This is technically impressive and I commend the team that brought it to life.
It makes me sad, though. I wish we were pushing AI more to automate non-creative work and not burying the creatives among us in a pile of AI generated content.
It makes me sad, though. I wish we were pushing AI more to automate non-creative work and not burying the creatives among us in a pile of AI generated content.
Personally I can't wait to see the new creative doors ai will open for us!
Rap is really the best example of how stupid these discussions are.
The language models are amazing at rhyming so by the logic then anyone can become a rapper and that is going to put current rappers out of business.
Only someone who has never tried to rap could possibly believe this. Same thing with images, same thing with music, same thing with literally everything involving human creativity.
"Creating" with an AI is like an executive "inventing" the work actually done by their team of researchers. A team owner "winning" a game played by the their team.
That being said, AI output is very useful for brainstorming and exploring a creative space. The problem is when the brainstorming material is used for production.
This would include almost everyone who’s used any editing software more advanced than photoshop CS4.
You could come up with your own story and direct the AI to generate it for you.
A film director is a creative. Ultimately, they are in charge of "visualizing" a screenplay": the setting, the the design of the set or the utilization of real locations, the staging of the actors within a scene, the "direction" of the actors (i.e., how they should act out dialog or a scene, lighting, the cinematography, the use of stunts, staging shots to accommodate the use of VFX, the editing (meaning, the actual footage that comprises the movie).
There's an old show on HBO, Project Greenlight, that demonstrates what a director does. They give 2 directors the same screenplay and budget and they make competing movies. The competing movies are always completely different...even though they scripts are the same. (In the most extreme example from one of the later seasons, one of the movies was a teen grossout comedy, and the competing movie was some sort of adult melodrama.)
2. Using AI can be can be an iterative process. Generate this scene, make this look like that, make it brighter colors, remove this, add this, etc. That's all carefully crafting the output. Now generate this second scene, make the transition this way, etc. I don't see how that's at all different from a director giving their commands to workers, except now you actually have more creative control (given AI gets good enough)
2. Current AI can't do what you're describing, so the biggest difference is that you're posing a hypothetical against the real world. But more specifically: the director already has a specific vision in their hand; the purpose of the "direction" is to bring this vision into reality within the scope of their budget and resources. With AI, you have a general idea and the AI creates its own vision and you pick what you like the best, until you ultimately realize the AI isn't going to get what you actually want and you settle for the best the AI can do for you. So, completely different.
That's what direction is though. Film directors prompt their actors and choose the results they like best (among many other commands to many other groups)
>You're selecting from the results it outputs, but you're not controlling the output.
The prompt controls the output (and I bet you'd have more control over the AI than you'd have over a drunk Marlon Brando)
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.
There's a line to be drawn somewhere between artist and craftsperson. Creating beautiful things to a brief has always been a teachable skill, and now we're teaching it to machines. And, we've long sought to mass-produce beautiful things anyway. Think textiles, pottery, printmaking, architectural adornments.
Can AI replace an artist? Or is it just a new tool that can be used, as photography was, for either efficiency _or_ novel artistic expression?
The work a camera does is capturing the image in front of the photographer. "Art" in the context of photography is the choice of what in the image should be in focus, the angle of the shot, the lighting. The camera just captures that; it doesn't create anything that isn't already there. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
The work of Krita/Inkscape/etc (and technically even Photoshop) is to convert the artistic strokes into a digital version of how those strokes would appear if painted on a real medium using a real tool. It doesn't create anything that the artist isn't deliberately creating. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
AI Gen, as demonstrated in the linked page and in the tool comparison, is doing all of the work of generating the image. The only work a human does is to select which of the generated images they like the best, which is not a creative act.
AI cannot “democratize art” any more than the camera did, until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
It almost definitely can start teaching artistry to its users, and the same people who are mad in this thread will be mad that it's taking away jobs from art instructors.
The central problem is the same and it's what Marshall Brain predicted: If AI ushers in a world without scarcity of labor of all kinds, we're going to have to find a fundamentally new paradigm to allocate resources in a reasonably fair way because otherwise the world will just be like 6 billionaire tech executives, Donald Trump, and 8 billion impoverished unemployed paupers.
