Disclaimer: I love MidJourney. It's the most provocative and addictive tool I've played with on a computer for many a year.
Largely agree with AW the OP, but think the question of "what art are we talking about" needs more air.
A lot of the turmoil around these tools appears to be about the threat they pose to the careers of artists and designers (and soon, most related domains). But some of the simple versions of this story (not this one) overlook the nuances IMO.
Some of those being,
- the distinction between "fine" art in the commercial "art world" gallerist sense, and graphic design/illustration/commercial art
- that professional commercial artists are going to adopt and exploit these tools with the same intrinsic advantages they have using with other tools
- that in a very short time there is already an explosion of work that uses these tools as one (large) element to produce synthetic work across media that would have been prohibitively expensive/time consuming without them
Even as a bystander, but with a background and interest as a serious and modestly successful artist in a different medium,
it's been remarkable to see just how quickly people with fewer kids, better ideas, and more time than me, seized upon these tools not as simple image-making widgets, but as sophisticated tools to exploit to generate a stream of imagery to be applied to create Other Things, both as proofs of concept, commercially, and as yes "real art" in the gallerist sense.
These things are quite obviously disruptive in a way most VC only dream of.
Idle other comments:
The "eerie" uncanny sense that scaling up the visual cortex abstraction stack toward "grandmother neurons" that these systems has, is IMO considerably more unsettling than the impact on specific industries. What we can see (literally) in these systems is a visualization (in the data viz sense) of how much further along towards AGI these things may soon be.
Their failure modes are more interesting to me than their successes. The ramifications for how they fail and how they are of course unaware of their own failure, is a true cautionary tale.
IMO those failures offer an excellent basis for "cautionary tales" and illustration to the general public of why we need oversight and governance for the deployment of these systems. It's one thing for them to produce "nightmare fuel" when asked to create kittens in the kitchen; it's another for a comparable (smaller less tuned closed-source closed-training-dataset...) system to be put in service approving mortgages, assigning credit risks, or (as made ProPublica famous) assessing whether someone is a candidate for bail.
(Highly recommended: The Alignment Problem)
Anyway. The singularity is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
I just completed a “show” of some of my art at my regular cafe that hosts local art on their wall for one month each.
I need to write about this experience (mostly so I can feel “done” about it), but my show was titled “Is This Art?” and consisted of around a dozen images generated by VQGAN/VQGAN+CLIP. I sold almost every single piece! Not bad for a non-artist, frankly.
Anyways, I think the key to my “success” was two fold: One, most images took an input image, all were photographs I took in the local area. Second, I was brutal in my curation of what I actually decided to print and include in the show. The keystone piece was actually a warped image of the coffee shop itself! In an art medium without clear constraints, my challenge was to define those constrains for myself. Not exactly a knew problem for artists.
I also chose to overlay the output image and original photograph in some cases, and unmask the photograph in certain locations in the image. I used this opportunity to touch up the output in photoshop, and add/remove artificers and details. I was limited by my lack of digital art skills here, but this was the fun part.
Final thought, a good eye for color and composition helps any artistic endeavor, and the same is true for this medium.
No need to call yourself a non-artist. To me it sounds like you're an artist :) Congratulations on the successful show. Is it possible to see the final results anywhere on the internet?
Thanks! And I’ve actually been joking that now that I’ve sold something, I’m an artist. “Art is whatever you can get away with,” someone once said.
I don’t yet have the curated pieces available online, but that’s on my TODO list. I really appreciate you asking, though, especially now that I’ve got the physical part figured out, over, and one with. :)
I don't think that AI is going to replace those artists, but if it does, maybe some will be convinced to become AI researchers :-) ?
These art AIs are very good at driving the point home that our DNN AIs are seriously capable. But those capabilities need to be nursed by ever-growing armies of people. True, maybe there is a limit to the amount of people needed to profit from coloring pixels in images, and maybe, just maybe, that ceiling is going to go down the more these artist AIs are used. But AI has the potential to break open areas we can't even imagine now. I for example have trouble imagining that in the time of the horses, there was an industry for traffic signals, another for transporting horse fuel between countries (but maybe there was?), another for teaching teenagers to drive the carriages and get their horse-driving licenses, and so on and so on. Although I don't know much about those days, maybe it was popular to be young and to horse around on top of a good steed.
Maybe we will be teaching our kids about how to survive in the jungle of wild AIs we have created for them, and teachers will be needed. Maybe we will hemorrhage AI-produced content, and in twenty years, there will be an industry for certifying that something is human-made (maybe a lesson to learn about how chess survived in the age of incredibly capable chess-playing computer programs?). Or maybe something else we can't quite see yet.
A bit too speculative. Even though this can generate images at a rapid pace the creative space does not. Rapidly prototyping is not really that useful when it comes to things in concept design, nor does it fill the niche of making an entire scene. Realistically, it's only practical uses are in doing things most artists are not able to do well, such as defining characteristics of individuals to prop and assert generation which in the current scenario it is quite useless for but it isn't to condemn the entire GAN space it will likely never replace artists. Nor the human centered design.
Without this technology, if I want to procure a concept-art quality image to promote my video game, I need to pay at least an amateur artist for their time and skill. With this technology, I can simply run some generations and maybe tweak or combine the output in Photoshop. I don't see how AI won't gobble up the bottom X% of the visual art industry almost immediately.
Fine arts, contemporary artists showing in galleries, mediums that can't be printed on photo paper (sculpture, canvas paintings, etc) will be more resistant to displacement. But the massive majority of commodity art & visuals - adverts, billboards, book covers, article images and so on - will definitely be displaced in the very near future.
Right now, I think the winning move for artists is feedback and iteration: "make his head tilt more to the left. make his tie a lighter shade of blue." etc kind of modifications that aren't easily parseable by an AI.
That being said, I'm quite enjoying generating pixel art to stand in for my programmer art before I commission artists.
I think that's something AI will actually be very good at - GLIDE and StyleGAN are better at editing than DALLE is at image generation. But that's a tool artists can use; you just won't have to do the highlights and shadows in your art if you don't want to.
Newer art programs like CSP already have a lot of tools Photoshop didn't, even if it's just 3D models for poses.
You really need to have a closer look at this thing, because it can definitely do all of that, and much more.
Earlier today I saw a video (sorry, lost the link) of an AI editing program (still a prototype). It generates layers of a scene in place, say sky, mountains, rivers, foreground, etc. each of which would be individually manipulated. Next the program seamlessly blends the layers. The host then continued to add objects/subjects and through "in-painting" made all of it blend into a single coherent scene.
This kind of capability is close to being released. This year.
Nope, it was a different one. You'd draw a shape (rectangle, circle) and the attach a prompt to it, after which AI generates it. Next, you can do advanced compositing.
> Right now, I think the winning move for artists is feedback and iteration: "make his head tilt more to the left. make his tie a lighter shade of blue." etc kind of modifications that aren't easily parseable by an AI.
This is literally how you do prompts to AI programs.
> And then software will "learn," and the arms race will continue.
How will the software learn? By having their work feed into the algo.
The creative space is massive and fashions and currents change. In order for the algo to catch up it would need a massive dataset and by the time this is satisfied the art would have moved on to something else..
This tool will still remain and will most likely be used by artists too, though just as a tool in the toolbox, not as a complete process. Fotography didn’t destroy painting, it changed it in unforseen ways.
For most works using this as concept art would be deceptive and out right fraud in worse cases. The FCC doesn't pursue it so you'd probably be fine but this is not a replacement for an actual concept art unless you are working on a low quality or low poly game and even then this would be very misrepresentative. This has no real use case outside fraud.
What do you think concept art is? Any picture seems like it'd work as concept art. Even an uncreative illustrator AI would help if the person using it just can't draw.
I'm extremely confused. The situation illustrated was that of an indie game dev using Mid journey or whatever to generate concept art.
Who exactly is being defrauded? Is the dev defrauding themselves? Their future customers? How would anyone even know? It's not like concept art is used for anything external?
The "de-facto" standard for design and art in public spaces, corporations, websites, flyers, movies, posters, is that which can provably and evidently only be produced by well paid, furnished dedicated professionals. The standard isn't what looks good, it's what is evidently the work of someone or something with sufficient resources to be worth paying attention to. The standard will shift to something that cannot replicated easily by some 10 year old kid with 20 dollars worth of DallE-5 credits.
I can imagine the standard shifts from quality to scale. I.e a company doesn't give a shit that they have nice design, but rather they make something so ugly that noone could mistake it as being something someone commissioned from an AI, and spread it in necessarily low-supply spaces. (i.e. a new social media company's logo is a green poop emoji that they pay every west coast MLB player to get a tattoo of on their forehead).
Either way artists (besides tens of well-known ones) aren't needed too much. "OK SallY-5, make some crap that's unlike all these trending images [image list follows]"
Right now it is new, but soon people will start to see the common sorts of failures that AI generated art has (and will have a very difficult time getting rid of) will become obvious and seem tacky and cheap.
Look at the coins with the dragon and his horde for example. The newness will wear off, people will become sensitized to the flaws, and AI "art" will find a niche which is quite a lot smaller than people impressed with technology imagine.
Art and artists aren't dead, AI is not at all "creative" just derivative. It will be one influence among many for actual artists, become a tool for some, and for the rest of us, take the place of "art mill" art for the kinds of places that want to look fancy without putting any effort into it. (I'm looking at you, "luxury" apartment building with the exact same bad, inoffensive abstract print on every floor's elevator lobby)
>AI is not at all "creative" just derivative.
And humans are not derivative? Every image human artists make is based off of something that artist has seen or experienced before. All creativity is derivative.
Derivative is a term of art with several different overloads. Critics will reach for the term to describe something that doesn't seem to do anything new; while lawyers further use it to describe a work that owes some kind of economic debt to the original[0].
The inverse of the legal sense of this word is "transformative". If you are making something new, then that debt goes away to the extent that such a debt would prohibit the creation of that work.
Generalizing from these concepts... we don't care so much that literally every bit of art is "based on" or "influenced by" something. We care if the end result is novel or not. This is very much an "I know it when I see it" kind of standard, so it might sound like I'm just talking in circles, but there is a difference.
Currently, it's difficult to get an AI system[1] to generate more novel images. There are certain patterns it knows how to do very well, and if you ask it for something that violates those patterns it gets confused because nobody's drawn that before. This puts us closer to "derivative" rather than "transformative", because it's harder to use the system for the latter purpose.
[0] Existing precedent and law specifically names a few categories of work that are assumed to be derivative; such as sequels and translations.
[1] I have only tried Craiyon / DALL-E Mini, and a handful of very primitive systems, both of which are not the most powerful image generators available.
> Right now it is new, but soon people will start to see the common sorts of failures that AI generated art has
This assumes that these sorts of flaws will remain just as bad for the foreseeable future. I doubt that's true, just looking at the progress in recent years of other machine learning domains.
Sure, eventually things will plateau, but it doesn't look like we're there yet, not even close.
Context being that another AI art model (StableDiffusion) knows the names of many popular artists and can create images that sort of kind of look like their work. This terrified a lot of artists on Twitter who've now gone around harassing AI developers and claiming they're plagiarists, then simultaneously posting things like "umm this is all uncreative and ugly collages" and "this is going to take all our jobs".
Oddly, the main instigator turned out to be a "Pokemon in real life" fanartist who didn't notice he's already a professional plagiarist.
> So in that context, saying “horses stuck around when the automobile came” is true, but if you went up to a painter and said “hey, within your lifetime painting will see a 90% decline, stop being taught formally, disappear from daily life or awareness”.
The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons' paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace paintings because they aren't paintings! Print shops already exist and may have replaced you though.
> I’ve had a lot of struggles with this. I have a specific image in my head, I’m trying to prompt for it, and the AI just does not want to do it. The most trouble that I’ve had so far has been with trying to get a tavern running across the plain with chicken legs.
There's a general unfixable problem here, which is it's hard to be aligned with silly prompts without giving you silly output for "normal" prompts. That's also why they're complaining the model output has too safe composition - the developers are lucky they even got it to do that, it's better than random blobs of color and body parts like older models would generate.
But the picture they want probably is hiding somewhere in Midjourney's latent space; it's just a matter of finding a prompt that recreates it.
Another would be prompting it with your sketch so that you can get an image in its "house style" - which doesn't seem very appealing for most models, but Midjourney has a pretty strong one.
Btw, stable diffusion official channel got suspended off twitter, because their model is open source, and it can create anything the person desires.
>The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons' paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace paintings because they aren't paintings!
