[logisticpeach]

Hate to say it but when i see stuff like this it only reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain.

Can't help feeling that this accidentally harms creative types and risks swamping us with visual junk.

The technical achievment is astounding but no-one would seriously claim that crafting an image via a short prompt is creative except in the most cursory way.

I'm probably missing some life changing use-case, but apeing art in random styles can't be it.

[soulofmischief]

People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software. The next generation will normalize these tools and find incredible ways to be creative within their new cutting edge medium.

The post-art world is here! Just think about how history books will remember this period! The styles that will be borne of necessity, of the need to break down art and find what makes it tick.

[pmoriarty]

"People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software."

Also about desktop publishing.

Remember all the printers (ie. people working in the printing industry operating printing machines) that were put out of a job when you could just buy a (electronic) printer for your home computer and just print whatever you wanted yourself?

People were wringing their hands about that too back then... now we take it for granted that we can instantly print whatever we want whenever we want, without having to pay an expensive professional to do it for us (something most people couldn't afford).

Has it resulted in more junk being printed? Absolutely. But it also let people print all sorts of fantastic not to mention useful things that would almost never have seen the light of day without cheap and easy access to home printers.

The xerox copier was similarly revolutionary... as was the printing press itself, which put a lot of scribes out of business.

Photoshop put a lot of airbrush artists out of business, and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?

As with photography, printers, copiers and photoshop, artists who embrace this technology will be able to use it to enhance their creativity and speed up their creative process.

There'll be a lot more competition, a lot more junk but also a lot more fantastic art that we can't even dream of yet.

[eru]

> [...] and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?

When I was finishing high school in the early 2000s, we still had teachers who made worksheets that way.

I remember one history teacher in particular. She used a photocopier to get sections from books, cut-and-paste them together, and then use the photocopier again to make the final sheets to distribute to the students.

I was very surprised at the time, but also admired the ingenuity. The process is much more physical than using a PC.

[etrautmann]

Yep, I see this as a start, and very curious to see the ways in which it’ll get used with a human in the loop, and also the ways human artists will be pushed to creat art that’s out of distribution for these models.

[avereveard]

Even then, few artist got famous on technical skill alone, surely less than those who got famous primarily for their message irregardless of their skill. And this is before getting into the endless pit of defining what art is.

Besides having an ai doing the legwork is no much different than Veronese giving large swath of paintings to his novices while focusing on the two/three major parts.

[etrautmann]

I think we agree then - if new technologies allow an artist to more rapidly explore, iterate, and refine a particular message, then those artists should still have something to create beyond what is possible with these images.

[avereveard]

Yes! Was expanding and building a little.

[LeoPanthera]

> People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software.

Did they? Because I don't think they did. I think most people were amazed by all these technologies.

[derac]

https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

Research beats idle speculation.

Google "photography skeptics early history"

[eru]

From the article you linked:

> As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving.”

Ha, dissing engraving at the same time as photography.

Though I wonder if the 'write' meant engraving of a design someone else already produced, or any engraving work at all.

[wpietri]

Both reactions always happen. With basically anything new, people will select some points via happenstance or bias, draw one of a few basic trend lines [1], and give a hot take. Because they generally think only about first-order effects and don't imagine other things that could happen, the hot takes are often of the utopia/dystopia variety.

These hot takes generally tell you more about the opiner (or the audience they're playing to) than the reality to come. It turns out it's hard to model en entire universe using 3 pounds of meat.

[1] Heinlein listed some of them way back in 1952: https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1952-02/page/n19/...

[p1esk]

Most people haven't heard about recent advancements in image generation. When they do, I expect they will be amazed.

[logisticpeach]

True, but then we've essentialy had limitless image generation capabilities since we've had the tools to make marks. I guess this is faster, and in other ways it offers promising new opportinities for people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.

Others are interpreting my original comment as "this is not art", but I'm not really trying to make that argument. Art is entirely subjective and i don't presume to define what is or isn't art.

