Don't fire your illustrator
sambleckley.com
sambleckley.com
Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical distribution - Worse than piracy, which was inevitable too at the time, but at least you didn't have to pay your lawyers to renegotiate with your label on top of NOT getting any money.
Adobe, OpenAI, whatever: they want artists to draw for them for peanuts to train their model, sign a waiver saying "I'm ok not getting any money from any AI art made from this", and then resell the output for $$$ on something like Splice[1], at the same time overtraining such models in ways that make extremely obvious whose artist made them in first place.
At the end of the day the model itself is going to be basically irrelevant, while knowing whose works were actually used to train it being the truly differentiating feature.
But you know, "the AI did this picture, so we don't have to pay you."
AI will also have an additional effect: it will be isolating in the sense that the need for other humans will decrease.
These two points alone, strengthened by many others, have led me to conclude that the world is MUCH better off with AI and that tech companies are ruining the world with their abominations.
Do you mean "world is MUCH better off without AI."
What you wrote doesn't make much sense withing the context of your comment, but I have to ask because there are some software engineers that find abominations appealing for some reason, or just lack the ability to tell the difference between desirable technology and a technological abomination. I think a big component of the latter is many software engineers' overconfidence in their abilities that makes them easy marks, and the willingness of many kinds of hype men to exploit that to con them with propaganda.
BUT, sometimes I want something that will automate the fudge out of my PC (imagine command prompt on overdrive). I usually DDG for the solution and end up in some 10yo solution in StackExchange, which doesn't do the thing.
My friends have all forgotten their DOS skills.. so I turn to ChatGPT and boom! I get me 2 paragraphs script in 30secs.
Do I hire devs? Hell yeah and we pay well, and we will continue to do so for many years. Do I use ChatGPT for the small (personal) stuff? Hell yeah too.
Now, if a company wants to outsource everything to an LLM/AI then I wish them the best of luck, coz when something will break (and oh IT WILL), Tthe contractor they screwed over should charge them x50!!!!
I have witnessed this firsthand when I dove into the deep end on something over my head, GPT-4 Code Interpreter went into an error loop and I had to learn all of the background knowledge I was foolishly trying to avoid.
> Tthe contractor they screwed over should charge them x50!!!!
IT already does this after they were outsourced. They build up IT companies that take at least 3 times as much for consultation and you still need to employ local IT that actually implements the solutions. And their wage also doubled as well.
Socialize the essentials, let people work for the non-essentials.
If there isn't enough work to go around for people who want more than a substistence living, start reducing the definition of "full-time" until there is. If only 50% of working aged people can find work, redefine full-time as 24 hours/week
Fractional reserve banking is pretty much an urban myth. Banks create money when they make commercial loans. The Bank of England explains it quite nicely here:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...
Taxes are competitive. If you have extremely high taxes, then the businesses that can move out will move out, leaving a smaller tax base and requiring you to raise taxes even more in a death spiral.
There won't be UBI, period. Though I could see a future where obsolete people are warehoused in sex-segregated poor houses until they die out, if it's determined that their freedom is threat to stability.
I just don't see it. They will need a job, they just won't be able to find one. It is not a utopia, it is a disaster.
If somebody with zero skill in the arts can produce output of similar quality as a craftsman and about a thousand times faster, what is the point of art anymore? Sure, one can enjoy the very act of creating art, but we can't deny that art has value in relation to an audience, and is also a display of skill and a source of pride.
What if AI generates the perfect music just for you, based on your taste? Here we lose any and all social/cultural aspects of music. There's no point in discussing music as we have no shared experience. There's no point in emphasizing your favorite song because everybody exclusively listens to favorite songs.
What if you need to write a long essay and use AI to help write it. I receive it and use AI to summarize it. Other than this interaction being supremely depressing, what is the point of it at all? Just submit it to the big machine and perhaps some of it will show up in my use of ChatGPT-17.
So you were faster to write something whilst I was faster to consume it. This allows the both of us to do more in a single day. This "big win" won't gives us back free time nor raise our wages though. I just means that the nature of the work is for us to take the job of being guard rails for AI, a soul crushing job in itself but also temporary, until the rails are no longer needed.
I like to think "AI" will make art better reflect its real value, devoid of the tangential flat costs associated with housing, clothing, and feeding humans in the process of producing art.
The consumers at large demand driving down the cost for consuming and enjoying art, and raise hellfire if there is so much as a suggestion of raising that cost. Remember how much controversy there was and still is about raising the standard price of video games from $60 USD to $70 USD? And that $60 USD today is pennies compared to $60 back in, say, 1995.
If the consumers at large demand the cost of art to go down and "AI" will make the process of producing that art better reflect that real value, isn't this overall a good thing insofar as making the price tag more clear and agreeable and closing down sweatshops?
I do agree with you in large part. I think I’m just slightly more optimistic that people who are driven to create will continue to do so and that people who really want real and human experiences and interactions will be able to find them with effort. Probably not anywhere on the mainstream internet though. Maybe even only in person.
AI is ok, but it will never ....
until it does, and then the goalposts will move.
the only logical endgame that I can see is AI replacing all human endeavour (creative, technical, physical, mental).
There will eventually be philosophers trying to make sense of the profound understandings coming from machines.
That consideration seems more along the lines of worrying about the eventual need to escape earth than a future on a closer horizon worth worrying about.
I’m more concerned about how every facet of our children’s lives will become inundated with shoddy ai being used to extract maximum profits at the cost of any humanness, and the death of all genuine communication on the internet.
Thinking that the progression is going to slow down is just wishful thinking.
more like hundreds of millions
> AI will also have an additional effect: it will be isolating in the sense that the need for other humans will decrease.
unless there's a complete restructuring of our society then a repeat of the late 18th century seems to be the likely outcome
with their stake in society gone: the peasant class get fed up of eating dirt and storm the bastille
(I really, really hope the AI revolution turns out to be just hype)
One thing I wonder about a repeat of history is if the lowest classes still get enough of a share of the increased output in income/QoL would there still be a revolt about the increasing wealth concentration?
There are many machines replacing hundreds or even thousands of people- farm equipment, trains, tunnel boring machines etc.
With software you could say chip makers, developers, and energy companies will get stronger but I don't think there's a comparison. The keyholders will be a much smaller group with a greater power if we stay onboard the AI train.
Sure, and even taking that into account we produce far more food with far less human labor than we did 100 years ago, and that's a good thing.
It’s even worse than you say — it was murder on digital retail too, right at the time when it was on track to compete with or exceed old physical sales.
Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them with the false veneer of legitimacy.
It's about keeping an entire industry, live or recorded, and their milieu alive.