It is conceivable, that a popular artist will become replicated using an automated method or a manual one. We see that happening all the time with music and art. The best artists are the ones who influenced others the most.
An analogy that TFA curiously doesn't touch is the advent of photography. What did it do to painting?
Painting became less and less figurative as photography became more and more accurate. The point of painting was to represent reality; but as photography became so much more accurate, that point became moot.
And so, painting went into a different direction. Represent not reality, but feelings, what the artist feels when looking at reality; something that's out of reach of photography.
AI is trying to conquer this as well. Human art needs to go further. Something weird that AI cannot touch.
Art that human beings actually care about is not the commercial art many people are referencing here. Art is not pretty pictures. Art is not a expensively produced media. Art is a human communication concerning the realizations of finite life. However, Art being Art, it does not communicate these issues in immature direct language, Art communicates through richly layered metaphor.
Real Art, that which moves one's soul, is beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence for a large number of reasons, chief of which because it is a communication between beings aware of finite existence.
Note, I am not saying the consumer markets will not be flooded with cheap mimicry of art as pooped out by ignorant noncomprehending AIs. That will most definitely happen. And a generation of would be fine artists will never pursue their innate vocation thanks to the misconception that AI is capable of creating Art (which it cannot.)
However, you do not have to fall for the stupidity most are caught. If you have an artistic vocation, realize that indirection and metaphor are your human creative super powers that AI cannot touch. Metaphor requires comprehension and often complex interwoven comprehensions, which is so far out of AI’s reach it is laughable the general pubic believes otherwise. AIs are idiots when you know them well. They have zero capacity to create Real Art composed of complex metaphors embodied in a form other than how they appear.
Nobody. Does it move your soul? Does it feel important that it exists? Does it matter if someone destroys it? These are answers nobody can collectively make, and that is why Art is simultaneously a grand fraud and the frontier of human reasoning. It cannot be defined because it exists on the edge of reason. The moment it can be created without a human communication behind it, it ceases to be Art.
Human curated DALL-E art. The AI just generates, the human curators, even if it is you, created the art. Recognition the generation communicates something within is the distinction, that's how "found art" became a thing.
I suspect you are going to repeatedly move the goalposts to keep the human in. Perhaps that's right, perhaps not but perhaps also ask yourself why you feel the emotional need to.
That is the nature of Art, it is a dynamic frontier, the edge of human communication and understanding. It is where our communication languages combine to speak what we've not said yet because we are yet maturing as a species and learning how to speak to ourselves.
I've been saying this in the copyright discussions. There is a human in the loop doing both prompting and curation. The copyrights should be assigned to the human, at least in part.
Maybe a GAN generating images from random seeds without conditioning would make uncopyrightable content.
And that is perfectly fine. We are going to see a devaluation of image art, simply because ordinary people will cease to respect the imagery, believing no effort or human was required to create it. Currently, laypeople respect effort and that becomes their proxy for initial respect of image art. However, Art has not been merely the Art Object for over a hundred years. What is in Art museums today, discounting the historical art that serves as the mileposts leading to our current location, is the cultural identifier the Art Object presents for an idea. The object itself is merely the next milepost, something concrete people can point to, in the unknown frontier of our most complex communications to ourselves we've spoken to date.
We lack fundamental science, such as no theory at all for artificial comprehension. That "first android baby" within 5 years is theater and fraud. (Which, incidentally could be Art.)
Well, "artificial" does come from "art" (ars + fex = skill + make)
> From Middle English artificial (“man-made”) via Old French (modern French artificiel), from Latin artificiālis from artificium (“skill”), from artifex, from ars (“skill”), and -fex, from facere (“to make”).
Regarding the artificial baby - I was thinking along the lines of putting the Gato [1] model in an android body. Nothing wild technologically, just give it the experience of having a family, friends, things to do, like we do for kids. This will induce the agent to form the same kind of value judgements as people make. It won't be just trained on the whole internet, but have access to the real world + human society, the best training dataset.
I believe the lack of access to the real world, the human society and a humanoid body is what keeps AI models from being more human-like. We can't become a developed human without society, for example. Why would AI be able to? The next step in AI is not about the neural net architecture but the curriculum, especially real world exposure.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Music has been in a dialogue with recording technology more or less since the beginning of recording technology.
Music can be performed. Or rather, performing music is way less boring for an observer than performing painting or sculpture. Of course, speedpainting exists, but performative art is more resistant to being obsoleted by technology.
I'm starting from the viewpoint that the whole point of music is observing the performer do it.
in contrast, the whole point of paiting or a sculping is the final completed artifact.
What I'm trying to get at, is how recording technology "defeats" the purpose of music as its performace; and so, irremediably splits it from it's source (its origin, the composition of the music). I suppose improvisation remains; but highly constrained within prearranged structures (a la "AB[improvisatino goes HERE]C") like in jazz.
I do not understand how hyperpop nor DnB are supposed to be a response to what I'm trying to get at (then again, I'm just now barely conveying my point... I hope.)
Art has already been there for ages. I went to see Copenhagen Contemporary's exhibit of light & space and I'd never actually FELT art like that. It was quite exhilarating. Suddenly i understand what people say they feel when they connect with art.
That's not what people mean when they talk about AI art though. AI art is Commercial Art. What Horkheimer and Adorno famously called "The Culture Industry".
I think the current output of AI art is mostly commercial but I'm sure an artist will come along and use it in some way different that exceeds the current use. Probably something that doesn't use text prompts or some other clever way.
It also pushed art to the niche. Painted images explicitly for children has been a massive industry for decades- also one that mature AI generative art could absolutely dominate.
I'd love to see this technology aimed at concept art for games. I don't think this would hurt employed concept artists, I do think it will be a tool concept artists can use to quickly thumbnail significantly more versions of a vision.
That artist will then refine the results into something supremely engaging to humans.
Really I see this as an incredible tool for artists to help refine truly innovative ideas.
If anything, painting has become more stylistic and figurative since photography; impressionism was a direct response to the photorealistic style of painting popular during the renaissance.
It freed artists of having to focus on realism, if they wanted to do so.
I don’t think that’s true though. There’s no reason you can’t prompt an AI to make an image that makes people feel things. One of the very first things I tried was “Mt rainier by Monet” and it certainly made me feel quite serene just like any human made nature art
I've been dabbling with text-to-image generation quite a bit lately. I also do graphic design, drafting, and occasionally doodle with a pen or pencil.
I really enjoy generating images, and I really enjoy drawing even though I'm not really good at it. I like to draw with my five-year-old, but I've also exposed him to Dalle-Mini. I think showing him dalle-mini was a mistake, and I'm going to avoid repeating it. (We are a low-media household.)
My concern about AI art has to do with children learning art skills. Will it be hard to encourage developing art skills? If a person can just ask for an image rather than learning how to make one, will they be motivated to do the work to build the skill? Or will it suddenly become a waste of time to the young mind?
Is that much different from being able to find ready-made images to look at in various media?
I could see a difference in the case of wanting to see a custom image and being able to summon it via description vs. needing to learn to produce it. I’m not particularly artistic and never developed any such skills… so I don’t know: how crucial is that particular motivation to those who acquire art (production) skills?
If you just want to look at an image of a thing, finding one is good. You might even find a real picture of something. ( In the future, this isn't a given. ) Plus you'll have to filter out images that are irrelevant, or even harmful.
If you need to use the picture for something, there's a lot of advantage to crafting your own picture. (licensing, privacy, attribution, ownership, et al)
When I wrote my comment I was trying to think of a parallel from the past, and I kept thinking of calculators. An even better example would be the decline of hand writing as a skill.
The difference between seeing art and drawing art is essentially one of a knowledge capture skill. When you learn to write, you have to copy the shapes of the letters. Often this is first done by tracing the lines or filling in an outline with color. Then you learn to reproduce it on your own, and eventually have it memorized.
The same is basically true for drawing, but you're doing more of the early parts of the process more often. To draw a figure from imagination you have to learn the shapes. To do that you have to find a real figure in pose, and carefully copy it to get the proportions of the shapes as accurate as you can(which is assisted by various measuring techniques to correct your work). Then, after a few thousand of those, you try to draw an imagined figure and voila, your hand makes recognizable shapes - maybe a bit simplified, out of proportion, or with poor anatomy, but something others can parse correctly.
And so doing a lot of drawing is like building up a vocabulary, becoming more observant and aware of subtle visual differences and therefore more able to communicate them back. I can't see AI replacing this: it can be a good servant and give a lot of options, but it can't mind-read that you want a hand posed slightly differently.
You can ask for an image, but that's not a physical object, it's an image. The thing that creates physical objects is called an inkjet printer and already exists.
Neither of them create paintings though. So your kids are safe to learn that.
Actually, truthfully, AI is merely a complex tool. Any “art” created by an AI with no human interaction is pure rubbish. It is the humans operating the AI that knowingly discard the rubbish, and after significant effort entailing a lot of trials and random experimentation they manage to get something their human mind comprehends is integrated with the goal they have in their imagination. It is the human curating and editing the AIs generations that produces the “art” and not the software. The software is merely a sophisticated idiot savant, and I significantly stress the idiot part because they are innately capable of zero art themselves.
I don’t think that fact has been established. From what I’ve observed with Midjourney and Dall-E, the defects in the output of these models are more artistically significant than just mangled faces and missing details. The models don’t understand the styles they are aping, and they don’t understand the elements of visual art in a way that allows them use those elements in the service of an expressive goal. I think it’s quite plausible that we plateau to a point where the user of these systems still needs significant technical knowledge (drawing and painting) in order to correctly specify the requirements to the model.
The amount of time required is immaterial. It is the quality of the communication that matters. Unless you can realize the significance of when Duchamp submitted an ordinary yet upside down urinal as Fine Art, then you don't really understand the nature of Art. Like I say above, Art is not pretty pictures.
I think that’s a recurrent theme with deep learning: it’s incredible, almost magical, when it’s well adapted to a specific task that fits specific parameters. But failure modes are a minefield.
How are these systems trained to make sure they're not polluted with images created by AI already?
I can see how it's semi-easy to have a database of images up to a certain date (before AI generating algo existed), but what about if you want to train the AI with modern data?
For example, say if I want to query, in 2035: "Flying hippos in the style of McGrundsBulle" where McGrundsBulle is an artist who only started producing art in 2025... How is the AI then not going to trained with "flying hippos" generated between now and 2035 by AI like DALL-E 2 / midjourney / etc.?
I'd argue it wouldn't make sense to train better AIs using current AI's generated pictures for many of them are the stuff of nightmares and it doesn't seem to be because they've been trained by nightmarish datasets. They're just creepy due to how the current AI works and many details are obviously off, which makes them very creepy to humans.
Datasets can be manually curated to contain primarily original images if this becomes a real issue. For example, classifiers can predict whether an image is generated or not. You could adapt the process used to create laion-aesthetic[0] to remove generated images.
Not sure it would but I would be interested to see what would happen. Since the current tools are built on what currently exists in the world of imagery what happens if they are trained on the new mashed up and more fantastical imagery that didn't exist before.
Why do you think its inherently a problem if the AI can see itself in the mirror? If anything, those sorts of feedback loops are exactly the missing ingredient to true AI imo.
Have you noticed that young people use music less and less as a signalling device? That is to say they care far less about whether or not the music is cool and signals their affinity to some kind of subculture... and more about whether or not they just like the sound.
This is because access to music has become cheap. Discovery of music has become cheap. Signalling behaviours though rely on the costliness of signalling through a particular medium. Costly signalling is the theoretical framework you want here to understand what is going to happen to art if the tech is as good as it is currently being hyped.
We like to think of art as this inherently communicative act - as the author says. But the main psychological motivation is signalling. We would not waste so much energy as a species on such behaviour if it didn't have some kind of evolutionary benefit. So I expect much of the energy that goes into the artistic signalling medium will be redirected toward more costly mediums.
Yes, I think the tech evolution of music has a lot of parallels here. In the 60s-70s, production and distribution were expensive, so there was scarcity. In the 90s-early 2000s DAWs on laptops made it easy to self-record/produce, so there was a a lot more music made, then in the 2010s legal distribution became cheap through streaming.
Nowadays there's more music being created and consumed than ever, but the musicians don't make nearly as much money as in the golden days of the CD. The mega-stars like Billy Eillish still make a good amount through brand deals / live shows, but the 'middle class' of musicians has fallen away.
I think lower barriers to entry through creating art via AI assistance will mean more art available, but it probably will make it harder to make a living as a professional artist. That said, I don't think anyone who chooses to be an artist today is primarily motivated to earn money.
