Comment by anonylizard
3 years ago
This entire article misses critical developments in the AI art space. Controlnet was just released last week. It allows for precise fine-tuning of the image with skeletal positions, depth maps, outline sketches, etc. It has been exceptionally received in the AI art community, because pure-text-prompting precisely runs into the issue described in the article. You can only convey so much information with text prompts.
That being said, artists in general still don't want to touch controlnet. Because despite controlnet solving their complaints about how the AI isn't controllable precisely, it doesn't solve the real problem, that drawing skills are massive devalued.
Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read basic python), and storytellers (like manga artists). It'll be a higher-pay, higher-prestige, higher-skill-requirement job than before. And all those artists who devoted their lives to draw better, find this to be an incredibly brutal adjustment.
PS: Despite how people made fun of 'proompters', or predicted that prompting would be automated away. The skill ceiling to good AI art has radically increased. There's now 10 different fine-tuned models you need to learn the basics of, each with different strengths. There's thousands of LORAs to insert into prompts to precisely reproduce a subject that the base model has no information on. There's 20 parameters to tune, each with different effects. There's VAEs which affect coloring and fine-details. Now there's controlnet, and you'd better learn blender to rig basic skeletons to feed it. This likely suggests the future of an AI-augmented economy: People become AI wranglers. Wordpress was supposed to make blogging easier, instead it spawned an industry of WP wranglers.
> that drawing skills are massive devalued.
This is the critical insight. Human artists having nothing to worry about. Human drawers do.
The decoupling of concept from execution is old news in most forms of art. Writing music and playing an instrument are two very different skills, and indeed any session musician will tell you that playing instruments well is not as valued as writing amazing music.
In fact we went through a similar thing in pop music in the 70’s and 80’s, with the brief moral panic over electronic music and people who “just push a button and don’t even know know to play their instrument.” Turns out nobody cares, as long as the music is good.
AI art decouples concept from execution for visual art. That’s all.
You're not taking into consideration how the actual artists actually feel. And, from the first hand - the feeling is horrible. Most artists love to draw, the process itself is incredibly satisfying. Just like a musician loves his instrument.
This is destroying them, stealing the joy from the thing they devoted decades of life. My wife is extremely depressed by this, to the point I think she'll need serious therapy. She still has most of her job, but yeah recent developments like ControlNet? Well, shit.
The human impact is real, but how is it different from how carriage drivers felt about the automobile, or how typists felt about the word processor?
I’ll submit that people who feel horrible have mistaken the commodity and value-add aspects of their jobs. AI does not make someone an artist, but nor does great hand-eye coordination and good brush technique. The actual art is concept; brushes and canvas and AI are tools.
I’m sorry that the decoupling of creation from performance is making people you care about feel bad, but really this is hundreds of years old news for most artists (musicians, architects, sculptors, etc).
People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.
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Sorry if this comes off as harsh but, AI is not stopping anyone from drawing. The person looking at AI and then fretting about the future, and then not drawing is the person preventing the drawing from happening.
The same thing happened to bank tellers with the ATM. Jobs change and so do industries. Art's become more niche.
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<3
Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.
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Obviously I don't get to tell your wife, or anyone else, how to feel about this. And there is a very real and very impactful thing in that, if you enjoy and make a living out of hand-drawn art, AI art will make it harder to make a living out of something you enjoy. There's no way around that, and I don't mean to deny that feeling. It always sucks when the circumstances around your craft and your source of income change.
But I don't think AI art can possibly take away from the beauty and enjoyment that can be found in drawing and making art. You mention how a musician loves playing their instrument. I can download a music edition software and summon a virtual orchestra out of my speakers in seconds. But does this take anything from the musician? Is their feeling any less true, their music any less meaningful to themselves and to those who listen? If I bring my laptop to a party and play Vivaldi's seasons on it, will that elicit the same reaction as if I play it in the living room's piano?
If language models eventually get good enough at programming that I'm out of a job, I won't derive any less enjoyment out of programming. I'll be a lot poorer, sure, but I will still enjoy the process of coming up with a way to express constraints in code, even if a machine can do it for me in the blink of an eye. Just like I find it relaxing to do the dishes myself when I'm anxious, even if I have a perfectly good dishwasher. Just like how people who enjoy solving Sudokus don't find it less fun just because automatic Sudoku solvers exist. The journey is the destination.
