Yep. There's people depending on art as a job, and through the market of commissions not being nearly as lucrative as it was before, they are losing their dream job. That deserves sympathy.

However dehumanizing this next point might sound, it is extremely important. Everyone must realize AI is on its way, and let go of the solid societal belief that labor is essential to living a comfortable life. It might no longer be so in the (near) future. Artists are simply the first to take this irreversable bullet; and that's causing some incredible exposure.

It is a tough subject. I think that the class action lawsuits will increase, and that there will be a law passed, probably in Europe, that allows artists to submit their artworks to a registry that will forbid any company to use them for AI training.

But progress is inevitable. When Chess and Go algorithms were based on training by previous human matches, there were voices that claimed that new algorithms profited from unpaid human work (Jaron Lanier was very vocal about this).

But then Alpha Zero was able to surpass those models, with no input from any human player.

AI art is increasing its capacity at an exponential rate that I have never seen in my life. I believe it will be capable of incredible new art, starting from scratch, with no human artwork input, in a matter of years. It will become the most versatile, prolific, art directable, and fastest artist in history. It will make human artists obsolete, like machines made craftsmen after the industrial revolution.

It will be interesting to see when AI comes for other industries, and eventually, all of human's productive tasks. These are interesting, exciting and frightening times, indeed.

I understand fully artists' perspective to this problem and I say that they have to start demanding changes in society. Whining about AI taking jobs doesn't help at all. They should not attack against AI but to society which have build around concept of work.

>artists are simply the first to take this irreversible bullet

First? Don't make me laugh. Manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation for decades, it's just they were working class jobs so no one cared. Now the precious middle classes are losing their jobs, suddenly there's a panic and "something must be done".

Every time a graphic designer loses their easy overpaid job an angel gets their wings.

This one's different, given it's by AI that shows no signs of stopping, in a field that was believed to be irreplacable. That bullet hits different from job replacement. This is job purging, with huge ramifications.

Where were you jerks when they took away the earning power of ordinary working people? Your mistake is that you think that automation is only for janitors, plumbers, and so on. But that's just your problem. Throughout history, those who opposed progress have been called marginalized, and now you are on the wrong side of history.

Evolution is going to happen bro, you can’t stop progress.

The genie is out of the bottle. The same thing is going to happen once AGI hits the scene.

[deleted]

For that matter how many accountants would have been employed 50 years ago to do the job of one with excel today?

Your post reminds me of where textile workes rebelled against the use of textile machines in 19th century.

I did Open Source my life, then Github Open Sourced code generator learned (among others) on my code. I never intended my code to be propertiary, but I also understand you need to pay for computing power and support. Ultimately I think open models that anyone can host, like Bloom (https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/bloom), are the future, and I hope the same for the art world. Make AI your collaborative Open Source tool, and educate to use it creatively, as only then knowledge can be extracted from it in the future. Willingly refuse to use any Closed Source

I think it will be appreciated when artists have more control over it with specialized tools. AI could allow artists to work less to create more. Imagine an artist making graphic novels, where the tools could let them precisely define the characters, costumes, and locations. Their sketches could be converted into finished artwork and tweaked to their expectations. This transition period where AI tools generate images based on prompts is difficult because it's hard to see a positive use for artists right now.

How would no human artwork input work? The only reason that works for chess is that the rules of the game can be hardcoded into the system and nothing else is needed to learn it. That isn't possible for art, a software that has no idea what the real world looks like won't spontaneously come up with anything resembling it. At best all its paintings would look like Pollock or Mondrian. You'd need at least photographs, usually taken by humans.

Happened to accountants like a decade plus ago already.

I believe is going to come from robot vision. Meaning, a robot with cameras is going to explore the world, finding interesting things, being curious, looking at things in different angles, and in different lighting conditions.

Looking and interacting with paint, pigments and materials.

And this will not be one robot’s experience, but an army of hundreds experiencing the world simultaneously.

Basically, speedrun the process that humans took 5000 years, it will do in one.

>How would no human artwork input work?

Just train on the good results of AI produced art.

Many artists are embracing this. Right now is the perfect time. Being a Luddite might give you some brownie points in the art community right now but it may cost you your career soon.

Most people will be on the same boat. Its gonna be hard but it’s inevitable. What you do right now in 20-30 years will very likely be replaced by AI. We have to accept that a superior machine will replace us.

But yk, at some point we gotta put our ego aside and accept the future.

Art is the decision of what to put in a frame. How the content is realized is technical details. “AI” image generation doesn’t change this in any way.