> Nowadays there's more music being created and consumed than ever, but the musicians don't make nearly as much money as in the golden days of the CD. The mega-stars like Billy Eillish still make a good amount through brand deals / live shows, but the 'middle class' of musicians has fallen away.
I’m not sure where you got the impression that the bygone era of the CD was so lucrative, or that its largess was more evenly distributed in a meaningful way. If you’re open to challenging that conception, I’d highly recommend reading Steve Albini’s article, The Problem With Music (also sometimes titled Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked; not linked because it doesn’t have a canonical link and I’m never sure which site reposting it can be relied on not to edit it). Anyway the tl;dr is this: to the extent there’s ever been a more even distribution of earnings for musicians, that certainly wasn’t attributable to CD sales. The article was written fairly early in the CD era, and those dynamics deepened through that period. I’m doubtful it was ever attributable to any particular sale of recordings on any kind of media. Then, as now (and probably since well before recording technology was available) musicians making a decent or better living by and large made the majority of it performing live.
For what it’s worth, the article I mentioned factored greatly into my decision not to pursue a music career, even as I embraced the early availability of cheap digital recording (and intermittently still do). I’m sure there’s an alternate universe where I’d be thrilled that my life’s work would be playing music, but I have little doubt that my entry into the middle class would have been far less likely than by taking up programming.
That happened a while ago, with Millenials. Subcultures were GenX only.
The prior technology was Boomers' universal counterculture, where if you wanted to do one of being a hippie or join the new age or do drugs or go to concerts or have weird sex you had to do them all at once - that's why they seemed convinced that going to an outdoor concert was literally the same thing as saving the planet.
Subcultures developed after people realized that didn't make any sense, and there was just enough communication technology to find people to get into your hobby, but not enough to mix and match them, so now your hobby life was often still defined by being a goth or punk or playing D&D, but it's less universal.
The kids are capable of joining more than one group at once because they can do it all online. And nobody is in a band anymore.
I think there’s still emo and scene kids. I’ve seen a few! And if there’s still such a thing as death metal, grindcore, etc then there are kids out there in that subculture.
I'm talking about kids. Like, 12 years old. It was a common thing to dream about for kids that age, though. I personally didn't, but mostly because my wishful thinking was about game dev.
> do Art to create meaning and participate in the meaning making process
is just
> for external signaling and the sort of implied “hey look at me” desire
in a different light. You cannot participate in the meaning making process without signalling to other meaning makers, attracting their attention, and influencing their subsequent signalling. If you don't signal, then you haven't participated because you just didn't try. And if you don't attract attention, then you haven't participated because you had no effect on the proceedings.
This is not to say that it's your interpretation versus their interpretation. It's to say it's both at the same time.
> > do Art to create meaning and participate in the meaning making process
> is just
> > for external signaling and the sort of implied “hey look at me” desire
OP didn’t specify “create meaning” for anyone else, or otherwise conveying art to others. One of the weird things about art is that it’s a form of expression that doesn’t necessarily have an audience. Quite a lot of art is more akin to keeping a diary, or singing in your head, than “look at me”.
> You cannot participate in the meaning making process without signalling to other meaning makers
I have ample evidence to the contrary which I have no desire to share with you, or anyone, other than noting its value to me having created it.
I somewhat agree with this but I think introducing a hierarchy to segment art is important.
'High art' (the kind that hangs in galleries) has a meaning attached to it that escapes into the level of a meme and that often has little to do with what is represented to the senses, which is easily replicated. For example, the Mona Lisa is now famous because of an attempted theft in the early 20th Century. Other art is meaningful because it was at the vanguard of a particularly novel aesthetic, associated with a specific artist (very common), or because it encodes a commentary on a particular aspect of history (Picasso is a good example of all three). This kind of art will endure because AI cannot copy what makes it "valuable", though it may still be of assistance to the 'high artist'.
The same is true for music. Kendrick Lamar isn't famous because he's exceptional technically (some enthusiasts I've spoken with find him fairly mediocre in this regard). He's famous because of what his music communicates, because of its (apparent) authenticity, and how that resonates with listeners. That plus Kendrick's story is what gives his music signaling value, which is then amplified into a meme. Most people on the other side of the meme adoption curve probably don't even understand why they should care about Kendrick or his music. Rather, they're imagining they like it in order to follow the trajectory plotted by the tastemakers. I strongly suspect all 'high art' is like this.
A perhaps more germane example of the above phenomena arises in NFTs. NFTs of weird anthropomorphized monkeys are valuable because of a collective hallucination that they in fact have value. You can use AI to generate the monkey JPEGs, but you cannot so readily use it to craft the meme.
'Low art', by contrast, is much more utilitarian and often devised in response to fairly prosaic demands. Technical sophistication usually wins out. This is what AI will supplant. It's a problem insofar as many employed artists were relying on low art to sustain themselves. Perhaps art will now become even more so the province of the wealthy?
Personally I've always been more a 'low art' person since 'high art' seems to be about participating in mutual delusion and even snobbery, and its surface characteristics may not evoke anything profound when divorced from the subtext with which the art has been furnished. Incidentally, I think this is partly why 'nerds' gravitate towards things like fantasy + sci-fi literature, anime, and video games. These are artistic mediums that are very directly evocative and wherein the meaning and the superficial/sensory experience are rather closely aligned. And, of course, they prioritize technical sophistication.
Anyone who's a fan of 'low art' should probably be very excited because we're fast approaching a time where you'll be able to experience a near infinite abundance of 'JIT art' that caters precisely to your tastes.
I've known a lot of artists. I agree that many would report this as their motivation. Whether or not it actually is...?
Anyway it's an empirical question that we might get to see the answer to - so no need to argue about it really. If artistic creation is disrupted as some predict, we'll get to see the impact on artists.
Then they will continue to do so in their own little world and largely be ignored by society. Which is fine.
Everyone else engaging with art will take what the algorithm(influenced by monetary deals/cuts/middlemen as ever in history) puts in front of them. Which will be the "hey look at me" people.
Keen observers might equally surmise that young people use music much more intensely as a signalling device, visible in particular by the searing intensity of fandoms and the currency of TikTok music microfads.
The friction that endows signalling with its cost is simply opportunity cost — you can’t be a vocal fan of everything or go deep on every TikTok trend-strand.
Also note that “discovery” here has been almost entirely mediated by TikTok or Spotify algorithms. If you’re tired of what those algorithms offer, in practice, it’s outlandishly difficult to do better than random walks to find something new you like….except through your friends’ signslling.
That all said, I think you might be right. But I submit this radically different reading is plausible. My own anecdata suggest this.
> Have you noticed that young people use music less and less as a signalling device?
Is this the result of some study, or where is this observation coming from? I have almost certainly not noticed this, in fact I might almost say the opposite.
Based on what I see, the concept of "genre" is gone for a few years - you just listen to whatever spotify or apple music or your app of choice recommends, and it fluctuates across a set of genres, but it's not as "fixed" as it used to be, in past decades.
Fandom/identification with specific artists remains as strong as ever though - you see a lot of "Swifties" or fans of a specific rapper, for instance, and they use it as a form of identity. You see fewer "metal heads" or "classical music erudites".
All anecdotal, of course. Would love to see studies on this.
Back in the 90s, DJs used to flex their record collections: cases and cases of obscure vinyl records that were both hard to find and expensive to buy. Owning specific items like KLF's White Album after the band nuked its back catalogue was a serious accomplishment.
But now anybody with a phone can dial up millions of tracks in a split second with Soundcloud, Spotify etc, including those KLF releases that were once unobtainium.
As an artist (music, film, 3D modeling/rendering, creative writing, portraiture) and an AI engineer, I'll admit I have a lot of uncertainty about the future of art. Some days I'm very scared, other days I figure I'll just "go with the flow" and not worry too much about a future I can't control.
I read the papers. I see the pace of progress. I understand how these models work on a technical level and I am blown away by how quickly they are being iterated on. I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).
People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy. Photography and painting both survived because they're fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished in cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate themselves. AI art is different, because its entire purpose is to replicate, and no matter what human artists do with the medium of digital images, the AI will always be right there to gobble up the new wave changes and learn to replicate them.
Whereas the advent of photography was never meant to kill the painting industry, these AI algorithms are very much meant to kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the researchers or not.
> I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).
I would 100% take you up on this bet.
> People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy.
I think that painting-and-photography is the wrong analogy; stuff like DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up.
> I think that painting-and-photography is the wrong analogy; stuff like DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up.
I don't know. As Wait But Why likes to say, cars sure did put horses out of business, pretty much thoroughly and permanently.
Artists aren't horses because artists are actually intentionally participating in the economy. Horses just want to do horse stuff and don't particularly have any desire to be employed by carriage drivers.
I don't really see what the difference is. If I want to intentionally participate in the economy by dragging a carriage with people in it around in exchange for money, no one is going to employ me because my services are obviously inferior to those that a car can provide.
Similarly, perhaps artists will wish to participate in the economy by making art, but they're going to find scanty employment when compared with machines which can operate 100x faster than they can, and arguably at a higher quality of output.
Well, what I mean is the horses and carriages aren’t even produced anymore since we don’t want them, and they didn’t do anything to make themselves useful again, not being sentient.
The human beings previously called artists will still be around as humans and will still have jobs, even if it’s some other job.
“Artist” is a vague term though, and I think we’d still have a lot of them due to Jevons’ paradox, the same way ATM machines have actually caused the number of bank tellers to increase. Especially because it’s high-status for society to say they support artists, which isn’t the case for other service workers like bank tellers.
There is a niche for horse rides, though - they’re romantic and I’ve seen them as tourist gimmicks in different cities. Artists have a bigger niche, as AI art (so far) produces digital images and not, say, physical sculpture or paintings.
> Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit.
And some of them are already doing that. In Peter Mohrbacher's latest newsletter he shared a digital painting which was started by Disco Diffusion which he then touched up to give it his characteristic look. Given the details and feel of the painting were unmistakably his, I wouldn't have guessed that the base of the image was AI-generated.
I see it playing out this way too. Technology at societal scale is "and" not "or", and computers have long been cast in the scapegoat role because of a basic principle that is not unique to them, but is made all the more clear by their existence: it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast.
When sampled digital audio first appeared in music, it went from experimental to pop hook(e.g. Paul Hardcastle "Nineteen") and then to the subject of court cases that clarified IP law for samples over the span of maybe 20 years. In the middle of that period one can find scare pieces about pit orchestras being replaced by synthesizers and so forth.
The articles tend to be correct in that the same jobs don't exist when they get automated, but you get new jobs instead. And so the panic, where it exists, is tied to whether you specifically are on the chopping block. For digital illustrators who are focused on a high degree of finish and polish, AI art threatens because it's so good at replication of a high-effort stylistic mode of production. Cartoonists are much less impressed since they are already in a streamlined, symbolic mode, so the net savings of AI is harder to come by. With a few years of traditional training, most of it just focused on the core "you can draw what you see" skill, you have what you need to build up a library of reusable visual language for your work: an arm seen from various angles is still an arm, you can add more anatomy to it or stylize it, but it has a symbolic function tied to particular shapes. And an AI can bring out more detail from the symbol, just as when an artist follows a reference more closely and renders it more carefully, but it isn't creating novel representation. That's still coming from the illustrator operating symbolically.
And when you lean into that, it's like, OK: presumably the AI will be able to do some style transfer and turn a crude cartoon into a fancy painting. That levels the playing field a lot but it doesn't change the nature of what makes an illustration good: having a sense of composition, storytelling and so forth. A lot of cultural context things are in there that will evade automation.
It should be noted that many of your points are already hit by "buying digital music instead of using streaming platforms". Those points are important to me, yet I’d never buy a vinyl.
It honestly depends. I can name quite literally hundreds of digital releases that are objectively, measurably worse than their vinyl counterpart.
Anecdotal. It doesn't matter if you yourself would never buy a vinyl, what matters is that a lot of other people are. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you would never buy a supercar/helicopter/Breitling/Rolex/swimming pool/jetski/yacht/vegan food/meat/gluten-free/keto-friendly/whatever, because others are.
> I can name quite literally hundreds of digital releases that are objectively, measurably worse than their vinyl counterpart.
I never said "all".
> Anecdotal
Yes, I know. Just like your comment. But you listed reasons for people to buy vinyls, when many were simply "reasons for people not to use streaming services". That was my point.