And no, "just stop doing AI" isn't an option, any more than "stop having nuclear weapons exist" was. Either we solve the problems, or a less scrupulous actor will be the only ones with the powerful AI, and they'll deploy it against us.
I've tried AI image generation myself and was not impressed. It doesn't let me create freely, it limits me and constantly gravitates towards typical patterns seen in training data. As it completely takes over the actual creation process there is no direct control over the small decisions, which wastes time.
Edit: another comment about a different meaning of accessibility: the flood of AI content makes real content less accessible.
Other disapproval comes from different emotional places: a retreading of ludditism borne out of job insecurity, criticism of a dystopia where we've automated away the creative experience of being human but kept the grim work, or perceptions of theft or plagiarism.
Whether AI has worked well for you isn't just irrelevant, but contrarian in the face of clear and present value to a lot of people. You can be disgusted with it but you can't claim it isn't there.
I have seen what 99% of people are doing with this "clear and present value". Turns out when you give people a button to print dopamine they probably aren't going to create the next Mona Lisa, they're just going to press the button more. Even with AI, creating compelling art is still a skill that needs to be learned, and it's still hard. And why would they learn a skill when they just decided against learning a skill? Incentives matter, and here the incentives massively favor quantity over quality.
> Whether AI has worked well for you isn't just irrelevant
My point was that it's creatively restrictive, and that current models tend to actively steer away from creative outputs. But if you want to limit yourself to what corporations training the models and providing the cloud services deem acceptable, go ahead.
Gatekeeping commonly means excluding others from a group, a label, or an identity. That’s what they’re referring to.
https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz
It would have cost millions. Now one person can do it with a laptop and a few hundred dollars of credits a month.
AI is 100% making filmmaking more accessible to creative people who otherwise would never have access to the kind of funding and networks required to realise their visions.
None of the videos I've clicked on required AI for the content to be good, and some of the randomness has no real reason to be there.
Also, they're painfully unoriginal. They're just grabbing bits that The Onion or shows like Rick & Morty have been doing and putting a revolting AI twist to it. It screams to me of 0 effort slop made for the sole purpose of generating money from morons with no creativity clicking on it and being bemused for 10 seconds
Because many other kinds of art require thousands of hours to learn before getting to the level of current AI
The real gate keeper to art isn't the cost of a pencil, it's the opportunity cost of learning how to use it
Some people have creative ideas they cannot realise and tools like AI help them do it. The more people that can realise their creative ideas the better it is for everyone.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of creating going on here. There's a reason why people always talk about the work/journey/process rather than the end goal. That's what makes someone an artist--not the end result.
You are consuming, not creating.
Going outside and taking a photo requires you to be engaging with the scene around you. You are the actor doing the thing. When you prompt an AI, the AI is the actor doing the thing.
Not to mention that many directors also write the script for the film.
N.B. If directing people is the distinguishing factor, then animation directors are robbed of their claim to artistry as well, as is basically any solo artist in history
Accessibility -- and I don't mean this in the sense particular to disability -- is highly personal; its not so much that it is more accessible, as that it is differentlly-accessible.
> I've tried AI image generation myself and was not impressed. It doesn't let me create freely, it limits me and constantly gravitates towards typical patterns seen in training data. As it completely takes over the actual creation process there is no direct control over the small decisions, which wastes time.
No offense, but you've only tried the most basic form of AI image generation -- probably something like pure text-to-image -- if that's what you are finding. Sure, that's definitiely what the median person doing AI image gen does, dumping a prompt in ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever. But its not all that AI image generation offers. You can have as much or as little control of the small (and large) decisions as you want when using AI image generation.
Sometimes I feel like HN comments are working so hard to downplay AI that they’ve lost the plot.
It’s more accessible because you can accomplish amazing storytelling with prompts and a nominal amount of credits instead of spending years learning and honing the art.
Is it at the same level as a professional? No, but it’s more than good enough for someone who wants to tell a story.
Claiming that computer access is too high of a bar is really weird given that computers and phones (which can also operate these sites) are ubiquitous.
> Edit: another comment about a different meaning of accessibility: the flood of AI content makes real content less accessible.