Just like recordings don’t invalidate live performance, photography doesn’t invalidate painting, canvas doesn’t invalidate cave walls, opera doesn’t invalidate theater, and virtual synthesizer plugins don’t invalidate a frame drum.

I guess what I mean is that although AI has upped the technical virtuosity game a fair bit, this just highlights that the true art is in the concepts raised by a piece.

> It is a tough subject. I think that the class action lawsuits will increase, and that there will be a law passed, probably in Europe, that allows artists to submit their artworks to a registry that will forbid any company to use them for AI training.

I highly doubt that, since they basically are responsible for LAION, the dataset Stability AI uses. The law for that to be possible is the EU Artificial Intelligence Act from 2021. Why would they basically kneecap their own starting AI industry right after it got off. AI development is the fight for the future viability of your industry. Either you try to support it or have companies from other countries that support it, now with increased efficiency and cost cutting, buy or ruin your companies competitively.

Art has literally never been an "easy" or "secure" job. It's insanely difficult to produce art at a professional level and rate. It's also not exactly something that's ever paid well, so artists have always had to accept that they're gonna have it rough unless they're profoundly lucky.

You're close, though. There are artists like RJ Palmer for example who are specifically trying to ignite as much controversy possible through bad faith arguments and framing, and there are literal dipshit AI enthusiasts who do just refer to any concerned individuals as "luddites".

This is just going through some particularly violent growing pains. One of the problems as well is that you have so many non-artists invading the space and demanding they be taken seriously, when the overwhelming majority of us have spent at least a decade working every day to reach a level of skill and still aren't taken seriously.

Mind you, there are those like me who don't really care. I can make better art than most of you regardless of AI, and when armed with things like Midjourney and NAI you guys don't stand a chance. Most artists aren't as arrogant as me though and the second something validates their self-hatred they'll crumble.

I imagine the Ship of Theseus is going to become an extremely common comparison in AI development.

It is hard to say that the art skill's price won't down, artist salary is hard to go up in the future, optimist should allow this point. But skill price have some fluctuate or even return to zero is a common phenomenon.

AI art actually imply that nobody can solid predict the ability that AI will be obtained, and the influence it will make. In the chaos of the AGI, anything may happen, and it is hard to consider that someone losing their job in this history event is a big thing, if gov even cannot process the unemployment, it will impossible to process AGI.

AI art is just robbing the artist job now, it is not a very big thing, if AI have a more powerful ability instead of just painting some pic, the big thing then will come.

> AI art is increasing its capacity at an exponential rate that I have never seen in my life. I believe it will be capable of incredible new art, starting from scratch, with no human artwork input, in a matter of years. It will become the most versatile, prolific, art directable, and fastest artist in history. It will make human artists obsolete, like machines made craftsmen after the industrial revolution.

Well said. I cannot believe how fucking quickly it's progressing, and can't imagine what it'll be like when it fully invades the fields of biology/chemistry/physics/computer science. It's there now, but art is the first field it's made a noticeable ruckus in so far. At the beginning of the year vs now in the art programs is night and day in how effective they are

It’s hard when it’s your turn.

AI is an asshole, its technological progress but you can't deny this fact.

For sure. I'd be using it myself if I could get it under control. The way it works in MJ and Dalle2, it's not producing usable artwork that I need. Interesting output, for sure, but it's not at the point where I can control it enough to put it to work. But I'm sure it'll get there soon.

true art and honest artists shouldn't have to worry about "being replaced on your job by a machine", but as long as art and entertainment have monetary values in our society, most artists will not get to be happy about what they do. they don't get to live to make art, instead they have to resort to making art to live and thus be upset about something else making art. not just paintings but eventually songs, music, dance, stories and everything else we humans produce.

it seems to me that art a human construct that cohesively binds most our other constructs but it is far from being a sacred institution which shouldn't have to deal with tangible/monetary things. maybe in the coming centuries.

If A.i. art has collapsed the werewolfporn market you were using to pay the rent on your $2k/month crappy apartment by the freeway..

​

Imagine a society where a.i. research & city-system management & automation & remote-controlled robots & biotech & cyberworlds.... & a.i. art... etc..

are used eco/socially beneficially - to make / provide eco/socially beneficial healthy food, housing, cities, towns, orchard parks with bikepaths, nice fair easy eco/socially beneficial workplaces, economics, finance, video and cyberworld education, training, beneficial fiction, daily life guidance, mental healthcare..

affordably, free basics? for more people, everyone? locally, globally?

​

Alright, now draw that.. + proposals for how to get from here to there..

