zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

>>meebob+kc
Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that:

a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.

b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.

>>orbita+Z62
You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this trajectory, demonstrates this.

>>thorde+P92
So I employ quite a few artists, and I don't see the problem. This whole thing basically seems more like a filter on photoshop then something that will take a persons job.

If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, so this really seems like a nothing burger to me.

At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you really don't know what you're talking about.

>>pfisch+zd2
With respect, you need to pay more attention to how and why these networks are used. People write complex prompts containing things like "trending on artstation" or "<skilled artist's name>" then use unmodified AI output in places like blog articles, profile headers, etc where you normally would have put art made by an artist.

Yes, artists can also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, and some artists have started using it to fill in backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen illustrations to go with these articles" where quality isn't so important to the commissioner that they are willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion.

As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work without permission or compensation, they will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the actual artists out of work.

>>keving+He2
If you are looking for a bunch of low quality art there are tons of free sources for that already. If this is what you mean when you say "putting artists out of work" you are really talking about less than 1% of where artist money is spent.

>>pfisch+4g2
OK, so your argument here is "it doesn't matter because the art being replaced by AI is cheap and/or mass-produced"? What happens once the quality of the network-generated art goes up and it's able to displace more expensive works? What is the basis for your argument that this is "less than 1%"?

>>keving+0s2
Art will get better and we will have artists that use AI tools to produce a lot more of it faster and entirely new professions will emerge as an evolution in art occurs and the world gets better.

This is like saying that photoshop is going to put all the artists out of work because one artist can now do the work of a team of people drawing by hand. So far these AIs are just tools. Tools help humans to produce more and the economy keeps chugging ever upwards.

There is no upper limit of how much art we need. Marvel movies and videogames will just keep looking better and better as our artists increase their capabilities using AI tools to assist them.

Daz3d didn't put modelers and artists out of work, and what Daz and iClone can do is way way more impressive(and useful in a professional setting) than AI Art.