It was largely a solved problem though. Companies did not seem to have an issue with using stock photos. My current company's website is full of them.
For business use cases, those galleries were already so extensive before AI image generation, that what you wanted was almost always there. They seemingly looked at people's search queries, and added images to match previously failed queries. Even things you wouldn't think would have a photo like "man in business suit jump kicking a guy while screaming", have plenty of results.
To think any/all combined stock services would be the end all is just unrealistic. Sure, someone one might have settled on something just because they got tired of scrolling (much like streaming video services), that does not mean they are happy with their selection. Just happy to be done.
Now, with generativeAI, they can have squirrels doing anything in any setting they can describe. If they don't like it, they can just tweak the description until they are happy. It's an obvious plus for them.
I never drank the kool-aid to be all gung-ho on this boom/fad, but I'm not going to be so obstinate that I refuse to accept some people find it quite useful. May someone make all the squirrel attending highschool generative art they want, but you can't tell me some stock place is good 'nuff for everything.
Yes, it's obvious that if your use case is obscure enough, or you need a ton of unique images, they won't work, which is why I said "largely a solved problem".
Also, you're implying that a generative system is so fast that it could create so many variations of your prompt to fill in the search results page in an acceptable time. That's a joke
It’s the same with code. I don’t think software engineers will really be replaced, but small web dev agencies have a good reason to be nervous. Why would you pay someone to make a website for your restaurant when 3-5 prompts will get you there?
The key word is professional. A good restaurant website begins with taking good photos of the premises and the food. AI won't come around to your business and take professional photos.
There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.
HTML templates and themes have been around for a long time. AI can basically spit out those templates and themes, which is great. But there's still a lot to do before you get to www.fancy-dining.com.
I do this a lot, far more than I actually go to restaurants, because I like adding small business details to OSM. There are a few that have their shit together but the overwhelming majority do not.
"Most are generic crap" doesn't mean restaurants aim for that benchmark when they decide to get a website.
I'm not sure if you're refuting the point I was making, which I'll clarify. "Restaurant website" could be a stand-in for any basic small business website. The claim was that AI threatens small web dev agencies who make small business websites. I don't think it will, as millions of small businesses want something better than "generic crap" or cookie-cut AI copy paste; AND we've had site-building services, social media pages, and template-driven approaches for a long time.
Neither will a web developer?
> There's a lot of bits and pieces to a website for bookings, content management, menu updates, etc.
Bolt.new can handle all these quite easily. Although I know several restaurants with very simple websites that have a few pics, a menu and their hours.
And now these image-generating models are giving us the equivalent of stock photos without the pesky issue of attribution or royalties. What a wonderful time to be alive.
I've produced my own music recordings in the past and I've hired musicians to play the instruments that I cannot. Having exasperated recording engineers watch my 5,000th take on a drum fill that I absolutely cannot play is not the fun part. Sitting behind the glass and watching my vision come to life from a really good drummer is absolutely the fun part.
Is having the ai spit out idea after idea fun in the same way for you?
May I ask what you use? I'm not yet even a paid subscriber to any of the models, because my company offer a corporate internal subscription chatbot and code integration that works well enough for what I've been doing so far but has no image generation.
I have tried image generation on the free tier but run out of free use before I get anyway pleasing.
What do you pay for?
I made a logo for an internal product that wouldn’t have had a logo otherwise at our company. I also make a lot of shitpost memes to my friends to trash talk in the long running turn based war game we’ve all been playing, like “make a cartoony image of a dog man and a Greek giant beating up a devil” and the picture it gave was just hilarious and perfect, like an old timey Popeye cartoon.
Two years ago I was spending three hours using local models like Stable Diffusion to get exactly what I wanted. I had to inpaint and generate 100 variations which would have been insanely expensive if I wasn’t powering it with my own hardware.
Now I get something good in minutes, it’s crazy really.
They're learning to expect to skip the most important part of creating something.
> they were laughing and we had a ton of fun
I'm a parent so I think I get the appeal, but this to be is like saying "they were laughing and having fun while reading and composing legal briefs." I don't see the advantage, and any momentary benefit comes at the cost of a longer-term loss.
ChatGPT is far, far superior (especially now) when you want something more specific that you've already imagined. But it's slower, and unlike Midjourney you don't get four versions to choose to build and iterate on, you get a single image that takes longer to load.
> four versions to choose to build and iterate on
If you're still not sure let me know and I'll show a screenshot.
The market is saturated and the way it works means ten get rich for every million artists. I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history.
Of course there's a lot of talent out there, "wasted", but I think that's always been the case. How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease?
I actually decided I'd probably never write music again after 1-shot making a song about the south Korea coup attempt several months ago. I had the song done before the news really even hit the US. Why would I destroy my own hearing writing music anymore when I can prompt an AI to do it for me, with the same net result - no one cares.
here's the 3-shot remix, the triangle cracks me up so much that i had to upload it https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/coup-detat-symphony-remix
the "original" "1-shot" is on my soundcloud page as well. https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-a...
it's in lojban. That's why you can't understand it. Yes. Lojban. Brings a tear to my eye every time i hear it. fkin AI
[0] more my style - hold music for our PBX https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music also all my stuff is CC licensed, mostly CC0 at this point.
(Just a small comment out of context of the remaining discussion:)
Maybe not many? It could be that "cultural attention" is limited and there's not much space at the top anyways. In other words: It might be that there's always a few famous artists that get remembered and the rest is forgotten. Same as winning the world cup: There's always a team that wins and it says nothing about the quality in a universal way. At best it says something about quality relative to the competition.
(Not sure I'd fully get behind the argument i composed here. But I found it interesting.)
Or maybe they just really were that good.
It hasn't. Look up the collapse of the viability of music as a career. Jaron Lanier has written on this.
If a classroom of 14 year olds are making a game in their computer science class, and they use AI to make placeholder images... Was a real artist harmed?
The teacher certainly cant afford to pay artists to provide content for all the students games, and most students can't afford to hire an artist either.. they perhaps can't even legally do it, if the artist requires a contract... they are underage in most countries to sign a contract.
This technology gives the kids a lot more freedom than a pre-packaged asset library, and can encourage more engagement with the course content, leading to more people interested in creative-employing pursuits.
So, I think this technology can create a new generation of creative individuals, and statements about the blanket harm need to be qualified.
This is your opinion. I don't see how these statements connect to each other.
You might have heard this: it's helpful to strive to be someone only a few years ahead of you. Similar to this, we give calculators to high-schoolers and not 3rd graders. Wolfram-Alpha is similarly at too high a level for most undergraduate students.
Following this, giving an image generator to kids will kill their creativity in the same way that a tall tree blocks upcoming sprouts from the sun. It will lead to less engagement, to dependence, to consumerism.
Scams beget more scams
Practically speaking, the work described would most likely never have been done, rather than been done by an artist if that were the only option - it’s uncommon to employ artists to help with incidental tasks relative to side projects, etc.
So stating that people shouldn't need to worry about starving (metaphorically or otherwise) would be roughly equivalent.
And many fold more than that are forced to drop out to "get a real job".
Of course all of the above is a good thing from the perspective of maximizing the quality of life across society as a whole. But wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to do (as much of) that?