A.i. art can help.

animate, cyberworlds, characters in cyberworlds, teaching, training, beneficial fiction..

There are some professional plans and proposals already - for more eco/socially beneficial systems, designs, workplaces, economies, towns.. in boooooring essays, books, research reports, lectures.. that your neighbors are never going to read..

& there are a decent number of decent systems, cities, towns, shops, existing now.. it would benefit the other 98% of the world to see and review and know about and learn about and train and copy..

A.i. art can help.

Most artists are going to get more creative WITH AI, than not. Even speaking as someone who climbed up the corporate ladder as a Graphic Designer, I don't see how AI art turns into a non-specialized profession. Many current artists will be able to interact with AI better than a non-artist.

since when did artists fee bad about AI? lmao stop making up problems that dont exist. There will always be a market place for real artists no matter how great AI art is

I just searched for 'A Dragon fighting a warrior' on the Lexica site and then typed the same search term into google image search. (Lexica.art is a library of AI art)

What you find is a continumm with some truly incoherent images at one end and some brilliant images at the other. For some of that progression I would say that the human made images and the AI made images overlap- are of equal quality and coherence.

But at a certain point the best of the human made Art does stand out as clearly superior, but not because it is better in terms of technique- at least not mainly.

What does distinguish the best human art is the way that the images have been structured and composed. Where AI seems to fail at present is in it's ability to tell the story of the image in a strong coherent way- and this same failing is often seen in the work of non professional human artists too.

It's not clear to me how any evolution of the current AI generators solves this problem, because the domain involved is non verbal. So no degree of refinement in the language model will grant access or control to this level of the image creation process.

There are aspects of image creation that rely on shared cultural understandings to be effective, so you would need a different kind of AI to solve this problem, one that understood that the simple term 'A Dragon fighting a Warrior' is a narrative idea that might involve such subtle concerns as the 'eye lines' between the protagonists (do they seem to be looking at each other?) the ways in which their individual postures and gestures interact to describe the nature of their relationship to each other ( Are they together? Or are they in opposition to each other?) And these concerns multiply exponentially as the scene becomes more complex and more characters and elements are added to the mix.

It seems to me that something approaching a true AGI would need to be involved if these kinds of concerns are to be addressed by AI Art. But I'm no expert, so I'd be interested if anyone thinks this is wrong- do the current models have the ability to incorporate these kinds of abstract concerns in their output?

Artists aren’t misunderstanding anything, techno capitalist cultists are stealing artwork illegally from websites and profiting off the hard work of real human beings and saying that AI made it itself. I’ve seen like 5 or 6 pieces just in the last month that clearly stole 80-90% of their composition from well known online artists. Gross

You forgot the third element here: technology marching forward. Discoveries coming one by one from everywhere, USA, Europe, China, from universities, from companies, from hackers teaming up with visionary investors. It's impossible to get everyone to stop developing these models. If one of them disagrees, then releases a trained model, it becomes impossible to control how it is used. We already have pretty powerful models into the wild, nobody can put them back. What I mean is that technology, through 1000 forces, will march progress ahead no matter if we like it or not.

It might not be apparent but a ML engineers jobs are being "taken away" by GPT-3 at a huge speed. What used to take months to code and years to label can be achieved with a prompt and no training data today. No need to know PyTorch, Keras or Tensorflow. No need to know exactly the architecture of the network or how it was trained. This used to be the bread of many ML engineers. So it's not just artists. We all have to be assimilated by the new technology and find our new place.

I bet you can use it to fish for ideas.

I don't believe it's a purge, it is a transformation. There is more potential for art now than before, but more evenly spread out.

> non artists invading the space

Many people using AI art generators do it for personal enjoyment, it's one-use art then throw it away, sightseeing, imagination fun. Or to see themselves and their loved ones in all sorts of imaginary situations and costumes. Not trying to take over professional art.

An asshole because it gave everyone illustration superpowers?

[deleted]

What would happen if we loop this a few times?

With NVIDIA's eDiff-I you can paint a sketch additionally to your text prompt.

If you find an ai that can represent on the screen what you really want in your head, then perfection is reached in morality. Current ai models doesnt do that, it takes longer to mirror whats in your head than drawing it by hand.

I only read the reactions of one artist, and in his specific case, what he was upset about was the blatant stealing, and the arrogance of the person who fed his system only this one artist's works. The guy even made posts about it, how he thinks artists are thiefs anyways, learning from copying other people and never citing sources for their references. Thus he wont give credit to the artist either.

