[whywhywhywhy]

> damage many feel they've done to the art community

If the "art community" can't understand what an insane gift SD1.5 and SDXL was to them then I don't know what to tell them.

Without those open models we could have easily ended up in a world where this tech existed but was only in the hands of people who could pay OpenAI or Adobe a month to use it, and I mean with the power of it what should that cost be? I mean to have such an advantage the monthly cost could have easily been in the hundreds a month like high end CAD/3D/VFX software is and only viable for huge studios leaving normal people in the dirt.

Emad's decisions mean for the rest of eternity a tool that could have ended up entirely locked behind an Adobe paywall can now be run on any machine you owned and tweaked entirely on your own hardware to work in a way specifically beneficial to your workflow.

I'm an artist and designer too, the fear of how fast these tools can replicate styles and take jobs becomes a lot less scary when I can take advantage of it myself or enhance my workflow with it myself without paying a subscription tax to do so. But if the "art community" can't understand or imagine how bad this situation could have been then I don't know what to tell them, some people just like being screwed over I guess...

[five_lights]

>I'm an artist and designer too, the fear of how fast these tools can replicate styles and take jobs becomes a lot less scary when I can take advantage of it myself or enhance my workflow with it myself without paying a subscription tax to do so.

Have you tried to train SD on your artwork? Pretty curious about the results an artist can achieve when embracing this tech.

[whywhywhywhy]

Yeah I've fine-tuned it on our company product aesthetics and now our product team uses it for rendering and concept work, something that wouldn't be possible using this tech via Midjourney, etc.

[ben_w]

My understanding is the art community has two problems:

1) Brand destruction: when SD was new, lots of people put "Greg Rutkowski, trending on artstation" in their prompts in order to get better images. It's possible that Greg Rutkowski being the single most popular example of this means he personally lucked out on this (some reporting suggests so), and the exposure really did boost his career. Do you think everyone else this has happened to was so lucky?

If I image search for "Greg Rutkowski", I see some cool things yes, but I also see this: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/gt4Z0uOIrrmop13OoU...

I suspect that many others have suffered from this association.

2) Substitution: the exact opposite problem.

Now that the image generators are pretty good, why should anyone hire an artist?

This image was generated in 267 milliseconds, for free: https://github.com/BenWheatley/AI-art/commit/d4e0322a30ab508...

That image is not perfect, but it's good enough for people like me, and that by itself is an economic risk to the future employability of that entire segment of the economy.

This really is important and does matter because all the talking heads were all busy confidently saying creative jobs like "artist" and "writer" were safe, and that it was truck drivers and factory workers who needed to re-skill, and thus we as a society have done basically nothing to prepare for or mitigate this economic disruption.

--

I don't know what's coming, not for me, not for anyone.

But I get why they feel scared, and I get why they feel this has taken something from them, even though the specific arguments about copyright and "parroting" that make it into public discussion (Gell-Mann amnesia warning) are often also deeply flawed and unconvincing.

To me, this is a trademark issue in the first case, not a copyright one; and in the second, the same disregard for workers that led to the creation of the actual literal Communist Manifesto.