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by _aavaa_ 1378 days ago
> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Technology is making something that used to take a lot of practice and skill be accesible to those without any of it. A monkey can now draw two ovals, label it an owl, and run an image-to-image conversion with Stable Diffusion to get a pretty good sketch of an owl [1].

Is it better than what a good artist could do? Irrelevant.

Is it better than what a cheap illustrator I find on Fiverr could do? Irrelevant.

The only important point is that I no longer need an illustrator to get myself an owl. I draw some lines, I pick some words, and presto I have an illustration.

The question of whether it's "art" is entirely irrelevant.

> Are you under the impression that right now, as of today, the publicly-available AI models are ready to replace humans for all types of art outside of scientific and technical illustration? Because that's not true at all. The AI can't even draw hands yet. To say nothing of its ability to handle multiple people and objects interacting in complex scenes.

I think this is severely underplaying the speed at which things are changing and basing an argument about things that the AI currently can't do. DALL-E was anounce in Jan 2021 and it's still locked behind API access. Stable Diffusion came out Aug 2022 and I can run it on <$2,000 laptop. That's not 2 years. Do you think hands are going to be a long term roadblock?

As for complex scenes, you can currently string that together with a Stable Diffusion plugin for photoshop/gimp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wwv7zk/sta...

1 comments

But if I want a good picture of an owl, I Google "owl" and get many more options than I could possibly ever have time to pick from. Stable Diffusion is essentially doing the same thing as Google, except presenting a kind of average result instead of showing me all the results in its DB.

Now, this may actually be helpful in that it gets around copyright claims - but that's the only real difference.

And you are free to search through the whole catalog of google results until you find an owl that looks exactly like you want. Though this is going to get harder as you want something more specific than a simple owl.

But the approach for stable diffusion is just as easy whether you want just "an owl", or "an owl in X's style with A, B, and C"

Changing the prompt until it generates what I want is not that different from changing my search terms until the result I want is closer to the top.

Now, I should of course note that search engines already employ ML techniques to actually interpret search terms, so to some extent the point is moot - ML is important to actually solving this problem.

But searching on google doesn't "generate" anything, If your image isn't on the web, there's nothing to bring "closer to the top".
Sure, but chances are, it is already on the web.

And of course, it's also possible that the image I want can't be generated by SD/DALL-E/etc.

Go ahead and get me a photo off Google images of an alpaca in a suit playing chess in vibrant digital painting style.

Without meaning to sounding rude about it... I'll wait.

I'd be curious to see if you could get that from the AI as well.

I tried generating that exact prompt a few times at theartbutton.ai and all the results were nonsensical.

For example: https://theartbutton.ai/image/OW1HZLfhjg6DFvJtk4vQZzUYqI7pGG...

Here are my best attempts: https://imgur.com/a/obZH7X5

Not a very wide range of what I could do with the idea in terms of composition, but just some variations of finishing touches/intermediate steps. I achieved this with some human-in-the-loop iteration and inpainting, but it was no more than 15-30 minutes toying around with it, and I'm no artist.

If you have a semi-decent graphics card and would like to experiment with a bunch of extra settings and tools than are readily available online, this is a good repo for that: https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui