Tanglemix t1_ire4l90 wrote on October 7, 2022 at 11:16 AM

Reply to comment by Square_Nothing_3522 in We are in the midst of the biggest technological revolution in history and people have no idea by DriftingKing

Your english is good and what you say is true- for a lot of people AI Art will work well, if all they want is something fairly generic.

I was really addressing the application of AI art in a professional environment where expectations are higher and the ability to make very precise altertations to an image is vital. In this scenario a 'pure' AI Artist, who has no other artistic skills, would find it very hard to meet their clients demands.

This does not mean AI will not be used by professionals, it already is, but for the foreseeable future the limitations of a 'text to image' interface will mean that human artistic skills will be required in addition to the use of AI.

The simple truth is that using a graphics tablet with pressure sensitivity I have a degree of precise control over how my digital image looks that words typed into an interface simply cannot match.

I'm sure that you are right that AI art will be cheaper than human artists, so cheap in fact that the perceived value of AI produced Art will be nearly zero.

The question then becomes; if you are trying to market a product in which artwork is an important indicator of that product's quality, do you use cheap AI Art, or do you use human artists? If the common perception is that AI Art is an indicator of low budget production values then using human artists may in fact be the better choice from a marketing point of view.

It's also true that while AI's can create a large variety of 'styles' in terms of technique they are limited in terms of framing and composition. This may not be apparent when viewing images in isolation- but when a lot of AI art is seen together certain patterns are visible that make these images look similar to each other. So there is a detectable 'look' to AI Art that may become a problem if you want to present your product as being unique in any way.

I suppose my point here is that Art is not a commodity like potatoes or cabbages- and so using Art that is seen as having low value is not always going to be the best thing to do. Ironicaly it may be that the sheer volume and low cost of AI produced art will lead to it's being avoided by those wishing to present their product as a high quality offering

Square_Nothing_3522 t1_irf7cop wrote on October 7, 2022 at 4:46 PM

Two scenarios.
1-Let's assume in 5 years, for some reason the quality of AI images hasn't improved that much when compared to the best humans at their craft.
Even if AI is seen as a lower-quality work producer, today AI is already capable of replacing most artists. So even if people still request services from humans it will be way less than before, meaning a significant number of artists will be jobless. Only those who can capture details better than AI will still be hired to do work. With this, you can already see that only a small percentage of artists will be able to make a living out of it.
Also, there is another thing you are missing, and it's called the art of promoting. This is already going on in some companies, people study AI, and its outputs to certain words, in order to understand how it works and give it better prompts, this can potentially become a new field of study, and people might request help from the best prompters to generate extremely good (very specific/detailed images) images from the AI. The field of prompting could potentially wipe out all the artists because we do not know how precise an AI can get with the right prompts.
I'm not saying all of this has to necessarily happen, but you can see that even if AI does not improve your field has many ways of losing most of its professionals.
That being said, I do not think that a scenario where AI work is seen as low quality will happen. That takes us to scenario 2, which is the most likely one.
2-For the past year the progress in AI improvement has been going so fast, that experts can't even keep up with the breakthroughs. We are likely about to enter a new era. I've witnessed this myself in this sub, in the beginning of the year there were only breakthroughs (different breakthroughs related to AI) once in 1-2 weeks. Now is every fucking 3-6 hours. I think it would be a miracle if text-to-image AI doesn't improve. By the current progress, in less than 2 years, it's likely to have surpassed humans capabilities in almost all artistic ways, at that time, the need for artists will start to decrease, slowly at the beginning, but by the 2030s, being an artist will just be a hobby (for 99%of people) not a professional field, or it might become like a sport, like chess where despite machines being better, people still want to see humans play.
Please pay attention to the breakthroughs, maybe in some weeks, we will be hearing something new about this text-to-image AI. People need to start taking this seriously and plan their future accordingly.

Tanglemix t1_irgppaj wrote on October 8, 2022 at 12:03 AM

The limitations of text to image are not technological, they arise from the inherent impossibility of encoding visual information precisely using words alone.

If you tried to generate a self portrait using an AI by inputting only a text prompt description of your face it would not result in a recognisable picture of you- only a generic image of someone perhaps similar to you. And this would hold true no matter how skilled you may become in writing prompts and no matter advanced the language model used by the AI to interpret your prompts.

So text to image is never going to be anywhere near as precise as drawing tablet when it comes to the editing of digital images.

To be clear I did not say that AI art would be seen as having low quality, I said it would come to be seen as having low value- a subtle but important distinction.

For example an author recently posted a question about how he could avoid being 'ripped off' by an AI Artist. His problem-as he saw it- was that he might be charged a high fee for something that took only minutes to produce by someone who pretended to have done the work themselves without using AI.

This- he seemed to feel- would be to steal from him by pretending to offer something of high value while in reality supplying something of lower value.

But the fascinating aspect of this situation was that the quality of the image was not at issue- in fact the very root of his problem was that he would not be able to tell by looking at the image how it had been made.

What this tells us is that AI Art will be seen as having low value not because it's bad art, but because it's so very quick and easy to make. Humans tend not to place a high value on anything seen as quick and easy to make.

No improvement in the quality of AI Art will prevent it's being seen as cheap low value Art when compared with art made by humans. How this perception will impact on the marketplace is another question. In some contexts such as greeting cards, for example, people will not care how the art was made- they just want a pretty picture.

However, if you are selling a product where the Art it contains is seen as a measure of the quality of the product, and you use low value AI Art in that product, this could be a problem because the message it sends is that you don't care enough about your product- and by extension- your customers, to pay out for higher value art made by humans.

None of this is especially rational of course- but humans are not entirely rational beings. One might say to that worried Author 'why do you care if the Art took only two minutes to make- if you like the Art and had already agreed the price?' And from a purely rational perspective he should not care. But- the fact that he paid a high price for something that took only minutes to make feels to him like stealing- and in a contest between rational thought and feeling, feeling will win out every time when it comes to human beings.

So the Impacts of AI in all it's aspects may not be as expected due to this variable- it may turn out, for example, that the perception of AI Art becomes so negative that it's use in almost any context will become seen as toxic and damaging to any product it is used in. Not saying this will be the case, but it could happen.

So don't be so quick to dismiss your own species in your enthusiasm for it's putative replacement- humans are nothing if not unpredictable.