The truth is that what happened wasn't a liberation. It was a methodical purge of the medium-sized side of the music industry. Now we're reaching the point of having 5-6 industry giants taking all the money plus...yes, an inordinate amount of people making mostly self-referential music in their own bedroom on weekends, music that will reach no-one outside whatever local scene they hang around. But most of them were making music even before, and were by their own choice irrelevant to the industry. (True, now they can also become influencers on Twitch and maybe one out of thousands can make a living by streaming their life 24h/day. One ticket for the lottery, please). Whoever was between them and the majors is being squeezed out of the game.
As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education, etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow proportionally, the average income of musicians/songwriters would decline.
The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence. Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much).
You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it.
Sure, there are exceptions, but it's not the rule. Michael Jackson would not have existed if there was no money in the career. The money is why his father pushed so (insanely) hard.
The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm. And maybe for a while that would happen, but eventually we'll see someone (similar to the private search engines we see today) come out with a new platform with the selling point that artists get a living wage -- as long as the people demand it, and I believe they will.
Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper. How much cheaper is another question, as circular saws are already very cheap today, compared to hand-made furniture.
So yeah, you're right, it's just like saying that.
> if there was no money in the career
It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
>You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
Well, yes, and that's how IKEA and mass production in general made many people that would be making furniture out of the job.
Even in tailor-made stuff good cheap tools does make work of skilled maker far quicker. And you can get more people trying to get into that if the tools are cheap.
Hardware is cheap, software is free/near free so there is far more people trying, when you no longer need to spend small car worth of money just to say play electronic music
> People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it.
Most musicians got that by playing in garage bands and doing concerts.
And many of them did it entirely for free, out of passion, till they were good enough, far before fancy computers were in everyone's pockets.
> The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm.
It is the norm far before Spotify happened I'm afraid
That's only true if you assume all the customers desire (or are willing to settle-for) arbitrarily bad tables for cheap. That isn't guaranteed, but even then... why are you so certain their decision is wrong? Maybe they simply care about something else more than their tables.
Meanwhile, the section of customers who still desire good tables will find those good-tables more affordable than before, even if they're a relatively smaller slice of the expanded table-market pie.
Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king. Terribly an artful books exists to come up, but I could still accumulate a library in my pocket that would be the envy of any ancient monastery or place of learning.
I think the existence of Micheal Jackson is quite tragic, so I don't think it's a good thing that a system tortured him into being a famous musician
What happened instead was that Spotify led the pricing change by taking capital, cheating policy, and producing a consumption avenue that cut the price by orders of magnitude.
And meanwhile:
> cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education
The gains in education are fractional. The library or a neighborhood piano teacher were good enough resource wise. YouTube eliminates the trip (and the funny thing is that we're iffy on even rewarding those people proportionally), but isn't a new opportunity.
And even for materials that are better in the way that 3Blue1Brown is for math... just like you're going to have to sit down and spend a lot of time actually doing problems rather than just watching the videos if you have any hope of really getting it, the constraint when it comes to producing music is still sitting down and putting in the time, not only on the specific problem/work in front of you but in the background to do it elegantly.
DAWs are great and can make up for some margin of missing virtuosity, but you have to put in the time practicing using them too -- they become their own instrument.
The constraint on making music has always been time. And what gets you more time to do something? Either having another source of wealth, or getting economically rewarded for doing that thing.
Spotify and the damage it's done the market absolutely matters. Just because music is getting through the damage doesn't mean there wasn't some lost, and not just quantity, level that could have been leveraged to through the magic of compounding focus. Anybody who's read Graham's "maker schedule/manager scheduler" should already know this.
Why do I care if spotify's investors have replace the record label investors?
Also, like everything in the universe, they are subject to supply vs demand.
And fundamentally the supply exceeds the demand.
Humanity has always been constrained by the 24 hour a day thing, but the economy has grown nonetheless.
That last little bit is interesting. Back in the physical media era, if Artist B fell out of your rotation, you could sell your record/tape/CD and decrease the size of their new market a little bit. Then we went to DRM, and every song you bought was a sunk cost; if you didn't listen to it, you still payed. Now with streaming, it's back to the downsides of physical media; if you stop listening to Artist B, they stop getting paid.
The problem now is that we have so much content (music, books, movies, short vids, long vids, etc...), and not enough aggregate time to consume it all.
If you can't hear the difference, see a doctor.
You could replace most of this category with a Markov chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most people even thinking about it, and I know because this is exactly how I made music for my shareware video games a decade ago.
That actually makes Spotify worse, because they could have offered that product instead of using huge sums of capital to reshape the expectation anybody with a device is entitled to listen to any work on demand for free.
I guess the good news is that it wouldn't cause a fuss if someone were to change policy so that you can't pay out buffet streaming like it's digital radio and people ended up having to buy songs or at least do the honest work of piracy if they won't accept the app directing programming. After all, most people are just as happy listening to a Markov chain generate bloops for free.
Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with a proper music score.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)
Does your game have a wikipedia entry?
Could I assume that people enjoyed outcast more than your hobby game?
Sure, but they'll also watch daily soap operas, and the meme "I showed my favourite film to a loved one, but they paid no attention" predates multi-screening.
> Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with a proper music score.
Even in aggregate over all the games: I wish :P
But the real question is: how much of that was the music?
Even now, were I to redo that period of my life (and so no need to caveat markets changing), the music isn't what I'd focus on changing — shareware was already a bad idea though I didn't realise it, MacOS shareware written in Java just as MacOS got its own (ObjC only) app store moreso.
You can apply this on professional filmmaking or vlogging. I guess amount of time consumed audiovisual production today is much higher on amateurish production thanks to antisocial networks.
Nowadays most valuable is attention. Cheap stimuli is easier to consume. That's what technology teach us.
But a 2k$ guitar is certainly better than a 50$ guitar. Not only in how it sounds but in how easy it is to play it.
My 1st guitar was bad so I couldn't do barrè chords. I thought I was bad and pros could do it. Turned out pros just had better guitars.
Better guitars also have less noise, better cables are shielded.
Yes, more expensive is better (up to a point).
EDIT: I should say the sound will likely better, not just better.
Even when you go into hardware you can still get plenty for cheap.
Good that you changed your mind.
Well, I'd say yes because that's what the conversation is about.
There was already "enough" recorded music decades ago that someone could fill all their living hours with constant listening and not exhaust it. If that's really all there is to it, I'm sure you'll have no problem committing to never listen to anything after around 1970. If you have any hesitation about that then you might start to see serious shortcomings in this conception of supply.
"there are more people able to make and publish music then ever" also papers over nearly everything that matters about the statement. "There are more people" is the defensible part. There's half an argument we have greater access to affordable digital tools for production than ever -- but I'm not even sure it's half. The constraining factor on music composition, performance/recording, production is always time. Even where the tools themselves save time that's a series of converging terms that stops at a limit because to make good music you have to practice using those tools plus others. A lot.
Set up a system which rewards those people in proportion to the audience they find and those people are both equipped and incentivized to spend more of their time into making not only more but making better, because they aren't required to spend their time doing other things.
