Ask HN: What will be the large-scale second-order consequence of AI Art?
For example, Photography, something that was only accessible to a few, became massively accessible when the iPhone came out. The large-scale second order was not simply that we had more photos we could reminisce with(the previous major use case of photos). But rather that we started sharing photos/videos with each other as a form of communication/storytelling. (with platforms like IG/Snapchat/Youtube/Tiktok)
This new generation of art tools fundamentally *expands* the set of people who can express their thoughts/feelings visually from a tiny fraction of the population to the masses. Something that used to take years of training is now achievable with a few weeks of practice. This is INSANE! And it's hard to know how this will actually change the world. (Note: I am by no means saying amateur artist + AI == professional artist, just like how iPhone didn't kill professional photographers.)
Will there be a new medium of storytelling? Will the next generation of Wattpad writers become "comic book artists"? Will we start to communicate through generated art that represents how we feel? What do you think can be the world-changing second-order consequence when everyone can express their thoughts and feelings visually?
41 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 81.8 ms ] threadHowever, there does seem to be a correction phase that comes after that leads us to an ultimately better place. So I am quite optimistic about what comes after with generative art.
When the reason for use goes beyond the initial novelty factor.
So from my perspective, I think it's a fad that'll die out or ultimately be abused, just like everything other machine learning toolset out there. But who knows? Humans and fads can remain irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
It was previously, because we were the only ones capable of it. As a counter-point, it's not hard to imagine aliens creating art.
The definition that specifies human origin is now outdated.
And rather than calling the definition of art outdated, it makes more sense to call this machine learning generation stuff "artificial art" or "superficial art" or some other separate term. It doesn't make sense to mix two rather incompatible concepts.
Actually I would say most of it is, since humans can produce bad art as well.
You're worried about the process, and I get that. But the result is art.
“AI” as we know it does not exist without humans pushing it forward; romantic notions our inventions are independently sentient depends on ignoring a whole lot.
For the same reason I can choose to not import a religion I can not import the idea these stupid things are “thinking” independently of humans, without justifying it as I don’t have to with religion as well.
All the constraints are defined by us. It’s not magic.
As a pretty handy example, photographers are considered artists. I took photography pretty seriously at one time, and it's very dear to me, but I will say that I don't think there's very much magic in it.
I don't think the algo is thinking or sentient or anything like that. It's hard to argue that it's not producing art, though.
Tangent: I would also argue humans are designed. I don't mean any mysticism: I think all life is being designed by unthinking processes. As evidence, just look at all the specialist life-forms that are filling a niche that they were...well, designed for.
That said, if people want to wax poetic privately in their own jargon, whatever, of course. That’s democracy.
But the refined over thousands of years corpus of knowledge “contained” within STEM fields has been shown over and over to be our most reliable guide humans have come up with for building a society. Nothing in there attempts to define what is and isn’t intelligence; it’s a model of what matter exists and how it coalesces at various “speeds” relative to light. Needing to define if AI is this or that is a romantic human thing; very subjective.
Where a physical thing “is” is hard to argue. Where a thing fits into ones subjective mental taxonomy is easy to argue.
Ultimately, is "thinking" not simply prompting your own brain with information(often times natural language) and see what the output is and then we fine tune?
Maybe a question to ask is, can you express yourself if you are not creating the canvas/paint brush? Or, is the Lego creation a form of expression if you are not making the Lego pieces!?
I think this will absolutely change the content space. We will see smaller groups of individuals able to make animated-films, add-special effects to their video-projects, etc. Get ready ready to see more content geared for the fringes of society, and thus amplification of their preferences in media, politics, etc.
I think the next wave will probably be video related AI tools and those will also be really impactful.
At present it still takes a lot of trial and error to create what you want, something that a knowledgeable designer can probably do better than the average person, so I still see a need for design people in the loop in most cases.
I can definitely see people starting to use AI tools for memes - it will be interesting to see if that is as sticky as memes are today. I think a lot of their value comes from recognizable formats, but AI art could definitely provide some interesting variety and new forms of expression.
Fakes and misinformation is still a threat. We have yet to have a big event triggered by a fake AI generated image, but I think that day is coming.
One thing about AI generated art - while you can make some crazy and interesting combinations (something that is fertile ground for artistic experimentation), the AI models can only ever interpolate _existing_ artwork. They can never come up with a new style or something that nobody has ever done before. One could argue that all art evolves from past art, but I think if we only ever used AI tools then creativity would eventually stagnate as the tools could only ever regurgitate a variation on something that has already been done.
A quick search confirms that other people were already using the term. :)
The current ai art world is shockingly reminescent of new minecraft updates; everyone using the same new blocks in their builds, so much so that block pallettes are comprised of blocks that do not go together at all, al for the sake of "making a build with the new blocks"
I think experimenting with new art techniques in this way is a fundamental part of the human experience, and i see no reason to cringe at it, even if it means that you can sometimes tell that a minecraft build was made when the update that included its blocks came out.
My bets on second order consequences:
1. 3D world generation based on prompts
2. Ambient music and sounds
3. Character modeling
4. And yes, interactive storytelling.
Imagine getting these models to a decent enough shape and having a 3D printer hooked.
Speech to Text -> Prompt Validation and Cleanup -> 2D Image -> 3D Models -> Printed Object.
Humans add, correct, guide, direct the vision and AI does the gruntwork all through the pipeline.