And for the record, I don't think human art will disappear because of AI art, or human programming will disappear because of AI programming. If there's one thing that's demonstrably true through the history of humanity, is that humans have a strong human-centric bias. The sooner we commodify something and remove the human element from it, the sooner we bring that human element back, now elevated to the status of luxury and catered to a niche.
Let me explain what I mean: I can buy black garlic in a plastic container for cheap, but I can also go to the weekend farmer market and pay three times as much for black garlic from a lady who lives up the mountains and can tell me the shape of the jar she fermented it in. IKEA makes perfectly good furniture that you can use to play board games for less than a hundred, but board game enthusiasts pay hundreds or thousands for custom furniture with nooks and bezels to stop the tokens from sliding out. Glass blowing as a form of art continues to exist, regardless of the availability of perfectly fine, industrially-made glass appliances. It's just in artisanal fairs in Venice, not in your living room.
And sure, you won't be able to make a living anymore out of cranking out uninspired corporate Memphis for bay-area startups, or drawing cartoon furries for Twitter randos on commission. And, in a way... thank fuck for that, right? The combinatorial space of drawing people with smooth curves in fantasy skin colors using technological appliances in collaborative settings can be exhausted by an AI, and you can actually focus on making art that breaks the mold, art that hasn't been made before, art that is meaningful to you. You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans, while the "art" that ticks out boxes and replaces placeholders in landing pages can be cranked out by AI.
Yes, it will be harder to make a living out of that, but I'm sure it won't be impossible. Computers have been able to generate Mondrian paintings since the 80s, and that hasn't made Mondrian paintings any less valuable. An AI may be able to produce the exact same drawing that you do, but it can't imbue human meaning in it.
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I feel for your wife. It helps her any, many other careers and passions are not far behind. I foresee many intellectual tasks being automated in as little as three to five years.
A friend works in law, mostly handling workplace discrimination cases His job will be safe for now, but not those of his paralegals and staff who research case law, write drafts, and handle everyday communication with clients and the courts. Many of them have been in it for years and are passionate about helping victims who have been hurt by racism and homophobia. One of his most tenured employees is an elderly black man well past retirement age, who greatly enjoys that he can now help stop the sort of discrimination he experienced when he was young. None of these people will be able to meaningfully contribute to their passion in ten years.
"This is the critical insight. Human artists having nothing to worry about. Human drawers do."
The reason why amazing music is valued so much is because there's so much music that you have to be amazing to be noticed. Art has had that problem for a long time. Someone spends 100hrs of talent on a masterpiece and we say "meh, seen a thousand of that quality"
Learning theory is easier than applying it so becoming an artist is easier and now artists have more competition. Not advocating against AI art but it's obviously going to have a negative effect.
Do you think synthesizers and sequencers have had a negative effect on music?
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Even human drawers might do all right, if they're selling physical drawings. People will still put hand-painted canvasses on their walls, just like people still enjoy an acoustic guitar concert, even if the guitarist isn't world-class. The authentic connection with a human being is where the art survives. If you're not an amazing artist, you can still be an authentic one.
But if you're just churning out commercial illustrations, then sure, an AI can do that now, or soon.
> Turns out nobody cares, as long as the music is good.
Actually, all those people who lost their professions they spent their lifetime working on, they care, rather a lot.
> indeed any session musician will tell you that playing instruments well is not as valued as writing amazing music.
Yes, in 2023 they say this, but I assure you when "session musician" was a common profession, that no one said this.
When I first started in music, if you wanted your piece of music, you had to pay instrumentalists to play it, and this was a valuable professional skill.
> Turns out nobody cares, as long as the music is good.
And the music is not good either.
When did everyone become so sociopathically detached from the welfare of others? It's just horrifying.
Hear of that group called the luddites?
This is just the latest chapter in the same book. The solution has almost never been stopping technology but distribution of the benefits to all members of the society. That is unless you want one entity to play winner take all in the end.
I'm not an artist, but my fiance is an animator. Generally, something similar exists in stock assets (photos, assets like vector files, other such things). We had a discussion on whether the existence of stock assets means drawing is no longer necessary to be an artist, and her answer was it still is something you should be able to do because knowing how to draw is the best way to learn the fundamentals of art in general, knowing how parts of a body work in a drawing or animation, and generally something is "good" vs. "bad," etc. However, as someone who isn't a fine artist, she doesn't have time to generate everything frame by frame, so she doesn't do it for every project she works on, but that knowledge is invaluable and one you can only obtain from knowing how to draw.