> If I want to intentionally participate in the economy by dragging a carriage with people in it around in exchange for money, no one is going to employ me because my services are obviously inferior to those that a car can provide.
So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code.
The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.
Saying "The artist's job is to elicit emotion" is such a broad statement that it stops being a meaningful lens to look at the world and draw conclusions from. If you say that, then you say that a painter is the same as a cinematographer, or a fine chef, or a therapist, or my family. The conversation that this blog post brings up is about the very precise boundary of people who create art through static visual mediums. Saying that their job is the same as a cinematographer - when a professional artist has probably spent ten thousand hours learning to draw, and virtually zero on film, is meaningless.
I’m a professional artist and while this is true to an extent, most of my job - and a lot of what I enjoy about it - is “drawing”. Running a thousand prompts through an AI black box sounds infinitely tedious compared to drawing stuff. I don’t want to live in that world.
Don't worry, you won't have to. AI-generated images aren't possible to copyright, and as they're all derived from existing sources (read: plagiarized), you're not going to be replaced any time soon.
They're not necessarily plagiarized anymore than a human artist plagiarizes from looking at an existing image. If you accepted this, Disney would basically own every animation ever made.
StableDiffusion is a 10GB model made from 100TB of images, so there probably isn't even room to have memorized inputs - there's also some built-in defenses against that.
It's possible to make an AI that does explicitly make collages out of inputs (that goes under "fine tuning") and such a thing would be useful. OpenAI has a similar paper about a text AI that cites its sources called WebGPT.
> DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up.
It moves artists so far "up the stack" that being an artist becomes redundant.
If C-level execs could just ask their computer to generate the exact website they wanted, there would be a lot less web devs out there.
Tools allow _skilled professionals_ to do their job better. The existence of GCC doesn't make the average Joe a programmer; it makes programmers more productive.
DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists.
DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers.
Like many iterative technologies, Wordpress had the right idea with clunky, underdeveloped execution. Nevertheless it was wildly successful but the way that it works often requires some web development (or at least technical administration).
Wix and Squarespace (the spiritual successors to Wordpress) however have undoubtedly put lots (most?) contract WebDevs out of business. There are still plenty around - go check Fiverr or UpWork. However it's impossible to argue that these tools haven't made it easier for non-web devs to build a fully-featured and beautiful site for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. It used to be that these no-code site builders all looked crappy and cookie cutter but in the past few years they've really upped the quality of their templates such that they often are indistinguishable from a "handmade" landing page.
I think the path is likely to be similar for these AI image and text generators.
Depends on what kind of complexity a website requires. Predominantly static portfolio or a website with basic ecommerce functions? Sure. Custom internal workflow and lots of externally interactive stuff with an API? Yeah, you're not going to be served well by Wix or Squarespace. Different tools for different tasks. It's silly to compare a website for the local salon with a platform/utility/tool/whatever.
> Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up
That’s a terrible analogy. Compilers didn’t put devs out of business because it still would takes months of learning before someone that needs a program made could leverage a compiler to do basic things. So they hire devs.
It takes 0 hours of learning before someone that want a nice illustration made for them can do it with dalle/midjourney. Why would they hire anyone to do it ?
Some people are going to say prompt engineering is a new skill, but I bet that prompt engineering is going to disappear as fast as it arrived as we build more practical ways of exploring the image space.
no, but I've used some descriptions as prompts (mostly on Craiyon) and got quite acceptable results. Plain descriptors like how you are standing in an open field to the west of a white house, with a small mailbox visible produced multiple usable candidates (if you didn't mind some quirky impressionism). 'A maze of twisty little passages, all alike' gave me all 2d mazes, but adding '3d first person, photorealistic' gave some entertainingly weird choices.
The good images come from detailed prompts, it requires creativity, visualising what you want out of it. I think anyone writing a prompt and getting what they want out of it (vs. something surreal and hilarious for its unexpected whackiness, at least while the novelty lasts) is 'doing art', just as a photographer chooses a subject and frames a shot.
> Photography and painting both survived because they're fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished in cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate themselves
I think there's a good argument to be made that photography killed photorealism in painting (or at least, it's an ever-shrinking niche). Photorealism was cheapened, and in response, Modern Art was created.
What's getting cheapened now is transforming works into digitally-defineable idea-spaces. Create a new idea in art, give a machine enough representations, and it can endlessly generate new works within that space.
What's not getting cheapened yet is
1) New idea-spaces -> I've yet to see an AI generate something that could be defined as a new art "movement"
2) New mediums -> I'm sure that something like Dall-E will exist for 3D CAD files sooner or later, but there are a lot of mediums that won't be physically reproduce-able by a computer (think James Turrell). Works in these spaces will remain valuable or even increase in value. And while AI might be able to generate new ideas in these spaces, there will need to be people to decide to put in the effort to execute them.
3) Curation and "found art" -> Deciding which ideas (generated or not) deserve attention.
Photography eventually led to the creation of an entirely new vidual medium though: films.
Films have a ton of artistic value, and even today, and a regular joe can appreciate many brand new, critically acclaimed films.
AI will absolutely kill some forms of art, and force others to change in a way that alienates most people. (Pop music and background muzak seem like low hanging fruit, because music can be distilled to numbers and signals much easier than other forms of art.)
But AI will undoubtedly lead to the creation of entirely new forms of art as well.
It's possible to view movies as a new form of art not possible before photography, but one could also view them as automated plays and the thing that killed vaudeville.
AI is coming for our creative part, which we imagined would be last in line. It already is doing a reasonable job at it. If it can do that, and will next exponentially increase in capability, what really remains of us?
Disagree on 2/3. Dull tasks are some of the best for robots - their attention never wanders, they never get fatigued, and their performance is always going to stay consistent. Dangerous jobs are already being given to robots - just look at the military. Even outside of that, humans getting hurt means liability/expensive insurance (not to mention bad publicity).
Humans will probably be stuck with the dirty jobs, though.
>I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now
you think AI auto-generated movies will kill the human film industry? AI novels? these are both fundamentally different from the kind of recombination that DALL-E is doing.
>the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).
3d printing
>these AI algorithms are very much meant to kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the researchers or not.
Yeah anyone claiming they understand what these things do, and how they do it, and then expecting them to replace digital writing/film is just...not going to happen. Not in 10 years at least. We're not even close.
Every time people start freaking out about the AI apocalypse, i tend to point out that to my knowledge, there's no learning style AI that's beaten a mario game, especially in a real "human" style (play through each level and learn them). I've seen an AI that can beat mario 1 this way, but it doesn't "learn", it just "brute forces" by trying random inputs, and then save state reloading if it gets a bad output (dies/gets stuck), and then does thousands of those games in parallel. And this ONLY works with mario 1 in part because "go right" is ALWAYS correct. Take any further mario game, where more vertical/backwards exploration is a thing, and its not even possible (mario 3 for example).
It would be trivial of course to just program it to beat every game and get everything, by literally programming the correct inputs (literally a tas) but a task that is expected to be doable by a young human child is, again to my minimal knowledge of amateur research, not even remotely within the realm of possible for modern AI.
Yes. I don't think we'll even have AI "Drawing" comic books in 10 years, at least not the way most people here are thinking of it.
As others have pointed out this might become a tool in the toolkit that's kinda like clipart++ meets photoshop, and it will have uses there, but I very much doubt it's going to get any use in those mediums.
Comics/mangas are generally either A. pretty damn easy to draw (in the scheme of stuff that's out there), so i'm not sure fiddling with an AI to get the output you want/training a team to work with the AI's initial output is worth it or B. horrifically hard to draw/stylized. Things like berserk or the currently relevant sandman are probably not something you can get an AI to reliably output.
My first thought with all of this art is it's almost always surreal, and reminds me of custom MTG card art, so while I could see it working better there, I'm still very uncertain this is suddenly going to be THE TECH to take over.
And that's even before my jaded view that things like this ALWAYS have caveats that they don't tell everyone right away. They haven't open sourced the code claiming vague worries about the implications, and hell maybe they really have made the golden goose and are right to worry, but my experience having studied AI casually over the years is more often than not it's marketing bullshit to keep the funds coming in and stop everyone from pointing out how HYPER specific it is and what a fucking phenomenal pain in the ass it must be to get it to work at all.
I'm extra annoyed by this particular team because I followed their exploits in Dota 2 very closely (having been a long time fan of the game), and while you can find all sorts of overhyped headlines about the "amazing" feats it performed, put under a much more critical light with a better understanding of what exactly happened (and the the stuff that wasn't mass reported like players figuring out all sorts of ways to abuse it), it's much less impressive. Don't get me wrong, still amazing tech, but it rubs me the wrong way how they damn well knew they were generating hype that didn't reflect reality.
I see how AI movies could replace every single Marvel movie since Endgame so. Toss the AI the comic story lines, give it endless compute capacity to create CGI effects and deep fakes if actirs and you have it.
It is different for movies actually tellong a story, those are about emotions. Once AI can come up with convincing story telling for us humans, us humans clearly are redundant.
At the end of the day, either AI art is "good enough" (whatever your criteria are - "novelty", "soul" etc), or not. If it's not, then human-made art will continue to exist, to the extent there's demand for it. But if AI really is that good at art, it would seem that it's not really a problem from the perspective of society at large. It would be a problem for artists who rely on art as their source of income, but that's something that is fairly easy to solve, since all it takes is money.
In my estimate, the common joe cannot distinguish between "real" and AI-generated art today. We're only seeing the first generation of AIs right now with the tech such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Imagen and Parti. I think it's pretty presumptuous to assume this trajectory would not continue to the point where most people would have a hard time identifying AI-generated images from real ones.
My work is in this area and I absolutely foresee some industries/arts getting decimated by the upcoming research in these topics - however, it's pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle at this stage.
The awareness for Dall-E / Midjourney is exploding. These tools are incredibly compelling and things like game art will definitely be generated by AI's in the near future. The possibilities are barely explored.
Leonardo da Vinci didn't just pick up a paint brush, knock out the Mona Lisa, and call it a career. He built his skills as an apprentice in workshops doing background figures and lesser commissions. Later artists (to the present day) have created prints and works for clients.
It's this work that creates the opportunity for masterpieces to happen. If that market goes away, the top end will be affected.
I'm not sure things like fellowships and residency programs can recreate this by just throwing money at the problem. There is something unique about the pressures of having to be bold enough to stand out from the crowd but accessible enough for broad appeal.
I'm not sure there's anything to be done, but I think we should recognize something is going to be lost here.
I'll add in that sculpture too might see challenge, thought it's materials might see resistance for some time. 3d Printing is already at a state where the output is of extremely high detail, and still on it's ascent (resin printing specifically). While not a like-for-like comparison, it's seen heavy use in favor of traditional sculpting in multiple industries, such as miniature production, where it completely replaces or heavily reduces the use of the traditional skillset.
There's no algorithm that generates artistic meaning. These neural nets allow you to employ arbitrary styles and techniques, but no AI can't come up with meaningful messages on its own...yet
I imagine at its height, AI would make "commodity art" less valuable. But stuff like Rhythm 0, Black Square, The Lighthouse; that sort of art, by definition, can't be generated. Maybe we'll start valuing the more obscure stuff, not dissimilar to how I value the Google result that actually shows the Julia error I'm getting that only 3 people have seen more than the docs page that matches a quarter of the string I pasted directly from the terminal
I'd agree with you, but I have yet to come across a salient, non-circular definition of "meaning" in this context that makes it somehow unobtainable by robots. What is the meaning you speak of? This isn't meant to come across as snarky either, I'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.
I think of meaning in terms of Saussure's sign and signified. "The Earth orbits around the sun" for example, is literally a string of characters. As a sign, however, its correspondent signifier could be a diagram of the solar system or something like that.
In general meaning is the parts of an experience that are salient to its representation as a sign. It's a sign's signified.
Robots lack an embodied experience that would be necessary for them to understand human meanings. They don't know what it feels like to step on a Lego, so a whole class of memes and meanings are unavailable to them as a result.
There are probably things that we, as humans, don't know that we feel but still impart meaning. It would be very hard to get a robot to say something like "as the blood rushed to my ears" in a truly meaningful way. Most who end up using that phrase in a sentence don't use its full meaning when thinking about it (so there's higher than normal pressure in the head, etc) but if pressed can expound on it in a way that would be obviously different than a robot's (GPT3 would say, the meaning of this sentence is [0.5435, 24.2352, 1.3245], nearby sentences I've seen have embeddings [1.5532, 0.3552, 4.2442])
I loved this comment so much, I had to toss the first sentence into a DALL-E Mini renderer. It came up with this: https://imgur.com/a/P6SPhlH. This one left me with the most sense of existential dread that I get out of your viewpoint for how digital art evolves.
