Preview doesn't do this one justice, that looks great for only 5 frames! Even though it also appears to depend on an animated path to get the result in the gif.
@eugeneloza Well, that all sounds like a whole lotta tedious rubbish that I am never going to do. Wake me up when AI can take care of that stuff for me...
@Danimal You're absolutely right about that commercial tactic, but Stable Diffusion (and other free models based on leaked versions of the commercial ones) are the spanner thrown into that machine. Wannabe monopolies can only hope to be able to race far ahead of the DIYers, and/or use lawfare and channel control to make it almost impossible to use AI art for anything without paying dues to one of the mafia dons. Both of those are possible but will be an uphill battle.
The second one is probably what I'd be going for in their shoes. You'll never be able to get on top of free hobbyist games through indie distro channels, but if you can lock down Steam/Store/Play/consoles so that nobody without a mafia seal of approval can get a look in, then anyone wanting to use AI art in a game and get paid for it has to pay you. 2 for 1 deal: artists are eliminated from the market, and game makers now have to pay you each piece of art instead, even though you never look at anything except the spreadsheets for managing the lawyers and the servers!
I also just noticed that the title of the thread was out of date before it was even created... The AI tools have already moved on to creating animated movies, 3D models, and 3D animations.
Humans innovate over time because of our contact with what we call "the real world". That's something which the generative AIs will eventually get the tools for as well - the tools to generate their own meaningful training data, without human intervention - and they will then get more creative. In fact they'll probably get those tools quite soon. They won't then need us merely for access to the complexity engine of the real world, as they do now.
In the meantime, they are completely dependent upon us to identify which art is "good" from our perspective, i.e. which strings of bits have some kind of meaning to creatures that evolved in the real world. To a computer program without training from us, today, any blobs of colour are mostly just like any other blobs of colour. The only interesting "aesthetic" criteria that they could start to learn for themselves without any input from us at all, is the Kolmogorov complexity of the data.
Once they can innovate properly in this space for themselves, what will still remain forever unknown to them is performing such innovation from the point of view of a human, because we're not replicable. We can be usefully approximated, even today, but you can never be sure of what you're losing in the approximation. For that reason, it will be useful that some humans will still always want to be artisans, and keep the historical version of the craft alive.
All of what you wrote is essentially wrong - but only on a long enough time scale.
In the longer term, humans are obsolete for all but one job. The question is just how long it takes.
10 years ago, it still looked as if it could take another 100 years for robots to replace humans in most jobs, even to the foremost experts. Not any more. A few relatively simple breakthroughs in learning algorithm design, plus enormous increases in $computing_power and scale, and now we can all see it. The last 10 years have been a snowballing revolution and there is no sign of anything which can stop it (unless it stops us as well).
You might notice that the above video has been around since 2014. It's changed a bit since then. When the original version of the above video was made, it was a third of the length, and it did not mention artists at all. At that time, artists (and programmers, mathematicians etc) were thought to be one of the last group of jobs that would vanish to automation! That's how fast the ground is now moving under our feet.
The ability of 2D artists to use their time and sweat to produce a piece of art that they can exchange for money is probably safe for 1-5 years, tops, for all of the reasons mentioned by others above. At some point after that, the described limitations will no longer apply, and the "exchange for money" part will be well on the way out. That will be because the time and sweat that it takes to produce the art will also be a thing of the past, except for artisans keeping the historical craft alive. Most of the former practitioners might have found other things to exchange for money by then - such as curating AI art, for example - or they might not.
Heavily manual jobs that really require the flexibility of a human body - things like being a plumber or a labourer - today look like the last group of "jobs" that will vanish to robots. The other two professions which would be around at that time would be "owner of inherited wealth", and "enforcer for an owner of inherited wealth", with the latter only required in small numbers to do the things that robot goons can't do by that time. But, that's just an extrapolation from today; it won't actually happen. It will meet the same fate as the extrapolations made in 2014 - the ground will shift again.
In the longest term, there's one single job which robots can't take, and that's to actually be human. We're the recipients of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Or to put it another way, 3.5 billion years of runtime of a massively parallel learning algorithm, running at the atomic scale, over almost the entire surface of a planet, on the fastest possible hardware. Our cells know secrets that it could take godlike AIs a billion years to decipher, even if they can still watch the cells in action. Only very stupid robots would throw that away.
thing is though, we kinda "humanize" these algorithms by calling them ai. they are not artificially "intelligent" so much as they are algorithms trained using real people's creative works. you can study rembrandt, whereas a dataset that "learns" what elements of art are reminscent of rembrandt doesn't "know" anything.
There are some pretty strong arguments that this is fundamentally no different to what actual humans are doing when they learn from the things that they see. AFAIK there are humans who have "exact" memories and can exactly recreate scenes that they have seen - Mozart could famously do the same thing with music, even after only hearing it played once. So the "AI" is not much different in this than a rare kind of human.
It's not really worth bothering to argue whether these things are "intelligent" or not - our idea of what "intelligence" really means is changing every day right now specifically because these things exist. We have to try and learn to live with the existence of this technology without creating a dystopia, and that's the only thing that matters.
Anyway, I came here to say that MedicineStorm started a more recent thread on the topic which had some really long and detailed replies in it, so there should probably be a link to it here! I'll add a link in this post if I can find that thread again.
Preview doesn't do this one justice, that looks great for only 5 frames! Even though it also appears to depend on an animated path to get the result in the gif.
@eugeneloza Well, that all sounds like a whole lotta tedious rubbish that I am never going to do. Wake me up when AI can take care of that stuff for me...