Set up a system which says "Oh yeah, we shouldn't reward any of this, people should just do it in their spare time" and sure, some will do it in their spare time. But they'll miss out on the compounding effects of focus and its power laws because they're occupied with whatever other stuff policy+markets have been set up to value instead. And their audience and the rest of the world will miss out on their power law peaks.
Which is why I was too generous with my earlier "never listen to anything after around 1970" thought experiment. Really, don't listen to anything except debut releases before 1970. Some of the debuts are really good, of course, and labors of love (or capital-backed love) as you say. But the post-debut work is what's enabled by the economic feedback.
There will, of course, likely often be survivors to bias ourselves to the status quo with. And perhaps that's good enough for some. Hell, maybe we're even rapidly getting to a point where we don't even need most artists at all, we can simply have software trained on all the work of all the artists that have ever recorded produce music for you, and be done with not only the pesky idea of rewarding musicians whose work we appreciate but having a pesky human being involved in direct production in the first place.
> Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them with the false veneer of legitimacy.
As a side note, in the beginning Spotify used pirated music off The Piratebay without asking for permission from the copyright holders.
Anecdotally, I had a friend at Microsoft hook me up with discount Windows OEM licenses for my PC builds and it seemed similarly easy to get licenses.
There are lots of other examples of this happening too... I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms
If anything, that feels even worse.
> I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms
If Nintendo has a licence for the game that the ROM was an unlicensed pirate of, while that's weird, it doesn't seem fishy in the same way.
Like, every nerd from the era has an mp3 collection. Mine is literally the only data that I have that's been around since I was 15 and survived multiple HD crashes.
How are you going to get the streaming business up and running without some seed data?
Are you also mad at Uber and Lyft?
Yes, and much of it is pirated. We all know that.
> How are you going to get the streaming business up and running without some seed data?
Pay money for streaming rights, probably. You're suggesting the only way to start a streaming service is to do so illegally?
> Are you also mad at Uber and Lyft?
Yes
The music industry was not looking to break the stranglehold they had on CD sales. Someone had to come in with a 'shoot first ask questions later' attitude to get to where we are today.
Uber and Lyft did what they did for the same reason -- the (oftentimes mafia-backed) taxi cartels had a monopoly on pricing and taxi medallions and the only realistic way to break that was to operate illegally.
I think you will find that the law (and copyright) to be extremely overrated. Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality, to say nothing of the various entities which have carved out most of the royalties that an artist can make for themselves.
First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it.
Second, AI generated art can't be copyrighted, so knockoff competitors are free to use your AI-generated marketing images.
At the very least, you can seed the AI with a paid graphic artist's work (seed-based AI images can be copyrighted). But that artist will do it better than your unpaid intern.
In graphic arts, the overlap between people with technical proficiency and vision/taste is probably quite high, but it's not one-to-one. There are people with excellent taste who can identify great art or design when they see it, and who can perhaps imagine incredible masterpieces in their minds, but cannot draw a convincing stick figure. On the other side, there are people who can expertly make someone else's concept real, but can't come up with a compelling concept themselves. AI will be great for the former, and bad for the latter (or at least force the latter to adapt).
Whether this will have the effect of concentrating wealth or distributing it more widely strikes me as a very difficult question. It may be devastating for certain professions, but could also enable a whole new class of entrepreneurs. I could see it going either way, or the two effects may cancel each other out and economic equality stays about where it is. We're in the realm of complex systems here, so I wouldn't put much stock in anyone's prediction.
The problem is that an artist still needs to eat in the 10-20 years it takes to develop "creativity and taste".
What AI will do/is doing is knock out the entry-level jobs. If you can't train humans on the entry-level, you will eventually have no experienced people.
The ai generation of artists will grow up with ai tools
There is no subtitute for drawing a face to be good at drawing faces. No AI will ever help that.
The visual entertainment "supply" is not limited by the current state of tools. It's always limited by the skills of the top crop. Professionals are always ahead and hard to come by. The industry's self-regulating mechanism is novelty; what is abundant becomes fundamentally uninteresting and dies.
I think it's a different kind of talent, and not automatically a lower bar. The key to being a professional artist is being able to offer variants based on given direction. Either way, it's much much more than pushing a button or holding a lever in place for a period of time.
No. First off trademarks exist and they found that work done solely by the machine couldn't be treated as a work for hire copyrighted by the machine and assigned to the operator. There is no reason to believe that work couldn't be treated directly as copyrighted by the human operator who has creative input nor is the matter with the images used to train the model truly settled.
>First, AI generated art is random and disposable. Yes, you'll get a great image that you can use once, but then what? You can't build a campaign on it.
You can already get variations on a them and text driven modification eg make the blank a blank or make the blank blanker.
...Other than the USPTO and the federal court system issuing multiple ruling stating the opposite, including a decision last week which specifically stated that the output of an AI model is not copyrightable, upholding an earlier decision by the USPTO... (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ai-...)
The act of prompting and customizing iteratively especially in systems which allow the user to submit a prompt that modifies the existing work for example "replace the human being with a monkey" "make the monkey pink" etc are clearly creative works that USE an AI not uncopyrightable.
If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot do so on the basis of a case that literally never addressed that issue unless you would like to traverse the muddy ground between actuality and fiction.
The act of prompting and customizing iteratively especially in systems which allow the user to submit a prompt ...are clearly creative works that USE an AI not uncopyrightable.
If you want to argue that point you absolutely cannot do so on the basis of a case that literally never addressed that issue unless you would like to traverse the muddy ground between actuality and fiction.
The case literally deals with the output of the AI model, not the input. But on that note...under existing law, code can be copyrighted but not its output. Thus, it is logical to reason that prompts to an AI model can also be copyrighted to the extent they are not strictly functional.
But with AI models and content generally, nobody cares about the prompts/inputs. The output is what matters. (For comparison: Deep Impact and Armaggedon were both the results of the same input: disaster movie in which a team of astronaughts has to go to the asteroid to blow it up before it destroys Earth. The "models" were different screenwriters and directors. Compare the outputs: one is a blockbuster classic, and most people don't remember the other movie.)
> The headline doesn’t seem to be what actually happened. The filer was arguing that the ai created the work on its own as a work for hire and thus the ai was the author with the computer scientist merely being the owner of the copyright as it was made for hire. I don’t think the argument that ai is a tool and the human operating it is the author was considered because the filer explicitly didn’t want to consider it.
> In the review being appealed here
https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...
> It makes it clear that the computer scientist doing the filing was trying to argue this was a work made for hire with the author being the computer. They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn’t how the law works. The summary makes it clear early that it’s just taking their word that the work had no human input and was thus purely the creation of the computer.
This seems to be a a better article https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-denied-cop...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37189599
In short A: Computer generated efforts virtually certainly qualify for copyright.
B: Non-artists can in fact iterate and modify work not just randomly generate shit.
C: This will virtually certainly get much better over time.
You will still get much better work out of a professional who can both utilize such tools when desired, and actually create not just copy or prompt art. This thesis is supportable but we shouldn't build it on sand lest it look more vulnerable than it is.
Random variations aren't interesting, they just make something abundant even more abundant and secondary. Unless you have a model with sufficient intelligence that can create something conceptually original (at which point we're all fucked, not just artists or programmers), it's not going to fly. Text driven modifications imply conceptual human input; besides, they are inherently worse than higher-order input, just like text to image alone is worthless for anything meaningful.
You are about a year behind the state of the art.
I actually did figure out what works and what doesn't in real artistic use. Which is the entire point of the article in OP which nobody seem to have read - text doesn't work well beyond the basic use or amateur play, regardless of it being the initial prompt or editing; you need sketching and references (and actual skill) to do real work. I don't think anybody's using available methods of textual modifications for anything complex - they are cumbersome and unreliable, even worse than textual prompts. In fact, I haven't seen anyone using them at all.
Besides the implementation details, natural language just doesn't have enough semantic density and precision to give artistic directions, even for a human or AGI. That's a fundamental limitation. Higher order guidance, style transfer, and compositing is how it's done.
Checkout confyui, it has an incredible amount of composability that allows you to generate new images based on others. Like image to image but on steroids.
For example, you can generate a character sheet and use it to generate the same characters on different poses using controlnet. Or you can have a base image for an object and use that to generate the same object from different angles and/or different colours etc.
I remember when I was a child, on a Sunday afternoon, my dad would put on an album and listen to it. Just listen. Very, very few people do that now.
Now we have a lot of demand for “incidental music”. Something you listen to while you do something else. Driving, reading, surfing the net, coding, cleaning…
There was a fundamental shift in how people consumed music that started around the time music became portable. Spotify won the race, but if it hadn’t been Spotify, it would have been someone else.
The transistor radio was invented in the 1950s. And quickly became used as background music as life progressed.
Also incidental music is not a new thing. Tavern musicians as background music have been around for centuries. It is hard to prove, but likely for thousands of years.
Listening to incidental music all the time devalues music. And we do it not because we wanted it but because Spotify, Apple music etc promote it. Until then "just play random stuff that this ML thinks is similar" was not a thing. But subscriptions make them more money than if they just let you buy albums and stream what you bought. I wish more artists didn't sign up for this but unfortunately big labels did.
But you can listen to non incidental music that you have specifically chosen while doing something. Even your dad could be doing something while listening to music (thinking).
The music had a purpose.
Any sources for this?
I'm of the impression physical distribution is on the rise compared to the earlier days of digital music. This has nothing to do with Spotify, and all about the digitization of music itself.
Anecdotally many people I know now purchase merchandise and media as a way to support an artist they like, rather than listen to the music they make in a physical format.
If you're already big enough that, i.e., XL Recordings can ask you to make a record without getting rights on the master, I wouldn't count it as a good example of "indie artist".
Also, Spotify promotes my music via editorial playlists and algorithmic (eg Radio or Discover Weekly), so I’m probably making a lot more total revenue than I would have on iTunes.
EDIT: Not making Taylor Swift money, but not many are
Also note the terms of his deal with Columbia are unlike most major deals in that he has a 50/50 profit split after his advance payment got recouped, retains either full control or 50/50 control of masters, etc.
If the court rulings hold and AI works cannot be copyrighted then us end users do not have to pay for it either... but that seems like a race to the bottom. Like the end of a craft. Why would anyone create art if it has no/minimal downstream value?
Artists need to band together in some sort of union or not agree to do art with that AI clause or perhaps only do art with a no-AI use clause. And have an allowed AI-clause that is prohibitively expensive (like in the multi hundred millions per piece). That way 'accidents that happen' have a prescribed recovery amount plus other requirements like pulling the generated artwork. "Hey, we understand it may have been accidental, but here is the bill."
I'm not saying that I agree with this approach.
I've been watching videos of Guy Michelmore in youtube. Not because I will ever write any orchestral music, but because I like his energy and envy his shed. Would I bother if Guy Michelmore were an AI?
It could also have some interesting avenues, like feeding some variables to the AI from say a video game (number and type of monsters on screen, mood etc.) to generate music reacting to what is happening on screen
That is not what AI would ever generate.
Or, sure, you can also terminate your record deal. Hope you have 500 grands around just for that.
Frankly I don't see it ending much better for visual artists.
I think the modern world has become too complacent in terms of labor organization - the time of plenty left a lot of people content to take whatever was given to them because there was such a glut of excess that it was freely shared. That sharing is coming to an end and we're returning to a time when we need to demand fair and equitable treatment.
I think Gen AI will commoditize the mundane and "typical", and heavily push people into creating something extraordinarily unique. I think there is the same pressure even without AI, when as a creator you have to standout amongst the sea of people vying for people's attention.
I believe GenAI can be useful in a way too. For e.g. If I'm an artist looking for inspiration, I can have a GenAI tool create some "random" works that I can get inspired from.
TBH "Fly or Die" was way more common on the US side of the industry. And even in the USA by the late '90s to the end of the 2010 it was somewhat doable if you were skilled enough to make a living solo (we're talking 60-80K/year max) as a "jobber" opening for bigger acts on local venues.
Like, the entire NYC indie scene got a start from this premise. If you get a chance, give a look to "Meet Me in the Bathroom"[1], which is a documentary specifically of this timeframe.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n71c1Szjv08&themeRefresh=1
Seems like a natural iteration in the ordering of complex systems. Beyond legal regulations it would be great to start to think about new solutions, if they ever exist.
To the contrary, physical distribution was only available to big artists/players. There was mostly no way for independent artists to get into the record stores.
Streaming (via distributors like DistroKid) made it possible for millions of independent artists to make money from their music.
Source: DistroKid founder here. Hi.
then resell the output for $$$ on something like Splice
This is silly. The USPTO and Courts have repeatedly stated that AI-generated media is not subject to copyright protection, so there are no licensing revenue opportunities for the big publishers/artists/whatever. This means: AI-generated content is not protected by copyright, so anyone can use a piece of AI-generated art however they want without a license and unless the law changes AI has no value to the content industries.
EDIT: Also, the USPTO has noted that the use of AI-generated content in a work will mean that the entire work will be presumed AI-generated except for the portions the content owner can demonstrate were generated by humans. The backend costs of maintaining AI-supplemented works will almost as expensive and burdensome as the costs associated with patents.
Also, I think people on HN have a very glorified view of how much money musicians make from streaming or cd/album sales: basically zilch, unless they're popular enough to be in repeat on the radio. Most musicians made their money from performing: generally a little bit from ticket sales or venue incentives (like % of booze sales) but the real money for the performers was from the sales of band merch, which is why it gets pushed so heavily.
At the end of the day the model itself is going to be basically irrelevant, while knowing whose works were actually used to train it being the truly differentiating feature.