No it does not. Not any more than another person signing up for YouTube makes any one channel less “accessible”. Everyone can still access the content the same.
The gates are wide open for those that want to put in effort to learn. What AI is doing to creative professionals is putting them out of a job by people who are cheap and lazy.
Art is not inaccessible. It's never been cheaper and easier to make art than today even without AI.
> Personally I can't wait to see the new creative doors ai will open for us!
It's opening zero doors but closing many
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What really irks me about this is that I have _seen_ AI used to take away work from people. Last weekend I saw a show where the promotional material was AI generated. It's not like tickets were cheaper or the performers were paid more or anything was improved. The producers pocketed a couple hundred bucks by using AI instead of paying a graphic designer. Extrapolate that across the market for arts and wonder what it's going to do to creativity.
It's honestly disgusting to me that engineers who don't understand art are building tools at the whims of the financiers behind art who just want to make a bit more money. This is not a rising tide that lifts all ships.
Why is effort a requirement?
Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Would you be against technology that makes medical doctors obsolete?
That's how human brains work. People have an intrinsic need to sort, build hierarchies and prioritize. Effort spent is one of viable heuristics for these processes.
> Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Art itself has great value, if it weren't, museums, theaters and live shows wouldn't exist.
> Would you be against technology that makes medical doctors obsolete?
The analogy doesn't work. The results of a medical process is a [more] healthy person. The result doesn't have any links to the one performing it. Result of an artistic creative process is an art piece, and art is tied to its creator by definition.
This is an expansive definition and thus not useful, because it would include:
1. Natural phenomena (sand on a vibrating plate is pretty cool).
2. Folk crafts (this hand-woven rug sure ties the room together!).
3. Advertisement.
4. Industrial design (this soap dispenser looks like a droid head, awesome!).
5. Drug induced experiences.
6. Art forgery and plagiarism.
Nothing in the list is really art. Rough definition of art is an intentional process (or the results thereof) of self-expression, and/or interpretation/modeling of reality performed with symbolic means. This implies intentionality and a conscience, which current "AI" doesn't have.
> AI lowers the discoverability of art that falls in the latter category, but I'd say that it's a solvable problem that can be fixed with better recommendation algorithms.
Theoretically it is. However, it won't be ever solved and implemented widely due to the lack of incentives and the fact that just replacing it all with "AI" is much more profitable and exploitable.
I don't think it's worthwhile to explain the inherent value of human created art or that to learn how to do it one must put some effort into it. All I can say is, if you are one of those people who do not understand art, please don't build things that take away someone else's livelihood without very good reason.
I don't think the majority of AI generation for art is useful for anything but killing artists.
Because we as a society have valued it as one for eternity.
Zero-effort output generators like prompting means people are just generating trash that they themselves don't even care about. So why should I take my time to watch/experience that?
The whole "GenAI is accessible" sentiment is ridiculous in my opinion. Absolutely nothing is stopping people from learning various art mediums, and those are skills they'll always have unlike image generators which can change subscription plans or outright the underlying model.
Absolutely no one should be lauding being chained to a big corp's tool/model to produce output.
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Why should being an artist be a viable job? Well, people should get paid for their work. That applies to all domains except technical people love to look down on art while still wanting to watch movies, well produced youtube videos, etc. You can see it in action here on HN frequently: someone will link a blog post they took time to write and edit... and then generate an image instead of paying an artist. They want whatever effect a big header image provides, but are not willing to pay a human to do it or do it themselves. Somehow because it's "just art" it's okay to steal.
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If tech has progressed to the point of true "general artificial intelligence", then likely all jobs will be obsolete and we're going to have to rethink this whole capitalism thing.
I think all industries should be utilizing tech to augment their capabilities, but I don't think actual people should be replaced with our current guesstimator/bullshitter "AI". Especially not critical roles like doctors and nurses.
On jobs: craftsmanship is slightly different than art: industries are built with people who can craft, there is today an artistic part in it but it's not the essence of the job: the ads industry can work with lower quality ads provided they can spam 10x. There is however an overlap between art/craftmanship: a lot of people working in these industries can today be in a balance where they live with a salary and dedicate time to explore their mediums. We know what will happen when the craftmanship part is replaced by AI, being an artist will require to have the balance in the first place.
