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Comment by ivanbakel | Hacker News Reader

The article isn't really asking for perfection. I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise (the hallucinated objects being a particularly bad example), and which are a big obstacle to taking AI-generated work seriously.

Who cares if the work that AI produces is great, or even good, if it can't stop generating nonsense at the same time? The article even mentions this - you can try to work out the turds, but then productivity takes a big hit, and you're still not guaranteed any consistency. So what's the benefit of the AI at that point, from the perspective of a professional, or even an entry-level?

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> I think the key point being made is that these are basic mistakes that even a non-artist can easily recognise

Sure, I can recognize them.

I can't draw at anywhere near the level of the output in the article, though.

AI (e.g., MidJourney) lets someone like me, who has neither the ability to create art on my own nor the time/motivation to acquire it, make whatever I need. If I see a "turd", I can regenerate that portion of the image until I'm happy.

To put it another way: AI makes different mistakes than an artist would, at any skill level. The strengths and weaknesses of humans and AIs seem to be similar in scale, but they're not in the same areas.

>If I see a "turd", I can regenerate that portion of the image until I'm happy.

Assuming the API is free, and you have unlimited time, sure. But if the API costs money for each generation, turd-free or full of turds, then at some point the cost of calling the API over and over and throwing away the turds starts to approach the cost -- both in time and money -- of just paying an artist to do it right in one iteration.

You're off by so many orders of magnitude that I'm forced to ask if you've looked into text-to-image generation prices versus artist commision prices, as well as completion timeframes.

There are a lot of things that AI text-to-image just can't do, like generate really novel or even uncommon configurations of objects that look like they're still obeying the laws of our universe. Plenty of use cases remain, for now, where it's true you do want a human artist.

...But underneath the (expanding) umbrella of things that you can do with AI, you simply cannot compare the costs. Humans are just absurdly expensive and slow compared to GPUs.

I see AI tools as being useful for getting a first draft of something (art, code, text, etc.) which the artist, writer, etc. can use to edit and refine into a product.

It can also be useful for experimenting with/iterating on concepts. For example, getting the tool to create 4-5 concepts you can use for inspiration.

Last time I tried github copilot to see if the "using AI to get a draft" workflow worked, I ended up with too many situations where I'd spend time reading and tweaking the generated code, to the point I had essentially rewritten the entire thing. This wasted a lot of time compared to just writing it like I wanted to in the first place. I'm really not sure how to incorporate it into my workflow.

I really care about code being correct and looking similar in both style and thought process to the rest of the codebase. People have an easier time reading code that has internal consistency in the way it does things.

I wish it worked better, because it's already very good at picking things up from context.

Here is more nonsense shadows by AI. Oops, not AI, but famous paintings by famous artists.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-art-of-the-shadow-how...

Difference is, those people invented art, they didn't copy it without understanding what it is.

Also, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can draw shadows because humans figured out how to do it first.

Because humans are humans, and they eventually figured out how shadows work. They didn't need to be shown thousands of examples of correct shadows before learning how to do it.

AI tools are in their infancy. People are so scared and threatened that they're calling AI outputs "turds".

What's been accomplished thus far has been mostly pure research. Now billions of dollars and human engineering hours are going into this problem to optimize into ease of use, speed, productivity, and utility.

In four years these people will all be using AI or they will be out of jobs. Period.

Don't use AI => Go extinct like a butter churner.

Isn’t there something about how getting 90% takes much less effort than the last 10%. I have a feeling AI will never become perfect, there will always be trivial mistakes such as these. There will be fewer of them for sure, and perhaps they‘ll become even less obvious as the technology matures, but there will always be mistakes made by AI which would make a professional deeply embarrassed.

Also the notion of “Use AI or loose your job” sound kind of ridiculous when it is considered a tool in the toolbox of a professional. It is like saying that cabinet makers should use routers or be out of job, or statisticians should use Kalman filters or loose their jobs. Sure there are times where an artist will use AI in their $dayjob, there probably already are, but that artists which don’t will loose their job, that is a weird prediction.

It's similar to a secretary who refuses to use a computer. Maybe you can find a few odd examples of that working out in the real world, but you're largely going to be out of a job if you don't minimally learn how to use a computer.

There are going to be many white collar jobs where if you refuse to use ai tooling, you're going to be an order of magnitude slower than your peers who do use it.

