable Diffusion generates.
So my prediction is that 99% of digital artists are essentially obsolete today, and the remaining 1% will become obsolete some time in the next 3-5 years.
More like yesterday, to be honest.
I won't go into the various problems these tools have, like them ignoring my instructions if they are outside what 90% of the population is doing, because I think they can and will be solved to various degrees eventually.
But the bar will raise. The quality that customers expect will start rising. Eventually the level of control and quality that is demanded will again only be adequatedly matched by people we usually call "artists". Sure, I - some scumbag programmer - can create some fancy generic shots today for a generic company blog post and for now that is impressive, but in the long term this won't cut it.
Folks will want highly fine-tuned specific imagery trained on company stuff or whatever. Branding will have to match exactly. The complexity of the design will explode. Good taste and raw visual skill, not to mention creativity - being an "artist" - will win and the average dude will not have the proclivity to keep up those skills. I think it's more than holding a pencil and being good at drawing lines.
I do think the raw skills of "holding a pencil" and such is becoming obsolete. That's like having good "punching card" skills. However, knowing what to "punch" is a timeless skill or at least a good part of it is and it's easy to adapt to a new era if needed. Punching code, typing code, selecting code-snippets from AI, it's different for sure, but the underlying high-level skills are adaptable and useful. I think the same holds for artists.
See starving artists who do what they do because they love it.
I feel the opposite to be the case — people are feeding prompts and sketches and AI generated RGBD images as base, and another RGB for style transfer source, all for just one image. If anything, it seems, it’s becoming a tool increasingly limited to professionals.
[1] https://pasteboard.co/VG6XNvbeC4gA.png
[2] https://www.slideserve.com/herbst/story-by-joy-cowley-illust...
But proper illustration is so much better, I doubt it will go away.
Perhaps a better simile is hand made clothing: you can get mass produced stuff, or you can get small batch, or you can get handmade. There is a market for all of those.
If digital tools enable decent clipart that can be at least somewhat paired to the content, that will take over most of the market, because then it'll be just somewhat worse than proper illustration while being dirt cheap in comparison.
I think it’s changing the job from pen and paper (allegorically) to a prompt wrangler who gets the image right for the editor or author. Kind of like how seo optimization became a job and didn’t even exist 30 years ago.
Maybe it should be one of his concerns? I'm not sure how he would feel about someone stealing his work and commercializing it.
The point I'm trying to get across is that, at least to me, it seems incredibly irresponsible and borderline unethical.
This is incredibly reductive. Property rights exist on the internet, too. Like how someone can own a domain name or the copyright to a photograph or short story.
Covered in the article, his work is being commercialized and profited from:
> Schuhmann hasn’t profited from LAION and says he isn’t interested in doing so. “I’m still a high school teacher. I have rejected job offers from all different kinds of companies because I wanted this to stay independent,”