"Never" and "AI" in the same sentence requires a high level of confidence in a specific future. I don't see why AI of the future couldn't generate a mind with all of the complexity and life experience (simulated) that Picasso was inspired by. Do that a trillion times and we might get things even cooler than cubism.
Your last paragraph is one potential use for blockchain that migjt actually work. Assuming a manually taken picture (regardless if digital or film) has some inherent value that an AI recreation does not, using blockchain to proof an actual person took that picture on site serves a purpose. Personally, I think those "orginals" have value.
AI could have an impact on digital art (besides using it optimize digital pictures in Lightroom), social media (why go to places for likes if that can be had by creating a deep fake, it does link back to the point about "originals" so) and the like.
That being said, forgery, staging and other shenenigans have a long history in photography. As wr talk art, as long as people are ooen about it it's fine. It becomes a problem if art work is sold as something it is not.
While I agree with your sentiment, I don't see why this couldn't be accomplished with just standard cryptographic hashing verification based off of, say, a scan of the artist's iris salted with a timestamp that is then encoded into the file. What do you think a blockchain would add to it?
Many successful artists don't paint, sculpt or build anything. It's not about the technique. Art is about sending a message, it's about what the artist is trying to say. It's about what the public feels and thinks when exposed to their work.
AI has a place as a tool to produce content in a fast and cheap way. And yes, as a result of that certain jobs will likely disappear. But art will continue to exist and great artists will still be followed and admired by the public.
Classic luddite argument at the core of the article.
Technology both displaces jobs and enhances jobs. It's impossible to tell a priori the economic effect.
It's just as possible that artists leveraging these tools are paid more because they're incredibly more productive than the overall demand for art somehow being sated and reducing artist employment
Very true. This technology will become dirt cheap in a matter of 2-3 years. Arguably a lot cheaper than brushes and paint were at the time of Leonardo Da Vinci. AI art, paints something beautiful which is computed using other paintings and real life objects. What an artist has in his head, the original idea, cannot be computed by the machine, by definition. The processes of the human mind, cannot be computed just like that.
Missing the point of the article if you think it's similar to luddism.
The industrial revolution had a huge impact on society, discussing that and how it will displace or transform some occupations isn't the same thing as actually fighting back against the new technology.
I've been "successfully" creating AI art for a few months now, and although there are some staunch opponents (mostly on Reddit), the medium has been generally very well received by both the audiences and many artists in the established community.
Perhaps its just because its early innings but a lot of the early examples of AI generated art seem to be in that uncanny valley stage. A bit dystopian - like from an unpleasant dream.
I'm curious whether thats just the text descriptions people are putting into the generators to get clicks or inherent in the AI art generation techniques used.
I'll also throw out that for most of the history of art - "art" has always been cheap to produce. My pre-schooler created "art". Its really only the outliers that we remember. And really the ones who make it do it through verbal communication of their ideas or have some mechanism for conveying a consistent, overarching theme/narrative. [1]
A professional AI "artist" might need to figure out how to become more of a visual creator/curator - ushering the generated images into coherent story that can be shared via discussions at gallery showings, etc.
Perhaps real professional visual artists need to find the equivalent of a live show that has kept music viable as a career or a live book reading that makes an author relatable.
My gut feeling is that artists will be the primary users of these tools and there will be a large market for those who are very skilled at producing, curating, tweaking, and post-processing the results. Some jobs will be lost due to clients who do it themselves, but there will be enough people who don't want to learn the tools no matter how simple they are. I also think the tools will become more complex.
Agreed. My gut feeling is certain creative jobs will wither down and become other jobs. You'll need your AI text prompt specialist. You'll need a color specialist, a typographer, etc., a project manager to wrangle everything and get the best foot forward. You'll need someone to make the deck and present to the client, etc.
Design agencies should be trying to build / buy these tools now as fast as they can. Otherwise the AI agencies will eat them up.
A skilled user of such tools will also likely be able to produce content at a much greater rate than a skilled artist that uses more traditional means, so the demand for skilled artists will likely still be lower even if those artist all become skilled users of these tools.
I can see AI replacing some kinds of art, but so much art is not about the technical skill. The thinking that AI can replace artists is the same thinking that causes some people to go to a modern art museum and say, “I could do that!” when looking at some piece of abstract art. Just because you could technically recreate the art you have seen doesn’t mean the art isn’t good or unique.
Someone could build a machine that splatters paint like a Jackson Pollock, but that hasn’t devalued his art at all. Keyboard and synthesizers haven’t stopped people from playing real instruments.
I've heard some modern trumpeters, but they weren't very good. The trumpet is a very difficult instrument to play well.
Guitars and keyboards are popular because of the wide range of sounds they can easily produce. Trumpets have a much more restricted set of sounds it can make, so I understand the reluctance to specialize on it.
But when done well, a trumpet sounds heavenly. Nothing can match its beauty.
You are talking about nineteenth century automation. That one aims to reproduce all people capabilities, including creativity. The machine will not splatter paint like Pollock, it will create new art form like Pollock. Yes, there always will be a place for the art of being human, but it is a niche thing.
With calculus, machines have replaced humans about 70 years ago, still, the best math and math innovation is still driven by humans. IMO AI will only accelerate art production, opening new opportunities and democratizing things like the ability to make a movie, personal music, instant wall papers, etc
These AI algorithms only regurgitate new permutations of what they are trained on.
There will always be the need for the pipeline of new material, but they're definitely won't be as large of a need for commodity artists who were already just regurgitating existing material in the first place.
Maybe about 40 years ago computers started to replace humans in earnest doing calculus, and replaced 20-30 years ago. I mean, computer algebra systems only really came into their own in the 80's (even if there was some work in the 60's) and uptake took awhile.
Every one of the MidJourney images featured in this article is obviously derived from averaging. The model is trained to correlate the average look of this or that with whatever keywords. For example, the "artist at work" – okay from afar with no real examination/consideration, it looks like something, kind of. As soon as you actually begin to look at it, it becomes glaringly uninspired. Hmm, what's he working on there...is that a hand? what even is going on in front of the artist? How about the front and center desk – nothing is actually definitive, I can't recognize a single thing on that desk! Etc etc, and similar observations can be made about all of the other images.
Not that art should necessarily be a clear depiction of real things, far from that. Good art (read: art I feel a connection with and inspired by) is the presentation of a SUBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW. In these images, all I see is the averaging of many points of view (the actual artworks the model was trained on, I presume), resulting in no point of view at all.
This technology will take jobs like designing 3-star hotel lobby wallpaper, not the places of human artists. Without a human point of view, "art" like this is flavorless jello.
Well, the author says they keep up on "the latest papers" and whatnot, which leaves me as yet unconvinced of the artistic quality of the future output from these models. We will see.
While I'm still rambling on about this – the author states: “In a strictly mechanical sense, yes, an artist can still create, knowing that the art could be done faster and better by AI.” The art cannot necessarily be done better by an AI, and the speed with which art is created does not matter, artistically.
> In short, it's a mistake to judge AI art by its current capability. It's about to go on an exponential tour.
It's been going on one for the last five years. Two years ago it would have been difficult to generate a picture that's recognizably anything at all, using any non-specific engine.
Now we're down to complaints that mostly don't matter that much. Two years from now..?
What you're describing is a known limitation of Midjourney and it's default impressionist style. Current solution to that problem: any particular item on the desk can be erased and re-generated with DALL-E, with prompt control, which will add a much clearer item.
That's an interesting idea dogcomplex, I'd be very curious to see the output of that process. Still ... who or what will choose what is too "average-y," what should be replaced with something more clear? Will some larger-scope model be responsible for that? Is there then any way to stop that recursion in an artistic way or does ultimately a human artist need to get involved?
This is a strange article because the strongest counterpoint to its own argument:
> The AI can make art. I’ve seen people dispute this, since what the AI makes by definition may not be art, under at least certain definitions. I think those definitions are stupid though, and will elect to ignore them.
is in the article itself:
> Art, at its core, is an attempt at expression and evocation. It’s a way of talking about things that are hard to put into words, a way of making arguments that don’t have their own formal logic, a way of connecting with others, of sharing. Some people paint or write because it’s a way of letting something out of themselves, of working through thoughts or trauma, or spending some time feeling some particular emotion or working on a thought...
> Art is a communicative act. It’s a conversation. You see a picture and it makes you feel a certain way, and yes, sometimes you silently process that art, but most of my favorite aspects of art as discussing it with other people, wrestling with the art in public, teasing out what it’s trying to do, or what it’s doing without trying. I generally think that this is one of the best parts of being an author or an artist, this very public back and forth, sometimes with the art having to defend itself as the critic shadow-boxes...
Sooner or later, a general artificial intelligence will create art and it will be a crisis for human artists. That's not today. DALL-E is not trying to make an argument, work through some trauma, or share a particular emotion, when it turns your text query into a feature vector into a JPG...
I recently attended a talk by Aaron Hertzmann who compared the rise of AI-assisted art to the invention of the camera. Yes, some types of art will stop being commercially viable---stock images of D&D characters, to take the article's example---just as photorealistic portraits stopped being viable in the age of photography. But art as a social act of communication is alive and well...
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadLargely agree with AW the OP, but think the question of "what art are we talking about" needs more air.
A lot of the turmoil around these tools appears to be about the threat they pose to the careers of artists and designers (and soon, most related domains). But some of the simple versions of this story (not this one) overlook the nuances IMO.
Some of those being,
- the distinction between "fine" art in the commercial "art world" gallerist sense, and graphic design/illustration/commercial art - that professional commercial artists are going to adopt and exploit these tools with the same intrinsic advantages they have using with other tools - that in a very short time there is already an explosion of work that uses these tools as one (large) element to produce synthetic work across media that would have been prohibitively expensive/time consuming without them
Even as a bystander, but with a background and interest as a serious and modestly successful artist in a different medium,
it's been remarkable to see just how quickly people with fewer kids, better ideas, and more time than me, seized upon these tools not as simple image-making widgets, but as sophisticated tools to exploit to generate a stream of imagery to be applied to create Other Things, both as proofs of concept, commercially, and as yes "real art" in the gallerist sense.
These things are quite obviously disruptive in a way most VC only dream of.
Idle other comments:
The "eerie" uncanny sense that scaling up the visual cortex abstraction stack toward "grandmother neurons" that these systems has, is IMO considerably more unsettling than the impact on specific industries. What we can see (literally) in these systems is a visualization (in the data viz sense) of how much further along towards AGI these things may soon be.
Their failure modes are more interesting to me than their successes. The ramifications for how they fail and how they are of course unaware of their own failure, is a true cautionary tale.
IMO those failures offer an excellent basis for "cautionary tales" and illustration to the general public of why we need oversight and governance for the deployment of these systems. It's one thing for them to produce "nightmare fuel" when asked to create kittens in the kitchen; it's another for a comparable (smaller less tuned closed-source closed-training-dataset...) system to be put in service approving mortgages, assigning credit risks, or (as made ProPublica famous) assessing whether someone is a candidate for bail.
(Highly recommended: The Alignment Problem)
Anyway. The singularity is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
I need to write about this experience (mostly so I can feel “done” about it), but my show was titled “Is This Art?” and consisted of around a dozen images generated by VQGAN/VQGAN+CLIP. I sold almost every single piece! Not bad for a non-artist, frankly.
Anyways, I think the key to my “success” was two fold: One, most images took an input image, all were photographs I took in the local area. Second, I was brutal in my curation of what I actually decided to print and include in the show. The keystone piece was actually a warped image of the coffee shop itself! In an art medium without clear constraints, my challenge was to define those constrains for myself. Not exactly a knew problem for artists.
I also chose to overlay the output image and original photograph in some cases, and unmask the photograph in certain locations in the image. I used this opportunity to touch up the output in photoshop, and add/remove artificers and details. I was limited by my lack of digital art skills here, but this was the fun part.
Final thought, a good eye for color and composition helps any artistic endeavor, and the same is true for this medium.