It feels like a regression: it leads to a reduction of ideas/explorations, a saturation of the affected mediums, a loss of intent. Eager to see what new things come out of it though.
And who owns the AI?
It’s delusional. Stop falling for the mental jiu Jitsu from the large AI labs. You are not becoming an artist by using a machine to make art for you. The machine is the artist. And you don’t own it.
So the bad news is people are just insecure, jealous, pedantic, easy to offend, highly autistic - and these are the smart ones.
The good news, is with dead internet theory they will all be replaced with bots that will atleast be more compelling make some sort of sense.
"Oh you're posting on hackernews, if you don't suck google's dick and every single gadgets megacorps shit out you must be highly autistic".... interesting take
Sorry I being autistic didn’t even phrase it well I think people got too offended I was just saying the bad side to it, HN is great.
Couple of people were so upset at the suggestion they replied in a defensive manner I should have been more careful with my rant
What a weird way to spell "give $200 a month to google"
Isn't the creativity in what you put in the prompt? Isn't spending hundreds of hours manually creating and rigging models based on existing sketch the non-creative work that is being automated here?
Of course that's not what I believe, but let's not limit the definition of what creativity based on historical limitations. Let's see what the new generation of artists and creators will use this new capability to mesmerize us!
Their placement of books. Their aesthetic. The collection of cool things to put into a scene to make it interesting. The lighting. Not yours. Not from you/not from the AI. None of it is yours/you/new/from the AI. It's ALL based underneath on someone else's work, someone else's life, someone else's heart and soul, and you are just taking it and saying 'look what I made'. The equivalent of a 4 year old being potty trained saying 'look I made a poop'. We celebrate it as a first step, not as the friggen end goal. The end goal is you making something uniquely you, based on your life experience, not on Bob the prop guys and Betty the set designer whose work/style you stole and didn't even have the decency to reference/thank.
And your prompt won't ever change dramatically, because there isn't going to be much new truly creative seedcorn for AI to digest. Entertainment will literally go into limbo/Groundhog Day, just the same generative, derivative things/asthetics from the same AI dataset.
All of these are just human being exposed more to life and learning new skills, in other words -- having more data. LLM already learns those skills and encounters endless experience of people in its training data.
> I hate this argument
That's very subjective. You don't know how the brain works.
> That's very subjective
I was expressing my opinion of this argument which absolutely is subjective
> You don't know how the brain works.
Neither does grandparent comment's author, didn't stop them from making much bolder claims.
If I see a painting, I see an interpretation that makes me think through someone else's interpretation.
If I see a photograph, I don't analyze as much, but I see a time and place. What is the photographer trying to get me to see?
If I see AI, I see a machine dithered averaging that is/means/represents/construes nothing but a computer predicted average. I might as well generate a UUID, I would get more novelty. No backstory, because items in the scene just happened to be averaged in. No style, just a machine dithered blend. It represents nothing no matter the prompt you use because the majority is still just machine averaged/dithered non-meaning. Not placed with intention, focused with real vision, no obvious exclusions with intention. Just exactly what software thinks is the most average for the scene it had described to it. The better AI gets, the more average it becomes, and the less people will care about 'perfectly average' images.
It won't even work for ads for long. Ads will become wild/novel/distinct/wacky/violations of AI rules/processes/techniques to escape and belittle AI. To mock AI. Technically perfect images will soon be considered worthless AI trash. If for no other reason than artists will only be rewarded for moving in directions AI can't going forward. The second Google/OpenAI reach their goal, the goal posts will move because no one wants procedural/perfectly average slop.
Merely changing a seed number will provide endless different outputs from the same single prompt from the same model; rng.nextInt() deserves as much artist credit as the prompter.
Imagine a world where you have a scene fully sketched out in your head (i.e. creativity), you have the script of what will happen, sketches of what the scene looks light, visual style, etc. You want to make that become reality. You could spend a ton of time and money, or you could describe it and provide sketches to an AI to make it come true.
Yes, the limitations in the former can make you take creative shortcuts that could themselves be interesting, but the latter could be just as true to your original vision.