I wrote more about this in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32660252
What AI takes away is all the hard work and application of talent that happens between articulating "ghost ship flying over futuristic city under moonlight" and having a quality picture of exactly that before your eyes.
That talent and work, with years of practice behind it, is the bulk of what art is.
Not just the talent to execute, but creativity. The AI has a deep imagination, or a facsimile there of, which is being relied upon. For the same prompt, it can generate a vast stream of completely different pictures incorporating different concepts in different ways.
There is still tedium: deciding which of the 200 such pictures that were generated for you do you go with.
Evaluating the output of AI and tweaking prompts and parameters isn't art, but more like constructive art criticism.
If a person A were giving prompts and changing requirements to another person B who produces successive refinements of a picture, B would be readily identified as the artist and not A.
Here is how an artist could use AI: use it to generate ideas, and then incorporate them into their own work.
There will be AI-based music generation soon. Will you say "it takes away the tedium of playing music"? Playing music is a joyful activity. Learning to play it can be tedious but the performance itself is pleasant.
People learn to play a song and then they play it hundreds of times throughout their life even though they could just record it once and let the recording do the "tedious" work of making the sounds!
Drawing is also pleasant. It isn't "gruntwork", though there are tedious tasks within it sometimes. Mostly it is meditative.
The fact that you don't like to draw and you want something that will draw for you is a whole issue in itself.
Would you want something that will dance for you? Ski for you? Flirt and make love for you? Don't worry, you'll be "directing the vision".
It sounds like you don't want to make art, you just want credit for art having been made.
Like, there are people who will use this tool to do amazing stuff, but they're going to have to spend months or years "tediously" learning how to make it do more than what it does out of the box. You know that, right?
I've written this before but it's relative to this discussion.
First to market with an easy-onboarding decent-looking AI animation platform will build a self-perpetuating position. Think like Roblox for animators.
https://i.imgur.com/HdT2bWM.png
One can crank out merch much faster for current trends.
All marketing and design stuff will move to cheap labour countries. The company in the emerging markets will employ 1000s of people who will get the business context from people .
They will employ all these people with AI tools to get creative and generate multiple options to be sent back to main office.
To make better AI, they will need better data. I can see many Mturk kind of gamification and crypto level stuff driving millions of people to tag data .AI will get multiple different inputs for a same image and then AI can keep improving on top of that.
- Video + audio generation (or automatic tweening for animation) means a single animator can create an entire movie or animated series.
- 3d models and textures + automatically generated animation and behavior trees. This could enable artists and non-technical people to create games and interactive experiences.
Now the opportunity for all 8 billion persons on Earth, regardless of experience, to create their own fascinating, epic, emotionally fulfilling and artistically relevant pieces in addition to the above only gives me knots in my stomach.
I don't understand why an accelerating explosion of ideas that nobody has ever thought of suddenly being realized is supposed to be an unequivocal good. You can have all the entertainment in the world, but human bodies will be chained to physical and biological limits for the time being, namely 14-16 waking hours a day. And some people like me have a much harder time regulating their attention spans as is.
To me, this intense focus on AI-related tooling in the recent past serves as a reminder that if it were possible for humanity to fill every last parcel of physical space with objects of our own creation, we would do so. I think it's just human nature; planting our objects on Mars would only be the first step of millions if it were feasible.
The digital world also suffices. It will be filled to the brim with a set of beautiful paintings of mansions with flowered gardens and fountains, painting, oil on canvas, 4k, detailed, thomas cole, trending on Artstation.
I also have to wonder what the effects will be on the culture of the humans steering the tools. I'm not sure what to feel about the connotations around the concept of "art" gradually coming to mean "the product of those with powerful enough GPUs and ten minutes of spare time a day." I don't know how else to explain it, but feels like something important is lost in the process.
It's like how when you try to practice drawing with pencil and paper, some people tell you that learning a skill like drawing is meant to be a journey, and is a process that requires patience and hard work. The implication is that it's supposed to instill virtue within the creator, so long as you're interested enough to embark on that patient, thoughtful journey for however long it takes. Now it feels like that promise has been invalidated within the span of a few years and a pile of tensors.
My worry is that the fascination with art produced algorithmically will cause people to stay in their rooms, and lose a desire to become more in touch with the outside world. It's common practice to go outside and sketch objects in the real world, using your eyesight and making spatial comparisons to what's on paper. That becomes archaic if the computer can do everything for you.
(I'm also biased in saying this, since I was never capable of enjoying the process of manual drawing long enough to see passable results. It doesn't give me a good feeling to know that I'll never be able to produce art with my hands that an AI would hypothetically never be able to produce.)
One other thing that's only tangential: Assume that any given platform like YouTube could somehow solve its biases and moderation problems, maybe by becoming a public service of some kind. Even with the "best" possible algorithm built for the sake of creators trying to build an audience, what happens when there's now billions of people vying for a slice of your 16 waking hours? An endless stream of fascinating, insightful, fulfilling information that never ends, personalized down to every single fleeting interest and sense of taste you've ever had.
This makes me uncomfortable.
In the present day, the hardest truth for me to swallow is that even without the ills of any given algorithm, what addicts me is ultimately the product of hundreds of other people's passions and drive for a fulfilling life ...
It'll create free money to go harder for all kinds of other fields.
As I mentioned thereon, "I look forward to the 'pollution'"[1]
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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32577822
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32581496