Yes, by lawyers, when they sue the owners of the AI model for copyright infringement, because this would not be a use protected by fair use doctrine. This will actually make human-generated works more valuable because now every work used to generate an AI work is now worth at least $75,000, even if its market value would be significantly less (or even commercially worthless) today.
Due to the costs associated with licensing of human works, if AI-content becomes a thing, it will probably be more expensive than hiring a human to do the same thing, because the model will have to account for the cost of paying a license fee for every work that was incorporated into a specific output.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but how much money do you think the 7500 creators on Spotify making $100k+ [1] would be making without Spotify or other streaming platforms? My guess is closer to zero than 100k.
Also 0.09 percent of 8 million creators making 100k+ [1] sounds horrible, but my guess is that should be taken with a grain of salt. How many folks are included in that 8 million who registered, but uploaded nothing? How many uploaded once or twice? How many uploaded and did ZERO promo of themselves? How many are just plain terrible musicians?
A number of years ago when I stumbled on him, Russ was pulling in a few hundred thousand per year from streaming. Looks like he’s making 100k per week as of a couple of years ago [2]. Yes, he’s probably an outlier. But he works his butt off on his craft, handles production and writing himself, and markets himself well.
Headlines like “Big tech and AI destroying the indie music industry” get more clicks and attention than “Streaming platforms provide income where once there was none” so shrug.
[1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/02/24/spotify-artist-e... [2] https://twitter.com/russdiemon/status/1325853093074923520
Even just training the model requires someone to copy the original work from somewhere and store it into a database to use to train the model. If they don’t have permission to make that copy then it’s commercial copyright infringement independent of anything done by the model after that point.
Thus the companies themselves are frequently breaking the sale even if nobody ever uses these systems.
> A human looking at someone’s artwork is “training a model
sure, except that model often takes months or years to train (wall clock years, not 1000-core cpu-years). and the end result is not a human that can stamp out new/competing artwork every 100ms.
for any kind of creative/performance/art work, these are watershed times. us coders are not super far behind.
This has nothing to do with the model's poor understanding of natural language, and will not change until we have something that could reasonably pass for AGI, and likely not even then. Your text prompts simply don't have enough semantic capacity.
If a magazine editor with run of the mill drawing skill can feed the prompt a sketch with stick figures and object outlines, and get back a good enough rendition with an improved composition, the job of the illustrator will be a side job of that editor.
I'm partial to the argument that being able to fix the generated image in post is a valuable skill, but on that part we already have decades of progress and people are usually more comfortable with editing tools than drawing tools.
I don't think it's going to take AGI to get to this point. It's 'just' going to take a top-tier model adding robust multi-modal input imho. A detailed prompt plus a bunch of examples of the style you're looking for seems like it would be enough.
That's not to say it isn't really hard, but it doesn't seem like it requires fundamental innovations to do this. The building blocks that are needed already exist.
LLMs pick out patterns in the data they're trained on and then regurgitates them. This works great for broad strokes, because those have relatively little variance between training pieces and have distinct visual signatures that act as anchors.
Details on the other hand differ dramatically between pieces and have no such consistent visual anchor. Take limbs for example, which are notoriously problematic for LLMs: there are so many different ways that arms, legs, and especially hands and fingers can look between their innumerable possible articulations, positions relative to the rest of the body, clothing, objects obscuring them, etc etc and the LLM, not actually understanding the subject matter, is predictably terrible at drawing the connections between all of these disparate states and struggles to draw them without human guidance.
You see this effect in other fine details, too. Jewelry, chain-link fences, fishing nets, chainmail, lace, etc are all near-guaranteed disasters for these things.
That said, better understanding is always welcome. DeepFloyd IF tried to pair a full-fledged transformer with a diffusion part (albeit with only 11B parameters). It improved the understanding of complex prompts like "koi fish doing a handstand on a skateboard", but also pushed the hardware requirements way up, and haven't solved the fundamental issues above.
Yes, hardware requirements will be steep, but it will still be cheap compared to equivalent human illustrators. And compute costs will go down in the long run.
Its like you take your AI to school, or do a Matrix-style data upload into your AI so its up to speed on a new concept
Professionals will learn how to do that, the market will cater to people that want to do that
Mostly, current tools are abysmal at maxing the semantic capacity. Midjourney is great a generating things that look good, but terrible at piecing scenes together.
Recent example I tried: a robot playing magic the gathering seated across a human.
Even getting the human in the picture is a challenge, but then the model doesn't know enough about MTG (it correctly pattern matches to "board game" or "card game").
Some pictures generated are much better than other, and it would be great to take e.g. the table setup from one picture and the robot from another, but doing is not really possible atm ("blend" doesn't work for that).
I have no doubt this will improve, but I'm wondering if there's something underlying this that could be a more general limitation? Maybe simply not enough data (a google image search for magic the gathering is also pretty disapppointing).
Another example: a glowing blue <company logo> carved into a stone monolith. It sometimes got the logo to be carved (rarely), it was never glowing blue (usually the whole monolith, or a part of it).
The reason it happens is that the models are far too small (parameter count-wise) and the prompt understanding part is simple, usually it's either CLIP or in the best case a small and dumb transformer. (But regardless of the current capabilities, text is just not a great tool to express artistic intent)
Generally, what you want can be done by giving the model higher-order hints like sketches and pose skeletons; see controlnets for Stable Diffusion for example. The overall idea here is to use a custom model created specifically to guide the diffusion model, based on the non-textual input. The problem is that MidJourney can't do this, you have to use SD.
Another thing is photobashing/compositing. Avoid fitting the entire composition into one generation, it will make the model lose track of your scene. Using multiple passes helps a lot. It's best to inpaint the objects or img2img them based on non-textual guidance to add objects and details in the specific spot.
Check my other comment for an example of a complex scene workflow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37140233
I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a "proper" illustrator because the MDJ images lack character, but it's also true that in a few months from now this might change: I'll stick with the illustrator to have more consistency in the images, but probably the AI could do a fancier job there.
Besides, the "things will change in 2 months" point is a good one, but it's been used since a year and a half and things haven't changed yet. Sure, the quality of the produced images improved, but not in a qualitative scale.
Side note: the link civitai to leads to https://sambleckley.com/writing/civitai.com/images which is a dead link.
Why not train your own personal AI on your artwork? Corridor Digital did this in the latest attempt to automatise animation, they hired an illustrator to create an animation style for them, then trained the AI on their drawings.
Doesn't seem so incredibly different from that.
1 - Since I'm either working for game companies or for my own project (https://fsd-wargame.com/) using AI-generated things is kinda damaging in terms of marketing. You never know when some uproar could arise against a project/game solely based on more or less petty outcries against AI. I generally sympathize with artists, but sometimes it's just whiny.
