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by pessimizer 1380 days ago
But those "force multipliers" have also eradicated the usefulness of huge parts of the skillsets of those skilled individuals. For a salient example in another field, printing, that was bulldozed by new technology: 90% of a typesetter's skillset was made irrelevant by Word/Illustrator/InDesign etc. It wasn't a force multiplier, it was a qualifications decimator. Now anyone could become a adequate typesetter by learning that 10%, plus the new entrants wouldn't be burdened by having to unlearn a lot of things that were now better done in a different way.

Not saying this is bad, or that typesetters or illustrators deserve a living. I am saying that being able to draw used to require being able to draw, and that instead being a fan of drawings, being good at describing imaginary ones to a computer and iterating them into a finished product is a mostly, if not entirely, different skill.
1 comments
wpietri 1380 days ago
It's a different skill than pushing a pencil around, sure, but that's a small portion of what people learn on the way to being good at visual art. I'm terrible at it but know some people who are quite skilled. They are worlds beyond me in terms of composition and expression.

Right now naively generated AI images are having their day, but I expect we'll soon get over that. I think the real future is in visual artists who closely collaborate with future generations of ML systems that are much more tractable and responsive. I expect a lot of that iteration will involve pretty traditional art skills, because those are time-tested ways to convey visual information.

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petra 1380 days ago
I've read a little bit about prompt engineering. The author said the stuff he needed to learn to be good at using stable diffusion, is about art history - knowing many art styles and their parts.

So basically, you read over a book(with amazing art) over, know your terms(or maybe know how to use a neat visual dictionary), and now you can paint in many art styles.

Of course there will be some more learning while playing with stable diffusion and getting a feel how to talk to it.

But it's very far from the old skill of neing an artist, not much knowledge will transfer.

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