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
I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a junior dev."

I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.

[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.

It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.

>>ben_w+Dg
>> whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices

No actually, that's not how that works. You're demonstrating the lack of empathy that the parent comment brings up as alarming.

Regarding programming, code that's only 95% right can just be run through code assist to fix everything.

>>itroni+N52
Artists are, necessarily, perfectionists about their work — it's the only way to get better than the crude line drawings and wildly wrong anatomy that most people can do.

Frustratingly, most people don't fully appreciate the art, and are quite happy for artists to put in only 20% of the effort. Heck, old enough to remember people who regarded Quake as "photorealistic", some in a negative way saying this made it a terrible threat to the minds of children who might see the violence it depicted, and others in a positive way saying it was so good that Riven should've used that engine instead of being pre-rendered.

Bugs like this are easy to fix: `x = x – 4;` which should be `x = x - 4;`

Bugs like this, much harder:

    #define TOBYTE(x) (x) & 255
    #define SWAP(x,y) do { x^=y; y^=x; x^=y; } while (0)

    static unsigned char A[256];
    static int i=0, j=0;

    void init(char \*passphrase) {
        int passlen = strlen(passphrase);
        for (i=0; i<256; i++)
            A[i] = i;
        for (i=0; i<256; i++) {
            j = TOBYTE(j + A[TOBYTE(i)] + passphrase[j % passlen]);
            SWAP(A[TOBYTE(i)], A[j]);
        }
        i = 0; j = 0;
    }

    unsigned char encrypt_one_byte(unsigned char c) {
        int k;
        i = TOBYTE(i+1);
        j = TOBYTE(j + A[i]);
        SWAP(A[i], A[j]);
        k = TOBYTE(A[i] + A[j]);
        return c ^ A[k];
    }