2 - My illustrations are line-art and cartography (https://www.artstation.com/thelazyone) , which are not the easiest to handle with AI. I'm sure that with enough effort there's gonna be a good model, but I haven't seen any so far.
The number of people who do the current work of an illustrator might go down eventually due to AI, but there will likely be more total people employed in the process of producing illustrations. It is just likely that fewer of them will have the skills that today's illustrators need, and also likely that fewer of them will command extraordinary wages. Many of the jobs that replace it will likely be closer to the median wage than today.
Also we will eventually turn the corner and start having population decline. For the US this might be just a few decades away. And some time after that, work would eventually decrease.
The automation of physical labor let us turn to intellectual labor and creative labor. The coming automation of intellectual and creative labor is not like the previous automations of physical labor, because it leaves human jobs no where else to turn to.
CGP Grey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video[1,2] covered this almost a decade ago:
> Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles will make horses unnecessary.
> The other reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier -- remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible. These city jobs are pretty cushy -- and with so many humans in the cities there are more jobs for horses than ever.
> Even if this car thingy takes off you might say, there will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine.
> But you, dear viewer, from beyond 2000 know what happened -- there are still working horses, but nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915 -- from that point on it was nothing but down.
> There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
[2] (transcript) https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply[0] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#are-we-working-more...
Production has increased. It's not clear that work has increased.
Mills and factories used to employ people by the hundreds of thousands and maintain people in a blue-collar standard of living. Now, no manufacturer even exists in the top 25 employers in the US--it's all service industry.
The vast majority of the decendants of the people working those manufacturing jobs are not working in better jobs than those were.
Several months ago we decided to A/B test SD against our usual illustrators. In our case the results were pretty dramatic, we actually found that the ctr shot up by almost 20% and cvr showed a consistent uptick. I don't agree with the blog post's claim that AI generated images work best in businesses where the content doesn't actually matter; this particular venture is a fantastic counter example. In our case the AI-generated images seemed to resonate more with our target audience, as we were able to achieve much more granular personalization at lower cost than before. not only did it reduce the CPA significantly, but the tight control we had over creative variations meant we could optimize in realtime based on audience segmentation.
Not to mention that our time-to-market for launching new campaigns went down by half. no more back-and-forths over design nuances, missed deadlines, or creative blocks.
And I do feel a bit mixed about the diminishing role of human touch in creative processes. But from a purely growth-hacking POV, this was a gamechanger, and we have the numbers to prove it.
Overall I think this is a net win, especially because I don't think this needs to be the end of the road for human illustrators, but this will force them to adapt and bring more sensitivity to the needs of their clients. It makes no sense for even a content business to be subject to so much friction in the procurement of creatives, and this forces more consideration to our needs
Anywho there's efficiency, and then there's soul. Hats off to the robots for (mostly) nailing the former, and sometimes surprising with the latter.
This evoked, for me, the "can I get the icon on cornflower blue" scene in Fight Club.
How much of this reduction in back-and-forth is influenced by the immediate/interactive response (dealing with fewer humans) and how much is due to a level of trust-of/delegation-to the machine? "A machine generated this icon based on my description, there's no need for me to question its choice of colors." — really the classic problem of considering machines as infallible and more expert than humans.
It's probably some of both.
There's a spectrum of how much furniture matters in any given place ranging from very short stay waiting areas to architect's offices, and commercial art is no different. If that image was truly inconsequential, you wouldn't need one there. Non-informational graphics on most non-professionally designed power point decks likely matter less. I'd say there's about a zero percent chance of a two page spread opening a feature article in a magazine being ai-generated unless it's an article about ai-generated images, and even then, it probably took professionals longer to massage it into shape than all of the rest of them. Specificity and per-pixel control is just so important in professional graphics workflows and despite what a huge stack of people who aren't professional designers will tell you, they are simply the wrong tool for the job. It's fundamentally the wrong interface. Maybe what Adobe or another player who knows what the industry needs will nail it, but it won't look like Midjourney— that's for sure.
The advantages of AI that you crow over simply can’t be met by any human professional artist. A human can’t do hundreds of revisions profitably. There’s increased “sensitivity” and then there’s needing to read the client’s mind.
If you think this isn’t a death knell for human illustrators in this particular market, you’re deluding yourself.
Shoving a human artist in the middle is a liability on each front.
The middle ground is what works best for me. I use generative AI exlusively mid-process, but neither for input (ideas) nor output (actual drafts.)
Here's how I write:
- I source my ideas from contemplation or conversations on social media. Topics discussed there have at least some pre-validated relevance - I sit down for ten minutes and dictate my thoughts into a tool like AudioPen (no affiliation, just a fan) which summarizes my 10 minutes in 5 or 6 paragraphs. THIS is the AI step. The tool suggests a few paragraph structures that I cycle through until I find a good one. - From there, I write my draft, following that outline. No more AI tools here other than grammar checking at the end.
AI is a great writing partner. It's a horrible writer.
This is exactly what I've found to be the case too. People outside of this AI media generation community still think it's entering some text and getting some output. In reality, there are entire workflows constructed to get the exact type of image one wants.
Look at: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/14ye2eg/co...
The second image is the output image, but the first is even more interesting. It is a node based interface more commonly seen in game development tools like Unreal Engine which has a similar interface [0]. It is akin to hooking up APIs together to get the resultant image. I see the future of image generation being more akin to backend programming than actually drawing anything, which is to be expected as the actual drawing part is getting automated while the creativity now rests in the workflow itself (at least until we automate the workflow part too, but that's a far ways off as computers can't read minds yet to even know what the user wants).
[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.2/en-US/nodes-in-unreal-engi...
Generative "AI" will take many forms. Ultimately it will likely remove much of the "technique" element to creation, depriving artists and content owners of income and relevance.
Will this happen overnight? No. I suspect over the next, say, decade, AI will be a beneficial tool more than a threat.
At some point, I expect generative AI to become multi-sensory(sight, sound, touch). Such systems will work from physical models of subjects/environments to produce novel and accurate representations based on rich descriptions and deep contextual awareness of culture. These systems will not think in pixels but in objects and relationships which are then simulated, rendered and filtered to match the desires of the users.
I do applaud efforts of the writers and actors to protect themselves from competition but I believe it will ultimately be in vain. It will be interesting to watch the legal developments in this space. It may be necessary for future generative systems to provide an audit trail showing how they gained an understanding of the world to prove no unauthorized training was performed. This merely raises the bar slightly and does not prevent future generative systems from deriving important relationships via other means, such as 'clean room', high-level descriptions being given(perhaps by other automated processes).
For example, while it may be illegal to train an AI to reproduce Harrison Ford using his copyrighted works or even images captured in a public space, I can reduce Harrison Ford to a set of characteristics which can be passed to a generative system to produce something indistinguishable from the real Harrison Ford. If I am able to document this procedure I see few ways for the legal system to prevent it but then again I am no expert in this area.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of current "AI". I have found LLMs to be particularly unreliable and mostly useless. I also find most "AI" generated art to be either boring, inaccurate, or in some way not compelling. That said, I think the trend is becoming clearer.