I think the best analogy I understand it is as is it is like assembly language or low level programming in general. I certainly do not have the time to program every piece of code I write in asm but having done projects in asm is invaluable as a coder[0], given how much it informs my mental model of how the code I write actually works. That understanding is beyond valuable and is something that puts you a rung above everyone else who just copies things from SO without knowing what they do. I think AI for devs, to the extent that it will evolve, will still be as such. People who primarily find it amazing today I find either 1) use it as a productivity boost for things that need a lot of boiler-plate[1], or 2) are SO-copy-pasters who are just amazed they have to think even less. A LOT of the "AI artist" community are the artist equivalent of the 2nd, honestly, and it's easy to detect AI art because it's generated by people who are not really artists, and in similar fashion either don't know the fundamentals or who only create "good" work by nearly directly copying other art pieces.
Also, to critique your analogy, what you guys are saying is along the lines of "given DAWs, why learn to play an instrument at all?" Except a plain look at any good composer will show they know how to play at least one instrument, even if they don't play all their music on that instrument, there is no doubt knowing how to play clearly makes you a better composer. I mean, can you even imagine a composer who cannot even play piano, or guitar? Sure a composer need not be a virtuoso concert pianist, but they should at the very least be able to play the chords of the very song they've composed. Nothing thus far teaches the human mind deep understanding of something more than doing that thing does. It is so clearly obvious in music and programming and the only reason people keep saying you can be an artist having never learned to draw is because such people simply do not understand art or composition at all.
[0] I'm not really a software developer but a computational scientist, and so I won't say I'm a developer, but still understanding of data structures, algorithms, discrete math in general, and yes asm is invaluable for me.
[1] As someone outside of the dev space, I don't know why you people don't just make better interfaces instead of juggling 9 yamls and 3 environments for every project, or just roll your own interface and reduce the boiler-plate yourself.
> Because despite controlnet solving their complaints about how the AI isn't controllable precisely, it doesn't solve the real problem, that drawing skills are massive devalued
At this point if I was an artist I'd probably be looking for a way to leverage my existing skills into AI art, because it seems like drawing skills will go the way of the horse and carriage.
I feel bad because this has happened so quickly. Previously it seems like there was a longer transition period.
This kind of transition has got me thinking the same about coding though. If AI programming does indeed take over, my programming skills will likely be massively devalued.
If you believe this is going to happen, how should you prepare for it? Start learning prompting now? Get involved with building these AIs? Etc.
I've tried to convince artists to transition to the AI-augmented future, since October. There's almost no successes. I've seen artist communities on multiple websites, in multiple languages. At first they tried to laugh at the AI. Now the AI has improved so radically so fast, they universally prefer to stick their head in the sand, and ban discussion of AI altogether, its all denial and rage.
On the more optimistic side. I see an extraordinary explosion in artistic innovation, just look at websites like CivitAI. The massive community all training subcomponents of the models for each other to share. The models rapidly improving every month just through fine-tuning and theoretical innovation, without stabilityAI's involvement (They are distracted by lawsuits now). There are many 3d-artists intensely experimenting with AI art, to say make AI-anime, which has illustration qualities on every frame (A previous impossibility due to the costs involved).
It seems with AI, it'll really cleave communities in two. The ones who eagerly embrace it, seem to enjoy it extraordinarily, and achieve quite a lot of popularity and success. But the rest just want to pretend it doesn't exist, waiting till employers realize that they are no longer needed.
Regarding programming, it doesn't appear that AI programming can replace humans. Programming is very similar to novel writing in terms of complexity for AIs. And AIs are still extremely terrible at long-form storytelling. The lesson is to aggressively use AI tools as much as possible, to understand the long-term weaknesses of AIs, and deliver your values in those areas as a human.
I've tried to convince artists to transition to the AI-augmented future, since October.
This comment is funny, "I've given the artists fair warning of 6 months that they're careers are over."
But the rest just want to pretend it doesn't exist, waiting till employers realize that they are no longer needed.
So when the employers fire the artists, who will replace them sorry? Will the C-level executives at my company be using DALL-E instead? How does it work? Would they just not hire a "creative assistant" who will probably hire other assistants ?
I've seen artist communities on multiple websites, in multiple languages. At first they tried to laugh at the AI. Now the AI has improved so radically so fast, they universally prefer to stick their head in the sand, and ban discussion of AI altogether, its all denial and rage.
I'd love to see these raging artist discussions? Can you link a few?
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I understand AI programming isn't there yet, but it seems likely that sometime in the next decade the same thing that's happening to artists will happen to programmers.