I don’t yet have the curated pieces available online, but that’s on my TODO list. I really appreciate you asking, though, especially now that I’ve got the physical part figured out, over, and one with. :)
These art AIs are very good at driving the point home that our DNN AIs are seriously capable. But those capabilities need to be nursed by ever-growing armies of people. True, maybe there is a limit to the amount of people needed to profit from coloring pixels in images, and maybe, just maybe, that ceiling is going to go down the more these artist AIs are used. But AI has the potential to break open areas we can't even imagine now. I for example have trouble imagining that in the time of the horses, there was an industry for traffic signals, another for transporting horse fuel between countries (but maybe there was?), another for teaching teenagers to drive the carriages and get their horse-driving licenses, and so on and so on. Although I don't know much about those days, maybe it was popular to be young and to horse around on top of a good steed.
Maybe we will be teaching our kids about how to survive in the jungle of wild AIs we have created for them, and teachers will be needed. Maybe we will hemorrhage AI-produced content, and in twenty years, there will be an industry for certifying that something is human-made (maybe a lesson to learn about how chess survived in the age of incredibly capable chess-playing computer programs?). Or maybe something else we can't quite see yet.
Fine arts, contemporary artists showing in galleries, mediums that can't be printed on photo paper (sculpture, canvas paintings, etc) will be more resistant to displacement. But the massive majority of commodity art & visuals - adverts, billboards, book covers, article images and so on - will definitely be displaced in the very near future.
And then software will "learn," and the arms race will continue.
That being said, I'm quite enjoying generating pixel art to stand in for my programmer art before I commission artists.
Newer art programs like CSP already have a lot of tools Photoshop didn't, even if it's just 3D models for poses.
Earlier today I saw a video (sorry, lost the link) of an AI editing program (still a prototype). It generates layers of a scene in place, say sky, mountains, rivers, foreground, etc. each of which would be individually manipulated. Next the program seamlessly blends the layers. The host then continued to add objects/subjects and through "in-painting" made all of it blend into a single coherent scene.
This kind of capability is close to being released. This year.
This is literally how you do prompts to AI programs.
How will the software learn? By having their work feed into the algo. The creative space is massive and fashions and currents change. In order for the algo to catch up it would need a massive dataset and by the time this is satisfied the art would have moved on to something else..
This tool will still remain and will most likely be used by artists too, though just as a tool in the toolbox, not as a complete process. Fotography didn’t destroy painting, it changed it in unforseen ways.
Who exactly is being defrauded? Is the dev defrauding themselves? Their future customers? How would anyone even know? It's not like concept art is used for anything external?
I can imagine the standard shifts from quality to scale. I.e a company doesn't give a shit that they have nice design, but rather they make something so ugly that noone could mistake it as being something someone commissioned from an AI, and spread it in necessarily low-supply spaces. (i.e. a new social media company's logo is a green poop emoji that they pay every west coast MLB player to get a tattoo of on their forehead).
Look at the coins with the dragon and his horde for example. The newness will wear off, people will become sensitized to the flaws, and AI "art" will find a niche which is quite a lot smaller than people impressed with technology imagine.
Art and artists aren't dead, AI is not at all "creative" just derivative. It will be one influence among many for actual artists, become a tool for some, and for the rest of us, take the place of "art mill" art for the kinds of places that want to look fancy without putting any effort into it. (I'm looking at you, "luxury" apartment building with the exact same bad, inoffensive abstract print on every floor's elevator lobby)
The inverse of the legal sense of this word is "transformative". If you are making something new, then that debt goes away to the extent that such a debt would prohibit the creation of that work.
Generalizing from these concepts... we don't care so much that literally every bit of art is "based on" or "influenced by" something. We care if the end result is novel or not. This is very much an "I know it when I see it" kind of standard, so it might sound like I'm just talking in circles, but there is a difference.
Currently, it's difficult to get an AI system[1] to generate more novel images. There are certain patterns it knows how to do very well, and if you ask it for something that violates those patterns it gets confused because nobody's drawn that before. This puts us closer to "derivative" rather than "transformative", because it's harder to use the system for the latter purpose.
[0] Existing precedent and law specifically names a few categories of work that are assumed to be derivative; such as sequels and translations.
[1] I have only tried Craiyon / DALL-E Mini, and a handful of very primitive systems, both of which are not the most powerful image generators available.
This assumes that these sorts of flaws will remain just as bad for the foreseeable future. I doubt that's true, just looking at the progress in recent years of other machine learning domains.
Sure, eventually things will plateau, but it doesn't look like we're there yet, not even close.
Oddly, the main instigator turned out to be a "Pokemon in real life" fanartist who didn't notice he's already a professional plagiarist.
> So in that context, saying “horses stuck around when the automobile came” is true, but if you went up to a painter and said “hey, within your lifetime painting will see a 90% decline, stop being taught formally, disappear from daily life or awareness”.
The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons' paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace paintings because they aren't paintings! Print shops already exist and may have replaced you though.
> I’ve had a lot of struggles with this. I have a specific image in my head, I’m trying to prompt for it, and the AI just does not want to do it. The most trouble that I’ve had so far has been with trying to get a tavern running across the plain with chicken legs.
There's a general unfixable problem here, which is it's hard to be aligned with silly prompts without giving you silly output for "normal" prompts. That's also why they're complaining the model output has too safe composition - the developers are lucky they even got it to do that, it's better than random blobs of color and body parts like older models would generate.
But the picture they want probably is hiding somewhere in Midjourney's latent space; it's just a matter of finding a prompt that recreates it.
One way to do that could be to sketch the picture you want some other way and run it through a reverse image-to-text notebook like https://github.com/pharmapsychotic/clip-interrogator.
Another would be prompting it with your sketch so that you can get an image in its "house style" - which doesn't seem very appealing for most models, but Midjourney has a pretty strong one.
>The issue with this claim isn't automation replacing artists (though I don't think that will happen either due to Jevons' paradox) - it's just that AI generated images don't replace paintings because they aren't paintings!
It is conceivable, that a popular artist will become replicated using an automated method or a manual one. We see that happening all the time with music and art. The best artists are the ones who influenced others the most.
An analogy that TFA curiously doesn't touch is the advent of photography. What did it do to painting?
Painting became less and less figurative as photography became more and more accurate. The point of painting was to represent reality; but as photography became so much more accurate, that point became moot.
And so, painting went into a different direction. Represent not reality, but feelings, what the artist feels when looking at reality; something that's out of reach of photography.
AI is trying to conquer this as well. Human art needs to go further. Something weird that AI cannot touch.
Real Art, that which moves one's soul, is beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence for a large number of reasons, chief of which because it is a communication between beings aware of finite existence.
Note, I am not saying the consumer markets will not be flooded with cheap mimicry of art as pooped out by ignorant noncomprehending AIs. That will most definitely happen. And a generation of would be fine artists will never pursue their innate vocation thanks to the misconception that AI is capable of creating Art (which it cannot.)
However, you do not have to fall for the stupidity most are caught. If you have an artistic vocation, realize that indirection and metaphor are your human creative super powers that AI cannot touch. Metaphor requires comprehension and often complex interwoven comprehensions, which is so far out of AI’s reach it is laughable the general pubic believes otherwise. AIs are idiots when you know them well. They have zero capacity to create Real Art composed of complex metaphors embodied in a form other than how they appear.
It’s easy to test. Show people “real” art and AI generated art and see how often they can tell which is which.
Maybe a GAN generating images from random seeds without conditioning would make uncopyrightable content.
Each person is individually.
True, as is seen in the "banana with duct tape".
Wait 5 years until the first android AI is being raised as a child and develops first hand embodied and social knowledge.
> From Middle English artificial (“man-made”) via Old French (modern French artificiel), from Latin artificiālis from artificium (“skill”), from artifex, from ars (“skill”), and -fex, from facere (“to make”).
Regarding the artificial baby - I was thinking along the lines of putting the Gato [1] model in an android body. Nothing wild technologically, just give it the experience of having a family, friends, things to do, like we do for kids. This will induce the agent to form the same kind of value judgements as people make. It won't be just trained on the whole internet, but have access to the real world + human society, the best training dataset.
I believe the lack of access to the real world, the human society and a humanoid body is what keeps AI models from being more human-like. We can't become a developed human without society, for example. Why would AI be able to? The next step in AI is not about the neural net architecture but the curriculum, especially real world exposure.
[1] https://www.deepmind.com/publications/a-generalist-agent
in contrast, the whole point of paiting or a sculping is the final completed artifact.
What I'm trying to get at, is how recording technology "defeats" the purpose of music as its performace; and so, irremediably splits it from it's source (its origin, the composition of the music). I suppose improvisation remains; but highly constrained within prearranged structures (a la "AB[improvisatino goes HERE]C") like in jazz.
I do not understand how hyperpop nor DnB are supposed to be a response to what I'm trying to get at (then again, I'm just now barely conveying my point... I hope.)
That's not what people mean when they talk about AI art though. AI art is Commercial Art. What Horkheimer and Adorno famously called "The Culture Industry".
I'd love to see this technology aimed at concept art for games. I don't think this would hurt employed concept artists, I do think it will be a tool concept artists can use to quickly thumbnail significantly more versions of a vision.
That artist will then refine the results into something supremely engaging to humans.
Really I see this as an incredible tool for artists to help refine truly innovative ideas.
It freed artists of having to focus on realism, if they wanted to do so.
I really enjoy generating images, and I really enjoy drawing even though I'm not really good at it. I like to draw with my five-year-old, but I've also exposed him to Dalle-Mini. I think showing him dalle-mini was a mistake, and I'm going to avoid repeating it. (We are a low-media household.)
My concern about AI art has to do with children learning art skills. Will it be hard to encourage developing art skills? If a person can just ask for an image rather than learning how to make one, will they be motivated to do the work to build the skill? Or will it suddenly become a waste of time to the young mind?
I could see a difference in the case of wanting to see a custom image and being able to summon it via description vs. needing to learn to produce it. I’m not particularly artistic and never developed any such skills… so I don’t know: how crucial is that particular motivation to those who acquire art (production) skills?
If you just want to look at an image of a thing, finding one is good. You might even find a real picture of something. ( In the future, this isn't a given. ) Plus you'll have to filter out images that are irrelevant, or even harmful.
If you need to use the picture for something, there's a lot of advantage to crafting your own picture. (licensing, privacy, attribution, ownership, et al)
When I wrote my comment I was trying to think of a parallel from the past, and I kept thinking of calculators. An even better example would be the decline of hand writing as a skill.
The same is basically true for drawing, but you're doing more of the early parts of the process more often. To draw a figure from imagination you have to learn the shapes. To do that you have to find a real figure in pose, and carefully copy it to get the proportions of the shapes as accurate as you can(which is assisted by various measuring techniques to correct your work). Then, after a few thousand of those, you try to draw an imagined figure and voila, your hand makes recognizable shapes - maybe a bit simplified, out of proportion, or with poor anatomy, but something others can parse correctly.
And so doing a lot of drawing is like building up a vocabulary, becoming more observant and aware of subtle visual differences and therefore more able to communicate them back. I can't see AI replacing this: it can be a good servant and give a lot of options, but it can't mind-read that you want a hand posed slightly differently.
Neither of them create paintings though. So your kids are safe to learn that.
I can see how it's semi-easy to have a database of images up to a certain date (before AI generating algo existed), but what about if you want to train the AI with modern data?
For example, say if I want to query, in 2035: "Flying hippos in the style of McGrundsBulle" where McGrundsBulle is an artist who only started producing art in 2025... How is the AI then not going to trained with "flying hippos" generated between now and 2035 by AI like DALL-E 2 / midjourney / etc.?
I'd argue it wouldn't make sense to train better AIs using current AI's generated pictures for many of them are the stuff of nightmares and it doesn't seem to be because they've been trained by nightmarish datasets. They're just creepy due to how the current AI works and many details are obviously off, which makes them very creepy to humans.
[0]: https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion-datasets/blob/main/laion-a...
This is because access to music has become cheap. Discovery of music has become cheap. Signalling behaviours though rely on the costliness of signalling through a particular medium. Costly signalling is the theoretical framework you want here to understand what is going to happen to art if the tech is as good as it is currently being hyped.
We like to think of art as this inherently communicative act - as the author says. But the main psychological motivation is signalling. We would not waste so much energy as a species on such behaviour if it didn't have some kind of evolutionary benefit. So I expect much of the energy that goes into the artistic signalling medium will be redirected toward more costly mediums.
Nowadays there's more music being created and consumed than ever, but the musicians don't make nearly as much money as in the golden days of the CD. The mega-stars like Billy Eillish still make a good amount through brand deals / live shows, but the 'middle class' of musicians has fallen away.
I think lower barriers to entry through creating art via AI assistance will mean more art available, but it probably will make it harder to make a living as a professional artist. That said, I don't think anyone who chooses to be an artist today is primarily motivated to earn money.
