[synapticpaint]

"Finally, a vital question is, how will this affect today’s working artists? Here the answer is not so optimistic."

I have a different take on this. I think this technology will allow more people, not less, to make money as a living (so, professionally) in a visual arts related industry. So I'm broadening the field to include not just "artists" but "commercial art" as well (designers, commercial illustrators, video/film post-production, etc.).

The reason is that it changes and lowers the bar to entry for these fields, automates away a lot of the labor intensive work, thereby lowering the cost of production.

Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases. So in the future, because producing commercial art is so much cheaper, it will be consumed a lot more.

At the same time, we're not at the point where we can actually remove humans entirely from the process. AI generated art is a different process and requires a different skillset, but it still requires skill and learning to do well.

The analogy would be something like a word processor reducing the number of secretaries needed in the workforce, but increasing the number of office workers. People no longer need someone to take notes / dictation, but all kinds of new workflows emerged on top of the technology, and almost all office workers need to know how to use something like a word processor.

Therefore, the opportunity here to do is to build tooling that make it easier and more accessible for more people to work with AI image generation.

Disclaimer: I'm doing exactly that (building tooling to make content generation easier and more accessible) with https://synapticpaint.com/

[hbn]

> Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases. So in the future, because producing commercial art is so much cheaper, it will be consumed a lot more.

I'm not sure how that would apply here. There's never been a shortage of art. Art has always had more supply than demand, and now we just added even more supply to saturate the market. I was previously a more likely client for an artist than I am now where I can get my computer to spit out any image I want in like 30 seconds. But I have no more desire for art than I did before.

[bulbosaur123]

> Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases. So in the future, because producing commercial art is so much cheaper, it will be consumed a lot more.

I have the opposite view. With lower barrier of entry it will get over-saturated, over-produced and consumers will suffer from content fatigue leading to less interest in AI generated media as a whole.

An analogy is luxury goods. Reducing price of luxury goods decreases demand for them.

[Beldin]

How about website/frontend design as an analogy?

It'd be great if that was made easier so that more folks could participate/make a living. Then again, I think that every time that was made simpler (eg. Flash, Dreamweaver/export to html, JQuery, ...) has resulted in a slew of crap.

So: the lower the barrier to entry, the more actual skill/artistry becomes important for a high quality result.

Phrased differently: once the drudge work becomes mechanised, the concept of quality is lifted to a new level. This highlights aspects that used to be stuck in the mud of the drudge work, enabling a more profound understanding... by those with the necessary skills to do so.

[dleslie]

> I think this technology will allow more people, not less, to make money as a living (so, professionally) in a visual arts related industry. > ... > Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases.

But not its price, and definitely not the compensation for the labour to produce it.

Making a living as a mediocre-to-good artist is already incredibly difficult; increasing the supply of poor-to-good artists through AI-assistance isn't going to make it any easier.

> The analogy would be something like a word processor reducing the number of secretaries needed in the workforce, but increasing the number of office workers.

Only if the word processor wrote documents without the assistance of a typist, or an author.

[s1mon]

NFTs notwithstanding, people paying big money for art aren't usually just "buying" .JPG files. There's often some physical component, sometimes quite large, heavy and difficult to reproduce. Oil paintings, castings, mixed-media pieces larger than a car, etc.

These sorts of things are less likely to be subject to someone typing a command into an AI generator program. AI stuff will have impacts on grunt work, and will be used to come up with crazy ideas when artists are stuck, and there will be some people who will make a lot of money with a line of text and some software, but overall, the art world values uniqueness, the human touch or at least the human conceit that goes into "computer art" or "machine art".

Art is only worth what people (real live humans) will pay for it. The NFT market has finally started to crater as people have realized there's nothing there there.

[kuramitropolis]

"Working artists" (lol) are gonna be just as subservient with or without 2D typewriters, because the "creative industries" are to art basically what porn is to sex. (Anglophones have this linguisic quirk where half of the time "art" is synonymous with "graphics", which to other languages sounds like trying to tie your shoelaces with one hand fused to your face.)

Truth be told, I'm yet to see an AI-generated or AI-assisted work that provokes any internal experience other than thinking "hey, cool pixels/sounds/sentences/whatever". Not even the usual "somebody paid a lot of money to make this thing, so I better pay attention" which is the official function of commercial art.

It's certainly a very interesting academic exercise, and possibly a lucrative line of business. But if the value proposition is supposed to be "now it's easier for more people to create more complex stuff" (i.e. operate at a higher level of abstraction), why do I keep finding many "manually produced" works that speak to me on some level, even among the shitfountain of mass culture - while no AI-made thing has yet got me thinking anything other than "hey, cool tech?"

I'll start worrying when an AI chooses to ignore its incentives and, instead of doing something more rewarding, goes on to create a work of art just because. I'll also start worrying when people start becoming unreceptive to non-AI art, which I think is more likely to happen within our lifetimes.

Because what I see here is some cool tech for creating some ersatz sensory stimuli. And obviously, with enough compute you can make this advanced enough to confidently supplant the previous generation of tech for creating ersatz sensory stimuli. Somewhat less obviously, this reduces the risk of a spontaneous transcendental experience when perceiving AI art to a safe margin. Which is... probably good for business somehow?

At the end of the day, the human sensory system has a finite complexity, so you can create more and more compelling simulacra. Have at it. What'll happen is the next generation of humans will grow up awfully prone to Wile E. Coyote moments - tragic as well as comic.

[nonima]

>I'm yet to see an AI-generated or AI-assisted work that provokes any internal experience other than thinking "hey, cool pixels/sounds/sentences/whatever"

Maybe because you knew it was AI generated before you looked at it?

[kuramitropolis]

Or because I knew it was AI generated when I looked at it. Either way, that shouldn't be the differentiator.

An artwork is judged by how it exists within the totality of the context. We can consider "art" in the broadest sense, as "artifice" - and from that standpoint the algos themselves can be seen as staggering works of art in their own right. But on the other hand if we view the algos strictly as tools, and only consider individual pieces of content that are created through them, so far it's been only "meh" with a very occasional "hmm".

A similar example is the audio gear scene. There are many electromusical devices that are true works of art, worth of historical study even - then someone picks em up and starts by making bleeps and bloops that may have some novelty value but don't create a lasting impression.

I try to keep an open mind - even Facebook can be seen as AI-facilitated performance art evoking a profound feeling of dread, but that's a much broader context.

[selestify]

> while no AI-made thing has yet got me thinking anything other than "hey, cool tech?"

That’s just, like, your opinion man.

[kuramitropolis]

That's exactly what it is. Show me some mind-blowing AI art :-)