Comment by brookst
3 years ago
> 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.
yes, and every time an artist shares their exiting new drawing to the world at large, a computer program instantly mapps it and gives it away for free before the artist can even make a living off it. AI is driving out the ability to afford to make and share original art. Those 'menial tasks', by the way, are often the bread and butter that allow artist to make a living and continue to create.The end result will be a great loss of creativity and culture. The great misconception is that AI learns art just like humans by devouring preexisting art. Humans learn skills to manipulate MATERIALS, to then create imagery. AI copies those hard earned skills without permission like a library of stolen blueprints. Sad that so many people don't (or don't want to understand the difference). If I make a beautiful dress and you have the skill to copy it, so be it. If I make a beautiful dress and you take the pattern pieces I created to make the dress (since you do not have the understanding nor skill to make the pattern for yourself, but must rely on my patternmaking) well that is stealing in my book.
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> 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?
Because driving a car or typing is entirely different from making art.
> People who enjoy drawing can still draw, just like people who enjoy playing instruments can still play instruments.
"You can just sit at home and play your little instrument, and not bother anyone, is that good for you?"
Your contempt for art and artists is just awful. It makes me despair for humanity.
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>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?
it's probably different in the way that the parent poster described, that artists found drawing an emotionally satisfying process whereas people typing probably didn't think setting styles in MS Word made them complete.
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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.
You're right. This is harsh. Some people make a living off art. Having valuable skills is good for people's self esteem. We're not replacing a factory line job, we're automating something that takes people 100hrs of classes and self practice to master and people have put themselves in debt to achieve.
But they can doodle in their spare time while they search for another job that isn't being phased out or spend most of their day crafting text prompts. Maybe go back to college take on some more debt.
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One big difference is that art is typically a passion job, whereas most of the previously automated jobs weren't. Being able to draw for a living also takes way longer to learn than being a bank teller, or data entry etc, did.
Not that it matters, AI is only going to get better from here. I'd also feel depressed if I made my living doing digital art.
<3
Good luck to your wife. This is fucking horrible. Being in an industry that Silicon Valley shitheads are ruining sucks.
It is definitely coming for the programmers too. They said coding would eat the world but I guess it ate itself...
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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.
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
Good luck finding the time to enjoy your hobbies when being poorer.
You'll have much less time an energy for passions at that stage. You'll probably be flipping burgers at burger king, until that's automated too.
I'm not saying you won't be able to enjoy programming when poorer, but life is sure a lot tougher when you need to think about money constantly. When having a health problem means maybe not having the money for treatment etc.
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Drawing furry porn commissions is meaningful to me. It's fun to sit around getting paid for drawing horny cartoons. It's a fucking blast, it feels like I am cheating at life to have this be part of my job. It's also easy and pays a nice hourly rate. And it's a human communication - I am helping someone express their feelings, desires, and fantasies. I am giving them permission to indulge in crazy fantasies and to feel beautiful, powerful, and desirable. Thank fuck that communication between myself and my clients can be automated away by a program! Thank fuck I'm freed from being a part of what binds a community of weirdos together!
Drawing Corporate Memphis bullshit for startups is a great way to transfer a big chunk of VC money from some Bay Area jerkoffs to an artist living somewhere much cheaper, where it can pay multiple months of their rent for not much work, and maybe even let them have some luxuries and/or financial cushions. Thank fuck that all that money can extend the startup's runway a tiny bit further now instead! Thank fuck those artists won't have to wrestle with the feelings that comes from getting paid better for a few hours of corporate work than for anything they've poured their passion into!
If you're regularly taking on client work, then you have places to play and experiment while still getting what you need to pay your bills, and even if you're just turning the crank to make another piece that fits in with everything else you've made, you're getting a tiny bit better at making art with every drawing you do, and you can bring that back to the time you spend on your crazy personal work. If you take some other job to make ends meet, your rate of progress slows way the hell down. I've seen it happen. Friends who used to draw a lot better than I did twenty years ago now just draw as a hobby, and draw just like they did back then; me and my friends who made it my job have spent the last twenty years drawing, and it shows in our work. Thank fuck that's endangered! Thank fuck we, too, might have a bunch of recurring gigs collapse out from under us! Thank fuck those of us who embrace becoming an AI wrangler for a corporation will be asked to do tons more stuff for the same pay, or less!
How do you propose the artists who are now blissfully freed from the work that pays their bills should pay the rent on their homes and studios, and to pay for their tools and materials, while still spending all their time making art that "breaks the mold, hasn't been made before, and is meaningful to the artist"? How do you propose they should find the time to hone the skills needed to do this? Because doing that is a lot of work.
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> You can imbue art with meaning and use art to communicate with other humans
Yes, but the moment you publish one piece the AIs will be able to crank variations on it at the push of button. So artists might think twice about publishing.
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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?
In some ways, yes! At least for pop. I’m a huge fan of electronic music and synthesizers, but lowering the technical barrier to entry has resulted in some particularly bland pop music over the years making it to the top of the charts, for all the usual reasons of how music promotion is broken. I still think synths, sequencers, drum machines, and DAWs are a net plus to modern music, but there are of course negatives if you look for them.
Probably. I'm not qualified to weigh the pros/cons of it.
The internet is amazing but now a stranger from halfway across your world can drain your bank account. What doesn't have a negative effect?
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.