I’m not sure where you got the impression that the bygone era of the CD was so lucrative, or that its largess was more evenly distributed in a meaningful way. If you’re open to challenging that conception, I’d highly recommend reading Steve Albini’s article, The Problem With Music (also sometimes titled Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked; not linked because it doesn’t have a canonical link and I’m never sure which site reposting it can be relied on not to edit it). Anyway the tl;dr is this: to the extent there’s ever been a more even distribution of earnings for musicians, that certainly wasn’t attributable to CD sales. The article was written fairly early in the CD era, and those dynamics deepened through that period. I’m doubtful it was ever attributable to any particular sale of recordings on any kind of media. Then, as now (and probably since well before recording technology was available) musicians making a decent or better living by and large made the majority of it performing live.
For what it’s worth, the article I mentioned factored greatly into my decision not to pursue a music career, even as I embraced the early availability of cheap digital recording (and intermittently still do). I’m sure there’s an alternate universe where I’d be thrilled that my life’s work would be playing music, but I have little doubt that my entry into the middle class would have been far less likely than by taking up programming.
The prior technology was Boomers' universal counterculture, where if you wanted to do one of being a hippie or join the new age or do drugs or go to concerts or have weird sex you had to do them all at once - that's why they seemed convinced that going to an outdoor concert was literally the same thing as saving the planet.
Subcultures developed after people realized that didn't make any sense, and there was just enough communication technology to find people to get into your hobby, but not enough to mix and match them, so now your hobby life was often still defined by being a goth or punk or playing D&D, but it's less universal.
The kids are capable of joining more than one group at once because they can do it all online. And nobody is in a band anymore.
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
What difference does it make tho?
Not entirely sure of this. "What's your bag" was a popular phrase.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/294306/what-does...
I don’t think you know a lot of artists. Artists, like the actual ones, do Art to create meaning and participate in the meaning making process.
Assuming they do it for external signaling and the sort of implied “hey look at me” desire is off base.
is just
> for external signaling and the sort of implied “hey look at me” desire
in a different light. You cannot participate in the meaning making process without signalling to other meaning makers, attracting their attention, and influencing their subsequent signalling. If you don't signal, then you haven't participated because you just didn't try. And if you don't attract attention, then you haven't participated because you had no effect on the proceedings.
This is not to say that it's your interpretation versus their interpretation. It's to say it's both at the same time.
> is just
> > for external signaling and the sort of implied “hey look at me” desire
OP didn’t specify “create meaning” for anyone else, or otherwise conveying art to others. One of the weird things about art is that it’s a form of expression that doesn’t necessarily have an audience. Quite a lot of art is more akin to keeping a diary, or singing in your head, than “look at me”.
> You cannot participate in the meaning making process without signalling to other meaning makers
I have ample evidence to the contrary which I have no desire to share with you, or anyone, other than noting its value to me having created it.
Right, and they make the art, and others pay huge premiums to collect art to speculate and signal.
'High art' (the kind that hangs in galleries) has a meaning attached to it that escapes into the level of a meme and that often has little to do with what is represented to the senses, which is easily replicated. For example, the Mona Lisa is now famous because of an attempted theft in the early 20th Century. Other art is meaningful because it was at the vanguard of a particularly novel aesthetic, associated with a specific artist (very common), or because it encodes a commentary on a particular aspect of history (Picasso is a good example of all three). This kind of art will endure because AI cannot copy what makes it "valuable", though it may still be of assistance to the 'high artist'.
The same is true for music. Kendrick Lamar isn't famous because he's exceptional technically (some enthusiasts I've spoken with find him fairly mediocre in this regard). He's famous because of what his music communicates, because of its (apparent) authenticity, and how that resonates with listeners. That plus Kendrick's story is what gives his music signaling value, which is then amplified into a meme. Most people on the other side of the meme adoption curve probably don't even understand why they should care about Kendrick or his music. Rather, they're imagining they like it in order to follow the trajectory plotted by the tastemakers. I strongly suspect all 'high art' is like this.
A perhaps more germane example of the above phenomena arises in NFTs. NFTs of weird anthropomorphized monkeys are valuable because of a collective hallucination that they in fact have value. You can use AI to generate the monkey JPEGs, but you cannot so readily use it to craft the meme.
'Low art', by contrast, is much more utilitarian and often devised in response to fairly prosaic demands. Technical sophistication usually wins out. This is what AI will supplant. It's a problem insofar as many employed artists were relying on low art to sustain themselves. Perhaps art will now become even more so the province of the wealthy?
Personally I've always been more a 'low art' person since 'high art' seems to be about participating in mutual delusion and even snobbery, and its surface characteristics may not evoke anything profound when divorced from the subtext with which the art has been furnished. Incidentally, I think this is partly why 'nerds' gravitate towards things like fantasy + sci-fi literature, anime, and video games. These are artistic mediums that are very directly evocative and wherein the meaning and the superficial/sensory experience are rather closely aligned. And, of course, they prioritize technical sophistication.
Anyone who's a fan of 'low art' should probably be very excited because we're fast approaching a time where you'll be able to experience a near infinite abundance of 'JIT art' that caters precisely to your tastes.
Anyway it's an empirical question that we might get to see the answer to - so no need to argue about it really. If artistic creation is disrupted as some predict, we'll get to see the impact on artists.
Everyone else engaging with art will take what the algorithm(influenced by monetary deals/cuts/middlemen as ever in history) puts in front of them. Which will be the "hey look at me" people.
The friction that endows signalling with its cost is simply opportunity cost — you can’t be a vocal fan of everything or go deep on every TikTok trend-strand.
Also note that “discovery” here has been almost entirely mediated by TikTok or Spotify algorithms. If you’re tired of what those algorithms offer, in practice, it’s outlandishly difficult to do better than random walks to find something new you like….except through your friends’ signslling.
That all said, I think you might be right. But I submit this radically different reading is plausible. My own anecdata suggest this.
If you like niche genres there are plenty of catalogues though and the amount of wide known artists are not that big.
Is this the result of some study, or where is this observation coming from? I have almost certainly not noticed this, in fact I might almost say the opposite.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/genre-is-disap...
Fandom/identification with specific artists remains as strong as ever though - you see a lot of "Swifties" or fans of a specific rapper, for instance, and they use it as a form of identity. You see fewer "metal heads" or "classical music erudites".
All anecdotal, of course. Would love to see studies on this.
But now anybody with a phone can dial up millions of tracks in a split second with Soundcloud, Spotify etc, including those KLF releases that were once unobtainium.
I read the papers. I see the pace of progress. I understand how these models work on a technical level and I am blown away by how quickly they are being iterated on. I expect little to no digital art (images, videos, films, music, writing) will be sold for profit by human artists 10 years from now, and the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).
People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy. Photography and painting both survived because they're fundamentally different things and can be easily distinguished in cases where their respective artists choose to differentiate themselves. AI art is different, because its entire purpose is to replicate, and no matter what human artists do with the medium of digital images, the AI will always be right there to gobble up the new wave changes and learn to replicate them.
Whereas the advent of photography was never meant to kill the painting industry, these AI algorithms are very much meant to kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the researchers or not.
I would 100% take you up on this bet.
> People love to bring out the painting-and-photography example as a defense for why AI is not actually going to bring an end to the art market, but I just don't see it as a valid analogy.
I think that painting-and-photography is the wrong analogy; stuff like DALLE is a continuation of Photoshop. Compilers didn't put programmers out of business, it just moved them one layer up.
I don't know. As Wait But Why likes to say, cars sure did put horses out of business, pretty much thoroughly and permanently.
Similarly, perhaps artists will wish to participate in the economy by making art, but they're going to find scanty employment when compared with machines which can operate 100x faster than they can, and arguably at a higher quality of output.
The human beings previously called artists will still be around as humans and will still have jobs, even if it’s some other job.
“Artist” is a vague term though, and I think we’d still have a lot of them due to Jevons’ paradox, the same way ATM machines have actually caused the number of bank tellers to increase. Especially because it’s high-status for society to say they support artists, which isn’t the case for other service workers like bank tellers.
There is a niche for horse rides, though - they’re romantic and I’ve seen them as tourist gimmicks in different cities. Artists have a bigger niche, as AI art (so far) produces digital images and not, say, physical sculpture or paintings.
This whole debate reminds me of the early aughts, when digital music was said to kill all music. I predict a similar development here too.
Human graphic artists will adapt and the next generation will incorporate AI generated images into their tool kit.
And some of them are already doing that. In Peter Mohrbacher's latest newsletter he shared a digital painting which was started by Disco Diffusion which he then touched up to give it his characteristic look. Given the details and feel of the painting were unmistakably his, I wouldn't have guessed that the base of the image was AI-generated.
When sampled digital audio first appeared in music, it went from experimental to pop hook(e.g. Paul Hardcastle "Nineteen") and then to the subject of court cases that clarified IP law for samples over the span of maybe 20 years. In the middle of that period one can find scare pieces about pit orchestras being replaced by synthesizers and so forth.
The articles tend to be correct in that the same jobs don't exist when they get automated, but you get new jobs instead. And so the panic, where it exists, is tied to whether you specifically are on the chopping block. For digital illustrators who are focused on a high degree of finish and polish, AI art threatens because it's so good at replication of a high-effort stylistic mode of production. Cartoonists are much less impressed since they are already in a streamlined, symbolic mode, so the net savings of AI is harder to come by. With a few years of traditional training, most of it just focused on the core "you can draw what you see" skill, you have what you need to build up a library of reusable visual language for your work: an arm seen from various angles is still an arm, you can add more anatomy to it or stylize it, but it has a symbolic function tied to particular shapes. And an AI can bring out more detail from the symbol, just as when an artist follows a reference more closely and renders it more carefully, but it isn't creating novel representation. That's still coming from the illustrator operating symbolically.
And when you lean into that, it's like, OK: presumably the AI will be able to do some style transfer and turn a crude cartoon into a fancy painting. That levels the playing field a lot but it doesn't change the nature of what makes an illustration good: having a sense of composition, storytelling and so forth. A lot of cultural context things are in there that will evade automation.
- Potentially superior quality to algorithmically destroyed dynamics, but this is truly on a per-case scenario.
- Exclusive content not on streaming platforms, either intentionally, or because labels or artists are dead and gone, or the IP is in limbo.
- Directly supporting artists because streaming platforms pay a pittance.
- Elitism/snobbery. Whether professionally, within a fanbase, as an influencer, in an audiophile community, whichever.
- The community/culture. People love to belong, never underestimate the importance of that.
- USP.
- Distribution to actual brick-and-mortar stores where you'll get in front of tastemakers and influencers.
- DJ culture is huge, particularly vinyl-only nights where they want to show their skills without hitting the sync button.
- It makes a great gift and people like to put them on display as adults in place of posters.
- People take comfort in disconnecting and doing a physical ritual, just like tea ceremonies in Japan.
- Listening bars are important in Japan. To anybody reading, if you're ever in the position to do so, I implore you to check one out.
- One of the few ways to own some music in the long-term.
I could go on for another 100+ points before reaching "digital abundance".
Anecdotal. It doesn't matter if you yourself would never buy a vinyl, what matters is that a lot of other people are. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you would never buy a supercar/helicopter/Breitling/Rolex/swimming pool/jetski/yacht/vegan food/meat/gluten-free/keto-friendly/whatever, because others are.
I never said "all".
> Anecdotal
Yes, I know. Just like your comment. But you listed reasons for people to buy vinyls, when many were simply "reasons for people not to use streaming services". That was my point.
So here's the misunderstanding. The job of an artist is not to paint, or take photos, that's just the medium. Just like a software engineers job isn't to write code.
The artist's job is to elicit emotion. The means by which they do that, whether it's painting, photoshop, or running 10,000 prompts through DALLE till they find the thing they're looking for is irrelevant.
StableDiffusion is a 10GB model made from 100TB of images, so there probably isn't even room to have memorized inputs - there's also some built-in defenses against that.
It's possible to make an AI that does explicitly make collages out of inputs (that goes under "fine tuning") and such a thing would be useful. OpenAI has a similar paper about a text AI that cites its sources called WebGPT.
It moves artists so far "up the stack" that being an artist becomes redundant.
If C-level execs could just ask their computer to generate the exact website they wanted, there would be a lot less web devs out there.
Tools allow _skilled professionals_ to do their job better. The existence of GCC doesn't make the average Joe a programmer; it makes programmers more productive.
DALLE allows any schmuck with zero artistic talent to generate their own art. It obviates the need for artists.
DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers.
The same way Wordpress obviates the need for web devs.
> DALLE is to artists what self-driving cars are to truckers.
Always 10 years away from replacing them?
Wix and Squarespace (the spiritual successors to Wordpress) however have undoubtedly put lots (most?) contract WebDevs out of business. There are still plenty around - go check Fiverr or UpWork. However it's impossible to argue that these tools haven't made it easier for non-web devs to build a fully-featured and beautiful site for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. It used to be that these no-code site builders all looked crappy and cookie cutter but in the past few years they've really upped the quality of their templates such that they often are indistinguishable from a "handmade" landing page.
I think the path is likely to be similar for these AI image and text generators.
Devs had to step up to create something better than Wordpress to stay on the market.
The same way, artists have now to create something better than DALL-E results.
That’s a terrible analogy. Compilers didn’t put devs out of business because it still would takes months of learning before someone that needs a program made could leverage a compiler to do basic things. So they hire devs.
It takes 0 hours of learning before someone that want a nice illustration made for them can do it with dalle/midjourney. Why would they hire anyone to do it ? Some people are going to say prompt engineering is a new skill, but I bet that prompt engineering is going to disappear as fast as it arrived as we build more practical ways of exploring the image space.
I think there's a good argument to be made that photography killed photorealism in painting (or at least, it's an ever-shrinking niche). Photorealism was cheapened, and in response, Modern Art was created.
What's getting cheapened now is transforming works into digitally-defineable idea-spaces. Create a new idea in art, give a machine enough representations, and it can endlessly generate new works within that space.
What's not getting cheapened yet is 1) New idea-spaces -> I've yet to see an AI generate something that could be defined as a new art "movement" 2) New mediums -> I'm sure that something like Dall-E will exist for 3D CAD files sooner or later, but there are a lot of mediums that won't be physically reproduce-able by a computer (think James Turrell). Works in these spaces will remain valuable or even increase in value. And while AI might be able to generate new ideas in these spaces, there will need to be people to decide to put in the effort to execute them. 3) Curation and "found art" -> Deciding which ideas (generated or not) deserve attention.
An interesting aspect of this was a (partial) severing of the connection between a lot of the population and the art world.
If AI means artists need to get weirder to survive, it widens this disconnect.
That might be the biggest tragedy in all of this.
Films have a ton of artistic value, and even today, and a regular joe can appreciate many brand new, critically acclaimed films.
AI will absolutely kill some forms of art, and force others to change in a way that alienates most people. (Pop music and background muzak seem like low hanging fruit, because music can be distilled to numbers and signals much easier than other forms of art.)
But AI will undoubtedly lead to the creation of entirely new forms of art as well.
AI is coming for our creative part, which we imagined would be last in line. It already is doing a reasonable job at it. If it can do that, and will next exponentially increase in capability, what really remains of us?
Humans will probably be stuck with the dirty jobs, though.
you think AI auto-generated movies will kill the human film industry? AI novels? these are both fundamentally different from the kind of recombination that DALL-E is doing.
>the only reason I haven't extended that to physical media like sculpture or street art is that I don't know whether we'll have dextrous enough robots to make those yet (though dextrous robots will indubitably come soon as well).
3d printing
>these AI algorithms are very much meant to kill the image industry, whether that was the intention of the researchers or not.
hmm
Every time people start freaking out about the AI apocalypse, i tend to point out that to my knowledge, there's no learning style AI that's beaten a mario game, especially in a real "human" style (play through each level and learn them). I've seen an AI that can beat mario 1 this way, but it doesn't "learn", it just "brute forces" by trying random inputs, and then save state reloading if it gets a bad output (dies/gets stuck), and then does thousands of those games in parallel. And this ONLY works with mario 1 in part because "go right" is ALWAYS correct. Take any further mario game, where more vertical/backwards exploration is a thing, and its not even possible (mario 3 for example).
It would be trivial of course to just program it to beat every game and get everything, by literally programming the correct inputs (literally a tas) but a task that is expected to be doable by a young human child is, again to my minimal knowledge of amateur research, not even remotely within the realm of possible for modern AI.
As others have pointed out this might become a tool in the toolkit that's kinda like clipart++ meets photoshop, and it will have uses there, but I very much doubt it's going to get any use in those mediums.
Comics/mangas are generally either A. pretty damn easy to draw (in the scheme of stuff that's out there), so i'm not sure fiddling with an AI to get the output you want/training a team to work with the AI's initial output is worth it or B. horrifically hard to draw/stylized. Things like berserk or the currently relevant sandman are probably not something you can get an AI to reliably output.
My first thought with all of this art is it's almost always surreal, and reminds me of custom MTG card art, so while I could see it working better there, I'm still very uncertain this is suddenly going to be THE TECH to take over.
And that's even before my jaded view that things like this ALWAYS have caveats that they don't tell everyone right away. They haven't open sourced the code claiming vague worries about the implications, and hell maybe they really have made the golden goose and are right to worry, but my experience having studied AI casually over the years is more often than not it's marketing bullshit to keep the funds coming in and stop everyone from pointing out how HYPER specific it is and what a fucking phenomenal pain in the ass it must be to get it to work at all.
I'm extra annoyed by this particular team because I followed their exploits in Dota 2 very closely (having been a long time fan of the game), and while you can find all sorts of overhyped headlines about the "amazing" feats it performed, put under a much more critical light with a better understanding of what exactly happened (and the the stuff that wasn't mass reported like players figuring out all sorts of ways to abuse it), it's much less impressive. Don't get me wrong, still amazing tech, but it rubs me the wrong way how they damn well knew they were generating hype that didn't reflect reality.
It is different for movies actually tellong a story, those are about emotions. Once AI can come up with convincing story telling for us humans, us humans clearly are redundant.
My work is in this area and I absolutely foresee some industries/arts getting decimated by the upcoming research in these topics - however, it's pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle at this stage.
The real question is, why would we want to, if the genie is truly that good?
It's this work that creates the opportunity for masterpieces to happen. If that market goes away, the top end will be affected.
I'm not sure things like fellowships and residency programs can recreate this by just throwing money at the problem. There is something unique about the pressures of having to be bold enough to stand out from the crowd but accessible enough for broad appeal.
I'm not sure there's anything to be done, but I think we should recognize something is going to be lost here.
I imagine at its height, AI would make "commodity art" less valuable. But stuff like Rhythm 0, Black Square, The Lighthouse; that sort of art, by definition, can't be generated. Maybe we'll start valuing the more obscure stuff, not dissimilar to how I value the Google result that actually shows the Julia error I'm getting that only 3 people have seen more than the docs page that matches a quarter of the string I pasted directly from the terminal
In general meaning is the parts of an experience that are salient to its representation as a sign. It's a sign's signified.
Robots lack an embodied experience that would be necessary for them to understand human meanings. They don't know what it feels like to step on a Lego, so a whole class of memes and meanings are unavailable to them as a result.
There are probably things that we, as humans, don't know that we feel but still impart meaning. It would be very hard to get a robot to say something like "as the blood rushed to my ears" in a truly meaningful way. Most who end up using that phrase in a sentence don't use its full meaning when thinking about it (so there's higher than normal pressure in the head, etc) but if pressed can expound on it in a way that would be obviously different than a robot's (GPT3 would say, the meaning of this sentence is [0.5435, 24.2352, 1.3245], nearby sentences I've seen have embeddings [1.5532, 0.3552, 4.2442])
I wouldn't bet on this
AI could have an impact on digital art (besides using it optimize digital pictures in Lightroom), social media (why go to places for likes if that can be had by creating a deep fake, it does link back to the point about "originals" so) and the like.
That being said, forgery, staging and other shenenigans have a long history in photography. As wr talk art, as long as people are ooen about it it's fine. It becomes a problem if art work is sold as something it is not.
AI has a place as a tool to produce content in a fast and cheap way. And yes, as a result of that certain jobs will likely disappear. But art will continue to exist and great artists will still be followed and admired by the public.
Technology both displaces jobs and enhances jobs. It's impossible to tell a priori the economic effect.
It's just as possible that artists leveraging these tools are paid more because they're incredibly more productive than the overall demand for art somehow being sated and reducing artist employment
The industrial revolution had a huge impact on society, discussing that and how it will displace or transform some occupations isn't the same thing as actually fighting back against the new technology.
I've been "successfully" creating AI art for a few months now, and although there are some staunch opponents (mostly on Reddit), the medium has been generally very well received by both the audiences and many artists in the established community.
I'm curious whether thats just the text descriptions people are putting into the generators to get clicks or inherent in the AI art generation techniques used.
I'll also throw out that for most of the history of art - "art" has always been cheap to produce. My pre-schooler created "art". Its really only the outliers that we remember. And really the ones who make it do it through verbal communication of their ideas or have some mechanism for conveying a consistent, overarching theme/narrative. [1]
A professional AI "artist" might need to figure out how to become more of a visual creator/curator - ushering the generated images into coherent story that can be shared via discussions at gallery showings, etc.
Perhaps real professional visual artists need to find the equivalent of a live show that has kept music viable as a career or a live book reading that makes an author relatable.
[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/the-hidden-side-of-the-...
Design agencies should be trying to build / buy these tools now as fast as they can. Otherwise the AI agencies will eat them up.
Someone could build a machine that splatters paint like a Jackson Pollock, but that hasn’t devalued his art at all. Keyboard and synthesizers haven’t stopped people from playing real instruments.
I'm not so sure about that. Trumpet playing appears to be largely dead. There's nobody like Herb Alpert today.
There's been an explosion in virtuoso instrumentalists on YouTube from what I've observed. Jazz seems be having a big renaissance especially.
I've heard some modern trumpeters, but they weren't very good. The trumpet is a very difficult instrument to play well.
Guitars and keyboards are popular because of the wide range of sounds they can easily produce. Trumpets have a much more restricted set of sounds it can make, so I understand the reluctance to specialize on it.
But when done well, a trumpet sounds heavenly. Nothing can match its beauty.
These AI algorithms only regurgitate new permutations of what they are trained on.
There will always be the need for the pipeline of new material, but they're definitely won't be as large of a need for commodity artists who were already just regurgitating existing material in the first place.
Not that art should necessarily be a clear depiction of real things, far from that. Good art (read: art I feel a connection with and inspired by) is the presentation of a SUBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW. In these images, all I see is the averaging of many points of view (the actual artworks the model was trained on, I presume), resulting in no point of view at all.
This technology will take jobs like designing 3-star hotel lobby wallpaper, not the places of human artists. Without a human point of view, "art" like this is flavorless jello.
In short, it's a mistake to judge AI art by its current capability. It's about to go on an exponential tour.
While I'm still rambling on about this – the author states: “In a strictly mechanical sense, yes, an artist can still create, knowing that the art could be done faster and better by AI.” The art cannot necessarily be done better by an AI, and the speed with which art is created does not matter, artistically.
It's been going on one for the last five years. Two years ago it would have been difficult to generate a picture that's recognizably anything at all, using any non-specific engine.
Now we're down to complaints that mostly don't matter that much. Two years from now..?
The Singularity is ever near because exponential growth!
> The AI can make art. I’ve seen people dispute this, since what the AI makes by definition may not be art, under at least certain definitions. I think those definitions are stupid though, and will elect to ignore them.
is in the article itself:
> Art, at its core, is an attempt at expression and evocation. It’s a way of talking about things that are hard to put into words, a way of making arguments that don’t have their own formal logic, a way of connecting with others, of sharing. Some people paint or write because it’s a way of letting something out of themselves, of working through thoughts or trauma, or spending some time feeling some particular emotion or working on a thought...
> Art is a communicative act. It’s a conversation. You see a picture and it makes you feel a certain way, and yes, sometimes you silently process that art, but most of my favorite aspects of art as discussing it with other people, wrestling with the art in public, teasing out what it’s trying to do, or what it’s doing without trying. I generally think that this is one of the best parts of being an author or an artist, this very public back and forth, sometimes with the art having to defend itself as the critic shadow-boxes...
Sooner or later, a general artificial intelligence will create art and it will be a crisis for human artists. That's not today. DALL-E is not trying to make an argument, work through some trauma, or share a particular emotion, when it turns your text query into a feature vector into a JPG...
I recently attended a talk by Aaron Hertzmann who compared the rise of AI-assisted art to the invention of the camera. Yes, some types of art will stop being commercially viable---stock images of D&D characters, to take the article's example---just as photorealistic portraits stopped being viable in the age of photography. But art as a social act of communication is alive and well...