> This doesn’t mean illustrators will stop drawing and become prompt engineers. That will waste an immense amount of training and gain very little. Instead, I foresee illustrators concentrating even more on capturing the core features of an image, letting generative AI fill in details, and then correcting those details as necessary.
I'm not sure why they think this is unpopular with no one. This seems like the logical path forward. In the same way that CoPilot isn't going to replace me but it's makes certain boilerplate much less painful and avoids the "blank page"/"writers lock" that can happen when I go to write a function sometimes. It's just nicer to start from something then modify it until I have what I need (even if I end up replacing 80-99% of it).
In the same way I imagine it would be nice for an artist to see a couple of examples of what their line drawing could be which will spark some creativity and then they can do what they want.
As the article mentions, the hybrid approach (using this as a tool in a series of other tools) is the way forward
There are concepts the AI simply will not grasp. For example right now midjourney will extremely struggle with "bulldozer", "centaur", "fantasy archer" etc. These will inevitably fixed (and have in the past) be fixed with new model versions with better training data.
The real struggle comes with either small details or semantic information. For example, its hard to ask it to make a lifelike/photograph scene with everything including the background in focus. Even with "focus stacking" type keywords. "selfie" is about the best word we came up with but unforunately that has significant side effects lol. Perhaps there just isnt enough instances of people specifically describing that property in the training data, but honestly its difficult to even learn english words for these concepts to describe with!
As for small details, it is indeed true that the current approach will probably never scale to handle something like "six blue cubes with a red triangle on each, arranged in a pyramid shape, with a yellow ball balanced on top". But as the author points out, such things will likely be handled with a minimum of photoshop skill using assets made individually
The issue with prompts is not stacked cubes. It's more like this: Ask 10 software engineers or 10 people from the sales department or 3 people from upper management to come up with visual ideas for ads, and you will have a bunch of shit on black backgrounds, robots, anime, bad copies of things people have seen and subconsciously remember, and zero actual visual ideas that fundamentally work. Designers and illustrators have to fight against and override their unoriginality and terrible ideas all the fucking time just to make a decent product.
Once again - I agree with most of what the author says, including the part about it being a tool in an illustrator's kit
Also, the hostility towards a prompt expert adding another layer of technical "know how" into the process between requests and art in the name of justifying a new job title is entirely warranted.
I don't know either of you and I have no stake in this but as an outside observer I think you come off pretty unreasonable here still. You seem to think your hostility was justified because you've basically made this person the scapegoat for your frustration about this topic.
They're relaying their experience and saying that there's more to creating than describing something to be drawn, and that most people lack the training and knowledge of what goes into that.
It's not about learning prompts, it's about learning how to actually design... and then learning prompts.
I feel like the original comment is taking things personally instead of seeing the point they're making through example of their frustration working with others.
I feel like you're projecting a whole lot more onto me than what i'm actually saying.
From my perspective, you still need a developer-minded person to do the job, AI just kind of makes their lives easier in the process.
I agree with the sentiment that it's the same in the art world. It's easy to get a compelling image but to get specific meaningful images usually requires a lot of post processing that a layman wouldn't be capable of doing.
But we have seen progress in leaps and bounds. LLM-based coding tools are getting better. LLMs are getting better. Context size is increasing. And the interest in LLMs is even motivating development of new approaches that will be more effective.
Give it a few years, things like Lecun's JEPAs or whatever hybrid supercoder DeepMind is working on, or some open-source LLM, will blow GPT-4 out of the water for programming.
I say this to say, one skillset I have as a developer is taking the vague requests product owners have and figuring out how to turn them into actionable code steps in a massive existing codebase with several repos. I don't say this to say I'm impossible to replace but to say that half the time people don't even know what they want or how to describe it. Then from there you have giant codebases that wouldn't fit in anything but the biggest (current) context windows.
I agree the accuracy limitations will likely evaporate but these things aren't necessarily something an LLM can solve. I'm probably going to be proven wrong over time but I use GPT for code pretty regularly and right now I'm not too worried about my job.
In five years or so the capabilities may be pretty amazing.
What is the system you are using to justify text? The "hanging" parenthesis on "(Understand that what I'm about to describe, ..." caught my eye, and it appears that every _line_ of text has it's own padding and word spacing to arrange it "just so". I can't imagine it was done by hand, but I've never seen it before.
The way it goes about it very silly; you can read more about it at https://sambleckley.com/writing/text-justification.html
[unjustifiable]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/unjustifiable?activeTab=readme [Hypher]: https://github.com/bramstein/hypher
The second point, "only spammy garbage content" will be happy with AI generated content, is already proved wrong given the quantity of high profile blogs that rely on it. They don't have the budget for the maybe 5% improvement you can get by paying an artist, and 0 of the risks common with artists (difficult to work with, missing deadlines, etc etc).
In a way it doesn't even make sense: the artist is also is also a generative blackbox. It's better in understanding precise prompts, but exactly as in software engineering the problem is often that the spec is wrong, the commissioner cannot get exactly the image they dream of because they cannot imagine it without having pretty high artistic skills. Or a number of iterations are needed, making the process quite long and costly.
There are other reasons why artists won't be entirely replaced, especially the highest paid, but a good chunk of their potential income sources have already been wiped out, and the proportion will only increase.
For the people making and consuming on Reddit maybe. I think that people who want this to replace graphic design work will want more attention to detail.
Sometimes I feel professional people are so good at their crafts that they're disconnected from general audiences. It's kinda like a programmer trying to convice a data scientist that Python is not that good of a programming language, while the data scientist is perfectly fine with it.
There are plenty of writers and illustrators out there who have trained themselves to churn out reproducible garbage over the years in order to fulfill the demands of content marketing. These jobs will be replaced by AI soon, but by creating content from a formula they've already be using a crude form of AI.
I really love Stable Diffusion, but, as a means of creating art (including the most common forms of popular art), it can only supplement existing work not replace it. I pay for plenty of real art in my home and the best works on my walls could never be replicated by an AI because what makes them beautiful is precisely the human touches that I have yet to see AI generate (and suspect it can't). Latent Diffusion Models also have a pretty poor imagination.
At the same time Stable Diffusion has gotten me thinking about creative projects I could undertake that would have been impossible years ago. But it's obvious that all of these projects will take plenty of work to create, and SD will ultimately just be another tool in the creative process.
I vividly remember when photoshop started to gain major acceptance and there was a similar anti-photoshop sentiment among "real" designers and artists. What's funny is how many webcomic authors I see critiquing AI art, when I remember quite well pen and ink comic artist similarly scoffing at web artists that used digital tools to create their work.
Hopefully we'll see SD and similar tools accepted as more tools to create cool art, rather than a misplaced focus of peoples career anxiety.
