[pmarreck]

> future artists having their jobs taken by AIs

that's simply not going to happen. as in every technological development so far, this is just another tool.

1) artists create the styles out of thin air

2) artists create the images out of thin air

3) computers are just collectors of this data and do not actually originate anything new. they are just very clever copycats.

you're looking at an artist tool more than anything. sure, it's an unconventional one and a threatening one, but that's been true of literally every technological development since the Industrial Revolution.

[athrowaway12]

4) If computers get good enough at 1) or 2), then there'd be much bigger problems, and essentially all humans will become the starving artists.

Also, I'm not so sure that language models like SD, Imagen, GPT-3, PaLM are purely copycats. And I'm not so sure that most human artists are not mostly copycats either.

My suspicion is that there's much more overlap between how these models work and what artists do (and how humans think in general), but that we elevate creative work so much that it's difficult to admit the size of the overlap. The reason why I lean this way is because of the supposed role of language in the evolution of human cognition (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language)

And the reason I'm not certain that the NN-based models are purely copycats is they have internal state; they can and do perform computations, invent algorithms, and can almost perform "reasoning". I'm very much a layperson but I found this "chains of thought" approach (https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/05/language-models-perform-re...) very interesting, where the reasoning task given to the model is much more explicit. My guess is that some iterative construction like this will be the way the reasoning ability of language/image models will improve.

But at a high level, the only thing we humans have going for us is the anthropic principle. Hopefully there's some magic going on in our brains that's so complicated and unlikely that no one will ever figure out how it works.

BTW, I am a layperson. I am just curious when we will all be killed off by our robot overlords.

[pmarreck]

> and essentially all humans will become the starving artists

all of these assumptions miss something so huge that it surprises me that so many miss it: WHO is doing the art purchasing? WHO is evaluating the "value" of... well... anything, really? It is us. Humans. Machines can't value anything properly (example: Find an algorithm that can spot, or create, the next music hit, BEFORE any humans hear it). Only humans can, because "things" (such as artistic works, which are barely even "things", much more like "arbitrary forms" when considered objectively/from the universe's perspective) only have meaning and value to US.

> when we will all be killed off by our robot overlords

We won't. Not unless those robots are directed or programmed by humans who have passionate, malicious intent. Because machines don't have will, don't have need, and don't have passion. Put bluntly and somewhat sentimentally, machines don't have love (or hate), except that which is simulated or given by a human. So it's always ultimately the human's "fault".

[athrowaway12]

>who is purchasing art

Mostly money launderers, I've heard.

>we won't be killed off by AGI because humans don't have malicious intent

I wouldn't say malice is necessary. It's just economics. Humans are lazy, inefficient GI that farts. The only reason the global economy feeds 8 billion of us is that we are the best, cheapest (and only) GI.

[idiotsecant]

If we manage to create life capable of doing 1) and 2) but also capable of self-improvement and self-design of their intelligence I think what we've just done is created the next step in the universe understanding itself, which is a good thing. Bacteria didn't panic when multi-cellular life evolved. Bacteria is still around, it's just a thriving part of a more complex system.

At some point biological humans will either merge with their technology or stop being the forefront of intelligence in our little corner of the universe. Either of those is perfectly acceptable as far as I am concerned and hopefully one or both of them come to pass. The only way they don't IMO is if we manage to exterminate ourselves first.

[cmsj]

Bacteria obviously lack the capacity to panic about the emergence of multicellular life.

A vast number of species are no longer around, and we are relatively unusual in being a species that can even contemplate its own demise, so it's entirely reasonable that we would think about and be potentially concerned about our own technological creations supplanting us, possibly maliciously.

[rowanG077]

Artist most definitely don't create images/styles out of thin air. No human can creatively create anything out of thin air.

[idiotsecant]

I think humans do in fact create things out of 'thin air' - but only in very, very small pieces. What we consider to be an absolute genius is typically a person who has made one small original thought and applied it to what already exists to make something different.

[rowanG077]

Creating something novel is not even remotely the same as creating something out of thin air. Even the genius with an original thought only could come by that thought by being informed through their life experiences. Not unlike an AI training set allowing an AI to create something novel.

[idiotsecant]

Is creation coming about by analysis of life experience somehow different from creation coming about by analysis of training data?

[astrange]

Yes, because it's multimodal, and because you can think of new things to look at and go out in the world to look at them.

[astrange]

Humans have access to much better thinking abilities than art AIs do.

e.g. SD2 prompted with "not a cat" produces a cat, and "1 + 1" doesn't produce "2".

[pmarreck]

Some stable diffusion interfaces let you specify a "negative input" which will bias results away from it. It wouldn't be terribly hard to do some semantic interpretation prior to submission to the model that would turn "not a <thing>" into "negate-input <thing>"

[astrange]

> that's simply not going to happen.

I don't think it will either, but artists think it will, so it's strange that their proposed solution "credit the original artists behind AI models" won't solve the problem they have with it.

[buffington]

> > future artists having their jobs taken by AIs > that's simply not going to happen

It will indeed happen, though not to all artists.

> as in every technological development so far, this is just another tool.

Just like every other tool, it changes things, and not everyone wants to change. Those who embrace the new tech are more likely to thrive. Those who don't, less likely.

> 1) artists create the styles out of thin air > 2) artists create the images out of thin air

I understand what you're saying, but as an artist, I can't agree. No artist lives in total isolation. No artist creates images out of thin air. Those who claim to are lying, or just don't realize how they're influenced.

How artists are influenced varies, obviously, but for me I think that however I've been influenced, that influence impacts my output similarly to how the latest generation of AI driven image generation works.

I'm influenced by the collective creative output of every artist who's stuff I've seen. An AI tool is influenced by its model. I don't see a lot differences there, conceptually speaking. There are obvious differences about human experience, model training, bias, etc, but that's a much larger conversation. Those differences do matter, but I don't think they matter enough to change my stance conceptually they work the same in terms of leveraging "influence" to create something unique.

> 3) computers are just collectors of this data and do not actually originate anything new. they are just very clever copycats.

Stable Diffusion does a pretty damn good job of mixing artistic styles to the point where I have no problem disagreeing with you here. It comes as close to originating something new as humans do. You could argue about how it does it disqualifies its output as "origination", but those same arguments would be just as effective at disqualifying humans for the same reasons.

That all said, I agree with you that the tech is a disruptive tool. It's a threat the same way that cameras were a threat to portrait artists, or Autocad for architects, or CNC machines for machinists might be a threat. The idea that new tech doesn't take jobs is naive - it always does. But it doesn't always completely eliminate those jobs. Those who adapt and leverage and take advantage of the new tools can still survive and thrive. Those who reject the new tech might not. Some might find a niche in using "old" techniques (which in away still leverages the new tech - as a marketing/differentiation strategy).

For me, I've been using Stable Diffusion a lot lately as a tool for creating my own art. It's an incredibly useful tool for sketching out ideas, playing with color, lighting, and composition.