The job of a secretary does not offer nearly the same creative outlet as the job of a graphic designer or an illustrator, let alone an artist. Also a computer is a way more general purpose tool than AI generation.

The job of an illustrator is to return a finalized product, how you get there is less important, and sometimes the quality of the product, the unique style of the artist, etc. is way more important to a customer than the speed in which it is created. The work of a secretary does not have this aspect. I think the secretary analogy does not work in the same way as a woodworker analogy, a clothes maker analogy, or even a programmer analogy.

Let's not pretend most white collar work is deeply creative or extremely logically rigorous. Sure the top 1-10% of the field will still be doing deeply unique work that requires a lot of human input, but there's a ton of (code|graphic|marketing|etc.)monkey work out there that is what most white collars professionals do. If you're one of these professionals, you'll most likely be forced to adapt to these new tools under the implicit understanding that those who don't will soon be far less valuable and as such get replaced by those who do (adapt).

The article is not calling generative work as a whole “turds” but rather it’s being used as a punchy term to describe the tell-tale smells of AI generated content. I didn’t get the impression that the author wanted to throw it all out, on the contrary, they are trying to identify and give names specific weirdness precisely because AI is in its infancy and we don’t have names for all this newly AI generated content. The blog post is a little hand-wavey about it, but it’s not meant to be a technical blog post either.

This kind of work, as fluffy as it feels, is important to progress new and not fully-formed innovations. If the turds the article points out ends up being a long-term problem for AI generated art, then we have a name for it already. If it gets stomped out once and for all in a future version and people figure out how to make this work in a general sense, then this word “turd” as it describes these artifacts just won’t ever catch on because it won’t be needed.

> In four years these people will all be using AI or they will be out of jobs. Period.

> Don't use AI => Go extinct like a butter churner.

There's a great reason to be scared of this. With enough automation, you won't have a job. Without jobs, there can't be an economy. And therefore it's game over for society as a whole.

Surely you've seen the chart of radiologist jobs vs. time?

(Hint: still hiring)

A lot of people use it as an exploratory tool, they're also quite good at generating base images which you can bring in as the bottom most layer in PS and start iterating upon it.

The authors main complaint of turds, a rather crass descriptor, is really more about visual coherence of the overall image many of which are easily fixable if you have even a bare modicum of design/tech skills.

The author also seems largely unfamiliar with the most important tools of generative art which are image2image and inpainting. These tools make it relatively trivial to mask certain sections of an image and replace them with the background, insert new objects, you can even use things like controlnet to set up specific perspectives and angles using depth/segmentation maps.

You can do fast prototyping, storyboarding, conceptual art, mockups, etc. most of my friends who work in the professional design world are already leveraging these tools.

>So what's the benefit of the AI at that point,

So, really we're going back to about 1750 at this point and asking the question "What is the point of making this machine that makes mistakes pretty often and is slower than a human"

And then 2 centuries later we would answer the same question in "Why the hell would a human do that, a machine is a thousand times faster"

It's not going take us another two centuries to go from first machines to automation powerhouse. Hell, I'm not sure if it's going to take us another two years to get past most of these problems.

If in 200 years we have no human artists left, we won't have any generated art either, because there won't be nothing to learn from.

You've obviously never used the AI image generators :)

It takes me 2 minutes to generate a bunch of iterations of an AI image, masking out and replacing elements as I iterate of whatever might be undesired. The result is an image that would have taken weeks to do otherwise (or impossible if I lack the talent).

I hate the self assured smugness everyone in the AI art communities seem to operate with.

"You obviously never used the AI image generators passive aggressive smiley face"

Like, why are you guys so obnoxious when you talk about this crap?

Well, have you? Obviously we're both discussing this here and not in an "AI art community" and your tone comes off as trolling at best both in this comment and your original comment. HN is about curiosity and it's prudent to test and try stuff before you bash around - in this case, the AI art tools empowers everybody, and it's for free as well so why not learn it (or not).

Empowering everyone to produce crappy images to flood online spaces used by artists after stealing their work. Truly amazing product we have here.

It's a legitimate call out if a bit blunt. You really have no business attempting to assess the value of a system that you haven't even bothered to interact with.

Just like how these AI companies built these systems without interacting with anyone who actually makes art.

Because there is a ton of control you have over the image and these tools are incredible.

It is a ridiculous for someone to knock a tool if they barely know how to use it.

You practically see no midjourney prompts using :: because most people haven't bothered to read the documentation.

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