@Danimal You're absolutely right about that commercial tactic, but Stable Diffusion (and other free models based on leaked versions of the commercial ones) are the spanner thrown into that machine. Wannabe monopolies can only hope to be able to race far ahead of the DIYers, and/or use lawfare and channel control to make it almost impossible to use AI art for anything without paying dues to one of the mafia dons. Both of those are possible but will be an uphill battle.
The second one is probably what I'd be going for in their shoes. You'll never be able to get on top of free hobbyist games through indie distro channels, but if you can lock down Steam/Store/Play/consoles so that nobody without a mafia seal of approval can get a look in, then anyone wanting to use AI art in a game and get paid for it has to pay you. 2 for 1 deal: artists are eliminated from the market, and game makers now have to pay you each piece of art instead, even though you never look at anything except the spreadsheets for managing the lawyers and the servers!
I also just noticed that the title of the thread was out of date before it was even created... The AI tools have already moved on to creating animated movies, 3D models, and 3D animations.
@eugeneloza Where are all these "free" programmers that you're talking about?
I want them to make some games for me...
Unless you do some clever prompt hacking, ChatGPT still only knows one poem.
Also, its "robot apocalypse" storylines are kinda stuck in the 80s.
Human art is mostly imitative as well.
Humans innovate over time because of our contact with what we call "the real world". That's something which the generative AIs will eventually get the tools for as well - the tools to generate their own meaningful training data, without human intervention - and they will then get more creative. In fact they'll probably get those tools quite soon. They won't then need us merely for access to the complexity engine of the real world, as they do now.
In the meantime, they are completely dependent upon us to identify which art is "good" from our perspective, i.e. which strings of bits have some kind of meaning to creatures that evolved in the real world. To a computer program without training from us, today, any blobs of colour are mostly just like any other blobs of colour. The only interesting "aesthetic" criteria that they could start to learn for themselves without any input from us at all, is the Kolmogorov complexity of the data.
Once they can innovate properly in this space for themselves, what will still remain forever unknown to them is performing such innovation from the point of view of a human, because we're not replicable. We can be usefully approximated, even today, but you can never be sure of what you're losing in the approximation. For that reason, it will be useful that some humans will still always want to be artisans, and keep the historical version of the craft alive.
@Paul Robinson *ahem*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
All of what you wrote is essentially wrong - but only on a long enough time scale.
In the longer term, humans are obsolete for all but one job. The question is just how long it takes.
10 years ago, it still looked as if it could take another 100 years for robots to replace humans in most jobs, even to the foremost experts. Not any more. A few relatively simple breakthroughs in learning algorithm design, plus enormous increases in $computing_power and scale, and now we can all see it. The last 10 years have been a snowballing revolution and there is no sign of anything which can stop it (unless it stops us as well).
You might notice that the above video has been around since 2014. It's changed a bit since then. When the original version of the above video was made, it was a third of the length, and it did not mention artists at all. At that time, artists (and programmers, mathematicians etc) were thought to be one of the last group of jobs that would vanish to automation! That's how fast the ground is now moving under our feet.
The ability of 2D artists to use their time and sweat to produce a piece of art that they can exchange for money is probably safe for 1-5 years, tops, for all of the reasons mentioned by others above. At some point after that, the described limitations will no longer apply, and the "exchange for money" part will be well on the way out. That will be because the time and sweat that it takes to produce the art will also be a thing of the past, except for artisans keeping the historical craft alive. Most of the former practitioners might have found other things to exchange for money by then - such as curating AI art, for example - or they might not.
Heavily manual jobs that really require the flexibility of a human body - things like being a plumber or a labourer - today look like the last group of "jobs" that will vanish to robots. The other two professions which would be around at that time would be "owner of inherited wealth", and "enforcer for an owner of inherited wealth", with the latter only required in small numbers to do the things that robot goons can't do by that time. But, that's just an extrapolation from today; it won't actually happen. It will meet the same fate as the extrapolations made in 2014 - the ground will shift again.
In the longest term, there's one single job which robots can't take, and that's to actually be human. We're the recipients of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Or to put it another way, 3.5 billion years of runtime of a massively parallel learning algorithm, running at the atomic scale, over almost the entire surface of a planet, on the fastest possible hardware. Our cells know secrets that it could take godlike AIs a billion years to decipher, even if they can still watch the cells in action. Only very stupid robots would throw that away.
Will the old username forward to the new one? Otherwise links are gonna break.
Puck's sprite has two eyes though...
Last updated in 2016?
Lots of great stuff from before that.
thing is though, we kinda "humanize" these algorithms by calling them ai. they are not artificially "intelligent" so much as they are algorithms trained using real people's creative works. you can study rembrandt, whereas a dataset that "learns" what elements of art are reminscent of rembrandt doesn't "know" anything.
There are some pretty strong arguments that this is fundamentally no different to what actual humans are doing when they learn from the things that they see. AFAIK there are humans who have "exact" memories and can exactly recreate scenes that they have seen - Mozart could famously do the same thing with music, even after only hearing it played once. So the "AI" is not much different in this than a rare kind of human.
It's not really worth bothering to argue whether these things are "intelligent" or not - our idea of what "intelligence" really means is changing every day right now specifically because these things exist. We have to try and learn to live with the existence of this technology without creating a dystopia, and that's the only thing that matters.
Anyway, I came here to say that MedicineStorm started a more recent thread on the topic which had some really long and detailed replies in it, so there should probably be a link to it here! I'll add a link in this post if I can find that thread again.
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