I am not an artist, just a person who loves consuming it. Perosnally i dont have a problem with it, until everything is referenced, and if you werent the person who actually worked on the artpiece, then pls dont call yourself the artist of that piece.

what do you think about the parallels of this struggle between trained artists and ai art vs the past conflict that traditional physical artists had with digital artists? there was a time when people thought that any art made with a computer was cheating and not real art. could this be the same thing?

Lieutenant Valeris : 400 years ago on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation flung their wooden shoes called sabots into the machines to stop them. Hence the word "sabotage."

Seems we are likely to see some of this again.

Edit: to be clear I don't condone sabotage, but without UBI we will undoubtedly see it occur. The future is always uncertain.

I think you misunderstand, but I didn't really specify either so it's on me.

Take the guy who trained a model off Kim Jung Gee as a "tribute" after his passing, then demanded he get credit if anyone should use his model.

There's alot that goes into an act like that which a complete layman isn't going to be able to grasp, and thus I truly do believe he didn't actually realize how much of a vile slap in the face that is.

Keep in mind, something like that would be similar to me, an artist/programmer who failed algebra 5 times, trying to make an equation in honor of Stephen Hawking's death in a single afternoon. I'm missing the point of his work, what made his work so impressive and important, and the work I produce isn't even gonna be any good. Then, I go out and say "if anyone wants to use this shitty function I put together feel free, but make sure you properly credit me!" There's aspects to the entire culture of science and math and physics that I've completely sidestepped so I can promote my own vanity project.

That is what I mean by "non artists invading the space"

People adopting the language of art and trying to leech the same cultural components of it while taking an at best incorrect angle to it, or at worst, a lazy and disrespectful one.

I think it's close, but certainly different. I'd sooner compare it to the invention of 3d modeling and animation, and how that's become a necessary skill in all art jobs whether you specialize in it or not.

I see a future where all concept artists will have to know Python if anything, but honestly it might also be a future where most creative jobs are sucked up and instead everyone is just an art director.

If you ask me, the most important thing right now is that artists try to actually take control of this stuff and learn how to steer it correctly so we don't get trampled by people who have no artistic history at all, which is less a concern about individuals wanting to make comics and shit and more about corporations snatching up literally all possible story ideas without actually making something of substance like how patent companies do with inventions.

Art correctness is in the eye of the beholder, I feel like you're gate keeping the new art kids. Let them eat cake.

Artefacts from the original model will be amplified, and the generations will gradually become more divorced from reality with each loop. This can only really be solved with either some kind of teacher agent, or giving the AI much more real training data than synthetic training data.

> Their sketches could be converted into finished artwork and tweaked to their expectations.

But you can literally just MSPaint some blobs right now and the AI will turn it into a masterpiece with img2img or similar.

I'll happily call something disrespectful if I deem it as such.

But if you have a selection process it might become a virtuous cycle. An evolutionary art system based on humans and AI.

I suppose you could train a GAN to differentiate between real and artificial art, and then only train the next model on the art it thought was real, but it probably won’t mitigate the problem entirely. It’ll definitely help though.

[deleted]

I would first collect examples of frequent issues: double heads, noodle hands, deformities. These are the negative examples. I would collect positive examples from the training set because those images are supposedly normal, but match them as well as possible to the negative examples with cosine similarity. Train a rejection model.

To generate prompts I would finetune gpt-2 on a large collection of prompts crawled from the net. Put the prompts into SD, reject deformed images. Rank the images with an image quality model (probably easy to find), keep only the high quality ones.

You can generate as many images as you like. They would be un-copyrightable because they have been generated end-to-end without human supervision. So just great for making a huge training set for AI art.

You could also replace all known artist names with semantic hashes to keep the capability of selecting styles without needing to name anyone. We would have style codes or style embeddings instead of artist names.

True, but you can't force a consistent style based on the creator's specifications. But it'll get there someday. There's a difference between creating beautiful images and creating a series of images that conform to the precise specifications an artists defines. I can't design my own comic universe with specific locations, characters, costumes, color palette, line style and lettering and generate comic panels that conform to that. To be able to do that, the artist needs to be able to teach the AI how to draw a specific style, the way an art director teaches a studio of artists to draw a specific style.

Easy to say, but people in general likes shitting on antiwork. With some argument that they earned their money, how come other people can get basic income freely? Of course, then there's the argument about communism.

Our current economic and social system is nothing permanent. It is system which will change in times. Technology is driving force which changes everything. If future is communism because techonlogy doesn't allow any other system exists so be it.

people are pissed because it's theft....