It's just not what gets the exciting headlines and showcases
Similarly with music, prior to recording tech, live performance was where it was at.
You could look at the digital era as a weird blip in art history.
We _could_ use this to empower humans, but many of us instinctively know that it will instead be used to crush the human spirit. The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.
I agree , but that's the negative. The positive will be that almost any service you can imagine (medical diagnosis, tax preparation, higher education) will come down to zero, and with a lag of perhaps a decade or two it will meet us in the physical world with robo-technicians, surgeons and plumbers. The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the land, and will be finished in 1/10 of the time it takes today. The main problem to me is that there's a lag between the negatives and the positives. We're starting out with the negatives and the benefits may take a decade or two to reach us all equally.
Why would you want massive amounts more of those things? In fact I might even argue that medicine, taxation and education are a net negative on society already. And that to the extent that there seems to be scarcity, it's mainly a distribution problem having to do with entrenched interests and bureaucracy.
> The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the land
That's is the actual scarcity tho.
I'm not sure what you mean. In my country getting a specialist to take a look at you can take weeks, the scarcity is that there's not enough doctors. For sure many people get delayed and suboptimal diagnosis (even if you finally get to see the specialist, he may have 10 mintues for you and 50 other patients to see that day). A.I can simply solve this.
> The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the land
>> That's is the actual scarcity tho
Not necessarily, the labor costs a tremendous amount, and also it might be that we don't need to cram tens of millions of people around cities anymore if most work is automated, we can start spreading out (again, this will take decades and I'm not denying we have pressing problems in the immediate future).
The same was said about the camera or photoshop.
Just wanted to add representation to that feeling
Creativity is a conversation with yourself and God. Stripping away the struggle that comes with creativity defeats the entire purpose. Making it easier to make content is good for capital, but no one will ever get fulfillment out of prompting an AI and settling with the result.
It'll lower the barrier of entry (and therefore the quality floor before people feel comfortable sharing something "they made" if they can deflect with an easy "the AI made this" versus "I put XY0 hours into this"), but it'll also empower people who wouldn't otherwise even try to create new things and, presumably, follow their passion to learn and do more.
Here's something you can try to prove it to yourself. Sit down and write a novel. It'll be like squeezing blood out of a rock unless your heart is ready to do it freely. You'll see that if you force yourself through hard work to do it, you'll just end up with something that people will laud as creative due to the execution but it'll lack everything about free-flowing creativity. Good programmers are lazy, so are good creatives, but now I'm just repeating myself.
It's a lot easier squeezing blood out of a heart, especially for the lazy.
It’s not important to me that they do.
> Im sure few will continue to do so but creativity will certainly take a big hit.
I’ve seen the workflows for AI generated films like https://youtu.be/x6aERZWaarM?si=J2VHYAHLL3og32Ix and I find it to be very creative. Its more interesting to me that this person would never have raised capital and tried to direct this, but this is much closer to what they wanted to create. I’m also entertained by it, whether I was judging it for generative AI issues or not.
its not really anyone's problem, and generally limited to the people that made way too much of their identity to be based on a single field, that they feel they have to gatekeep it
its great that people can express themselves closer to their vision now
Nothing prevents human from continue doing just that, precisely because it brings joy and satisfaction. Painting, photography classes are still popular, if not more, in the age of digital photography.
Have a look at the workflow and agent design patterns in this video by youtuber Nate Herk when he talks about planning the architecture:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9yzBp14EM
There’s less talk about automating non-creative work because it’s not flashy. But I can promise it’s a ton of fun, and you can co-design these automations with an LLM.
Making a movie is not accessible to most people and it's EVERYONES dream. This is not even there yet, but I have a few movies I need to make and I will never get a cast together and go do it before I die. If some creatives need to take a backseat so a million more creatives can get a chance, then so be it.
AI creatives can enjoy the brief blip in time where they might get someone else to watch what they've created before their skills become obsolete in an exponentially faster rate just like everyone else's.
There is a more sensical distinction between work that is informational in nature, and work that is physical and requires heavy tools in hard-to-reach places. That's hard to do for big tech, because making tests with heavy machinery is hard and time consuming
good lord. talk about pedantic.