I think this is the meat of the argument and a pretty compelling point. I have definitely struggled to get mijourney to create certain images that I had in my head and eventually just gave up.
When audio recording became a consumer product, was there huge resistance from live performers? I would imagine so, but I just don't know much on the subject.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/one-year-the-day-the-...
It's interesting because it's something which is around us every day but most of us don't know about it.:)
So far I'd consider the resistance from artists against AI "small" to "practically none".
If artists go on street and demain copyright law changes then I'll say it's moderate amount of resistance. Luddites did smash down machines.
I feel like I barely knew this and now need to go read up on that whole era. Thanks!
This case differs in that it got amplified on Twitter, though.
> If you’ve ever used a generative system, I can pretty much guarantee that you spent an embarrassing amount of time making tiny adjustments to your prompt and retrying. Producing a compelling image with generative AI is pretty easy; maybe one in ten images it generates will make you say, “Wow, cool!” But producing a specific image with generative AI is sometimes almost impossible.
Who could possibly think this will be the case six months from now? I mean, maybe some of the the content and warnings here is fleetingly accurate, but it's truly not a hill to die on. You could fire your illustrator and be inconvenienced for a couple months until the next stablediffusion update. It's a disservice to illustrators to make them feel safe.
If a company needs to generate illustrations at a big enough pace to require an employee they'd only be replacing their illustrator with a worse one. We all know what happens to GUIs when programmers develop them, so why would this case be any different?
Wait... Hasn't this already happened? Professional/specialized press photography seems way down compared to pre-smartphone era? Now a journalist/reporter is expected to do a passable photo job on their own. Or a random member of the public
I think this gets to an important point. If whoever is paying the bills has something very specific in mind, they won't be happy with AI (or frankly many artists) at this point. But as a creative interpretation of something more general, it's actually really good, and I think with many low-importance works like the author describes as "furniture" - we really don't need to be that exact.
One year ago we had textual inversion. Now we have LoRA and control net. I know it might not be a scientific breakthrough, but in practice it's day and night.
Of course an AI can not produce an image that matches what's on your mind 100%. Because by definition it will require you to provide all the information, a.k.a. you need to make the image by yourself first.
But I really don't think illustrators are as safe as the article implies. Yes, the jobs won't disappear overnight, but are there that much demands for illustration to support a future where every illustrator becomes 10x more productive than before?
(I've done illustration commercially before, while it's not my main source of income and I'm junior level at best.)
I don't think it will be true six months from now. OpenAI has been red teaming a new version for months that goes way beyond anything we've seen today. You can see some leaks from this video: https://youtu.be/koR1_JBe2j0
I'm glad to see OA does have a successor for DALL-E 2, though: the service seems to have somehow gotten worse since release.
>the service seems to have somehow gotten worse since release.
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that they probably lowered the number of steps or used a similar strategy to reduce the computation.
Sorry, thanks! I accidentally gave the date for the first DALL-E.
> OpenAI has been red teaming a new version for months that goes way beyond anything we've seen today.
Any sign that it's better at understanding complex textual prompts, and not just at making high-quality images?
The video I have linked.
From an outsiders' perspective it looks like we've had a series of achievements where AI worked impressively well considering it isn't a human. But afterwards we got an incremental grind that never got close to an AI that's just good, period.
I'm very impressed people got self-driving car demos working. I couldn't do that. But year after year self-driving cars remained a demo, albeit an incrementally improving one.
You can get a ride in Phoenix today. Order a Waymo from your phone, it shows up with no driver. https://waymo.com/waymo-one-phoenix/
The number of cities is still small, but it's not a demo anymore.
What do you mean? Waymo has been running fully driverless operations with the general public since 2020: https://waymo.com/blog/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr...
It is also a disservice to encourage managers to make their illustrators redundant when we don't yet know that, in six months, AI image generators will equal a human illustrator in being able to create adequate pictures. This kind of article has an important role, namely that of countering hype (often based on PR from machine learning companies). That hype is why more ignorant people think that AI can already replace crowds of employees, when the reality is more nuanced.
I’d bet more along the lines of 1 year. As for six months, tweaky prompts might be here to stay.
You have total doomers aware of the AI potential. Horrified at the long term consequences of these LLMs. Then on the other side you have users saying "Its just another crypto bubble", and when pressed, they admit that they never used it.
There is just such a vocal population here that says 'Well its not always 100% perfect, so its useless", and they are burying their head in the sand that companies are already using the OpenAI API to reduce the cost of business.
I genuinely don't understand these people. They don't use the technology and they deny how useful it is. There is news and real world examples of its usefulness. I can only imagine these people manage (money) terribly.
It seems to be pretty solidly demonstrated now to have some limited efficacy across a broad range of areas today, and is very effective in some niches (like the articles mention of producing SEO fodder cheaply).
Growth from that state though? The only thing you can bank on is that nobody really knows.
If ChatGPT can replace a team of software engineers why didn't you replace that team with four times as many college interns years ago? Because you can't combine people capable of doing easy coding and get someone who can do moderately hard things.
The essay focuses mainly on prompt-slot-machine-based generative AI but there’s a large suite of work that uses the same research to more directly support the artist. Stuff like in-painting, controlled diffusion, and re-stylizing.. as long as it’s free (compared to more expensive art equipment) it should have a beneficial impact on artists.
Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.
Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.
As the Magic Eightball says, ask again later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
I wonder why...
https://imagen.research.google/
Or Parti https://sites.research.google/parti/
Being able to combine two different kinds of AI sounds too good to be true. It sounds like AGI. Why does it work for SD? Why aren't we trying to combine more AIs to create a super AI? Or we're already doing this?
Edit: typo
People will prime their image generation with a specific series of image and combine them with new prompts, packages will be made to prime their AI and then they’ll go from there
Whether its finetuning checkpoints, creating LoRa/Hypernetworks/TIs, etc., that's already the status quo.
Again, we’re already there.
And the only reason i wrote it is because I’m aware of what people do
There’s nothing legally inconsistent about passing a law saying, e.g., “ML training is not fair use”. Doing so will not even reduce existing fair use rights being exercised by actual people.
The author’s argument is that doing so is philosophically analogous to human creative processes, but those are—and I can’t underline this enough—human. And the law is not (and cannot be, should not be?) consistent in such a way.
Is it still fair use to take inspiration from another artist's work? How can the courts necessarily tell if the art was made using AI or if it's just someone stealing another artist's style? Theft of style isn't currently recognized under the law, but it could be.
2. Discovery. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resource...
Some variants of “theft of style” are recognized by some courts already, please see the legal literature on music copyright and the recent 7-2 SCOTUS decision on Warhol’s Prince series.
But would be overjoyed to be proven wrong.
For context, I’m in the process of translating a work that I know for a fact is in the public domain (sole author died 90+ years ago) and I’ve still got legal questions that I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to solve.