I guess my point is more specifically "what itch does this scratch"?

It's really cool, and that may well be the answer tbh.

[p1esk]

people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.

That’s 99% of the people. I mean even to learn prompt engineering will probably be too much for majority of those 99% people, but it’s a huge step forward in user friendliness, compared to, say, photoshop.

”what itch does this scratch"?

How many people post pictures on social media? Many of those pictures are not personal, they show something pretty, cool, or interesting in some way. All of those people can potentially use image generators to achieve the same effect.

[bawolff]

> only reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain.

I hate arguments like this. Even ignoring how dismisive it is of the achievement at hand, why would you assume ingenuity is transferable like that? Someone who makes a breakthrough in physics is by no means likely to have made an equivalently ground breaking advance in biology if they had decided to study that field instead.

[capitalsigma]

I think this phrase actually means "I don't want to seem like a Luddite, but now that AI is disrupting something that I personally care about, I'm no longer enthusiastic about progress"

[logisticpeach]

Aside from the fact that I explicitly praised the achievment, my point actually relies on said appreciation.

I guess my musing was hypothetical but I was careless in communicating that. I get that we can't centrally plan innovation or human effort - and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society where this was the case.

[bawolff]

Respectfully, you can praise the achievement while still being dismissive. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

[nopenopenopeno]

I am a filmmaker and most films are essentially crafted this way. Beyond hiring and securing resources, directors essentially create by communicating ideas in short prompts because there isn’t enough time to do anything more.

I could absolutely see an AI model doing the job of an entire film crew. I have issues with this, but only with respect to the longer term aggregate affects on culture in the broad sense. I cannot honestly believe that much would be lost from the perspective of one project or another.

[educaysean]

I'm of the opposite opinion. AI assisted art is simply the natural next chapter for "art" as a whole. It will finally kickstart the public discourse about what being an artist means in the perspective of artistic vision vs execution.

Most artists spend their lives not refining their brush stroke, but rather their eyes. The way I see it, the impact of curation and artistic direction will matter more and more in the future.

[intelVISA]

As with programming, an AI model cannot replace the key parts but can help automate the monotony.

For me it's exciting to use as placeholder art and then have a 'real' artist review it.

[odessacubbage]

i find myself mentally unable to comprehend people who believe that the drawing part of drawing is monotony. discovering that this mindset not only exists but is widespread has been equally as disturbing as any ai advancement.

[intelVISA]

Not me, I enjoy drawing; perhaps I should've used the word 'manual' instead

[kchod]

I would look at it as more of "allowing normal people access to unbefore-dreamed-of levels of draftsmanship" vs some comment on capital-A Art. It allows non-artists to express themselves visually.

I'm biased: I've been working on an image generation app. But the beta users I've had so far will generate fifty or a hundred images in a day. That isn't a use case traditional artists support.

[victor9000]

Well, robots have been better than humans at playing chess for decades now, and we still have chess players.

[eru]

More impressively, chess has not only survived as a human past time. But we still have professional human chess players.

[pizza]

> reminds me of what we could have achieved if this ingenuity had been applied in another domain

It will; I think the reason we're seeing diffusion models applied to image generation first, is that it's a task that meshes well with the models. But also in general I think people will still be guided by the principle "use the right tool for the job" - this is just another tool. I doubt that the set of paths toward realization for any given needed creative imagery collapses to just "use a model"

[capitalsigma]

I don't know why everyone assumes that ML researchers have some big map of the future where they can make decisions like "yeah, let's choose this branch over here, where AI gets good at generating art first, rather than that other one where it cures cancer a decade earlier." The breakthroughs come where they come, and no one knows where some model architecture will have an application in the future.

[_zoltan_]

what other domain would you suggest which requires roughly the same skill set?

[Wistar]

Music composition?

[_zoltan_]

I fail to see why that would be more beneficial than to generate art.

[Wistar]

Who said it was?