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> seems like drawing skills will go the way of the horse and carriage.
The exact same thing happened to technical drafters when CAD destroyed the entire (sub-)industry.
And to typesetting, for that matter[1].
Which is a pity in the human sense and the sense that both were forms of artistry and produced things of great beauty, both the product and the machines used to enable them, but they're simply not economical in the face of Solidworks and digital composition. And yet the replacement technologies have also enabled a lot more creativity and further advances. Objects with complex geometries are now possible to specify and manufacture, when they previously could not even be accurately drawn.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute, where not only could the unions not simply oppose the rising sea-level of technology, but their failure seriously damaged union credibility in general.
> At this point if I was an artist I'd probably be looking for a way to leverage my existing skills into AI art, because it seems like drawing skills will go the way of the horse and carriage
Drawing skills were made redundant for producing most types of high quality image before the motor car but people still pay for hand drawn items
Not sure AI lowering the skill barrier for and speeding up the generation of digital art is really going to change that
> my programming skills will likely be massively devalued
I see this in the context of the drawing vs. art analogy. Yes, your typing and maybe syntax skills will be devalued, but your higher level, creative programming skills are probably safe for a good long time yet.
Depends what you mean by 'good long time'. I think at this point it's worth acting under the assumption that programming will not be a well compensated career in 5-10 years, and either be prepared to switch to something else or try to make a lot of money in the near term.
Also, if I'm wrong then I get to be pleasantly surprised.
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I'm sure there will be some overlap, but prompting is sufficiently different from programming that I think a lot of skills will not translate.
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Especially combined with deep knowledge of the business domain you work in.
>If you believe this is going to happen, how should you prepare for it? Start learning prompting now? Get involved with building these AIs? Etc.
If you still want to work as someone who produces code - except your personal code factory has changed from brain and fingers to AI - then yeah, you should probably do both of those things.
Even if you spend 1-2 years and this AI hype doesn't work out, you still have those skills to go back to.
Frankly, this mainstream adoption by Google and Microsoft is, uh, not going great. So you can afford to observe for now, but AI advancements have been made very rapidly, so it's not wise to completely ignore it either.
> If you believe this is going to happen, how should you prepare for it? Start learning prompting now? Get involved with building these AIs? Etc.
Short of advocating for artists' unions...
Law is still going to govern anything AI creates, so anyone who develops a skillset in both art and law would be well-positioned to gatekeep as a copyright troll. This carves out a career for yourself and enacts revenge by making it a liability for employers to use AI to replace artists.
HR is the theocratic version of that, since law school isn't cheap. You can still gatekeep, but you'd be playing by more-arbitrary rules ("you can't use that AI because it incorporates images of Women Without Penises," etc.).
Security is pragmatic, but I worry about the long-term stability of it. Every time a breach is announced, there are no consequences, so why even pretend to need it?
I used to suggest pivoting to tangible works and experiences (architecture, sculpture, etc.), but those are easily displaced as well-- I would bet against it now.
Look at porn-- what started as a handful of performers in studios is now done by any college student with a webcam in their bedroom (next up to be replaced with AI-generated content).
For now, you can still add value as a sex worker by offering the GFE, but even that's about to be obsolete. You can get your fix of flirting from a chatbot (TTS or sexting) and 3D print a copy of anybody else's genitalia. Remote-controls, vibrators and fluid pumps add some life to it. And you don't even have to leave the house, which affords you privacy to pursue darker subjects without oversight and save you more time for repeat consumption.
Truly, what a wonderful world...
Go with the flow. AI will need humans to be effective, humans will need AI to remain competitive. But everyone will have the same base models, just like we all have the same web search and electricity. AI won't be a competitive advantage, it will be a basic requirement.
Do you believe the number and complexity of software applications will decrease in the next 10 years because of AI, or that it will spawn whole new ecosystems of software and new types of jobs? I believe the second is more reasonable, we will have higher expectations from software in 2033 than in 2023. The easier AI makes it, the more difficult we make the tasks.
Human desires fill the available space like air, AI exponential is slower than our entitlement. So we still need to work.
> If you believe this is going to happen
I believe this is going to happen (and is happening right now, in front of us) not just for programmers but for any role that can be automated.
> How should you prepare for it?
Get equity. I mean ownership stake. If you don't have a legal/financial claim on the output of the machine then you're about to be part of the worthless surplus from the POV of the system.
> Start learning prompting now?
No, the machines will do that well enough in a minute or two.
> Get involved with building these AIs?
No, the machines will do that well enough in a minute or two too.
- - - -
Artificial Intelligence destroys scarcity, which is the fundamental basis of our societies and economies.
Think about it: scarcity is the very problem that societies and economies evolved to solve in the first place.
Now science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. There is enough to go around if we just worked out the logistics, and computers can do that for us in a matter of moments. In other words, the "World Game" is not hard! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game we just have to get over our hangups.
Now here's where it gets really interesting: ChatGPT et. al. don't have glands, they don't have emotional trauma, no PTSD from being humans-on-Earth for generations, etc. We can program them to be sane and perhaps even wise.
We can also attach empirical feedback devices to them, make them scientists...
So we have physical abundance and benevolent, sane, empirically-grounded AI advisors, how much longer will it take to sort things out? I think we could be looking at the start of a Golden Age?
Yeah this post seems like it will not stand the rest of time.
The fundamental conceptual shift is the emergent behaviors displayed by these models. And that is highly unforeseeable.
We’re not working with machines that do what they’re built to do. They’re doing more. And every day we discover something new they’re capable of doing.
Making any sort of statement about the limits of this technology is going to be shortsighted.
The opposite is also true. People overestimate what is possible and underestimate how much more effort and time is required to start replacing industries.
> Artists will still exist, but most likely as hybrid 3d-modellers, AI modelers (Not full programmers, but able to fine-tune models with online guides and setups, can read basic python)
Why should artists have to learn fucking Python!? There are so few jobs open to people who don't want to "learn to code", this was one of the last, and that's going too.
> This likely suggests the future of an AI-augmented economy: People become AI wranglers.
So we don't get to create ourselves anymore. No drawing, no making music, no programming even. We just give prompts to AI programs. Which means we are worthless, because any bozo can do this.
I hate this timeline so much. It's like all the worst and most mediocre parts from every SF future, with an extra dose of stupidity and greed on top.
(And I'm a computer programmer.)
I wouldn't worry too much. We've pushed the biosphere past the point of repair. This "utopia" they dream of won't have a chance to come to fruition before we all go down in flames.
And given this dichotomy as choice, I would choose the flames too.
At the end of the day, we are not going to see AI art in the Guggenheim, or any of those other museums where the finest art in the world resides. AI art is and will always be a novelty. Real art comes from the human spirit. It is not about technical execution, and not just about painting a pretty picture. In actual art we want to see humanity, something that AI will never, ever truly know about.
Seems like a lot of people are missing this point, and it seems like a lot of people have a chip on their shoulder about being unable to create art, and believing they can express the deep recesses of their feelings and psyche and everything else that makes us human by proxy through AI, and thus completely missing the point of creating art in the first place.
These are great platitudes, and as a fellow human I like the idea that only we can create "real" art, but I don't know how to justify that idea. I have no chip on my shoulder about art, it's not part of my identity at all. Computer programming is, though, and I fully expect it to affect my industry in the next decade.
The current fine art market is extremely unmeritorious so I agree that AI art will never make it to the Guggenheim. That isn't a good metric since the human curators will never allow it to happen. The metric will be the industry. Will ai start composing scores for movies? Promotional posters? Art that's sold outside of expensive curated galleries (etsy, ect)?
It's possible that humans will keep their stranglehold on these and I hope that's the case... But I wouldn't bet on it.
I don't know if this is a backhanded comment or not, and I also don't know how much modern fine art you have actually seen IRL, but there are people doing some pretty fascinating things that an AI could not really do, such as "leave a physical painting out in harsh weather for several months, or until you think it's "done", as a treatment." Yeah you can mimic the idea but all you get in the end is a JPG or whatever.
Please look up the definition of platitude. It's not very nice.
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I think even without AI art we are well past the point of art in famous galleries making sense. Isn't most of this just thinly veiled money laundering anyway?
I imagine we WILL see AI art in a famous gallery for exactly this reason. Except it will be lauded for the imagination of the creator and the tweaks they made, not their drawing ability.
That is an extremely cynical point of view in my opinion
> This likely suggests the future of an AI augmented economy: People become AI wranglers. Wordpress was supposed to make blogging easier, instead it spawned an industry of WP wranglers.
Good counter for "AI will steal our jobs". When competition starts to use AI+human, you got to level up. And since everyone has the same base AIs, the differentiating factor is still human.
thanks was looking for something like this.
SD has been great at giving lots of new ideas but frustratingly difficult/impossible to iterate on anything.