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Comment by oldstrangers | Hacker News Reader

I think the fear of AI art is really unfounded. Once the novelty wears off, people will learn to view it for what it is: fancy clip art. You'll see pieces by Midjourney at your local Urban Outfitters as "cool" wall art, probably on some graphic tees; just a bunch of generic junk really.

It's use online will become as ubiquitous as stock photography, and you'll see the same images used everywhere and for everything.

Digital art as a whole will probably be most negatively impacted, because we will view things much more negatively knowing the tools involved. I already can't enjoy anything Midjourney makes because it all looks the same. I just immediately turn my brain off when I see that signature style. Was certainly cool for a few minutes though.

ShutterStock should be concerned, but artists and graphic designers don't need to worry. Just another tool.

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It's much better than clip art. It generates fully bespoke and creative renditions of your ideas. Right now the models are a bit weak, but given a few years this will blow 90% of digital artists out of the water. People won't re-use anything, they'll generate something new for every thing they do.

That said, I still agree that we probably don't need to fear AI art. In fact, we might - as artists - want to thank it.

For a long time now a lot of artists have felt a kind of ennui because of the lack of a clear path to innovation or creating something "new" and inspiring. Things have become stale and overly commodified, with musicians, photographers, painters, etc. often complaining that anything they create or see is unintentionally retreading well-worn tracks. You talk to any striving and ambitious artist and they'll tell you there's not much inspiring art anymore.

The way this AI art works is that it essentially re-arranges old motifs in new ways. It's a permutation device that shows you the current state of art (if it has a large enough training set) applied to arbitrary situations. Artists might be able to use it to find the negative space where new exploration is possible and finally start creating inspiring art again.

Imagine coming up with an idea then feeding it to an AI and seeing if it's already been done? If the AI can't express it, then there might be something interesting there.

I think, creatively speaking, this is bad for Bob Ross and good for Dali. I'm sure Bob Ross himself wouldn't mind though.

> For a long time now a lot of artists have felt a kind of ennui because of the lack of a clear path to innovation or creating something "new" and inspiring. Things have become stale and overly commodified, with musicians, photographers, painters, etc. often complaining that anything they create or see is unintentionally retreading well-worn tracks. You talk to any striving and ambitious artist and they'll tell you there's not much inspiring art anymore.

I think this is projection on your part - likely from the point of being a jaded consumer and/or HN contrarian who sees all modern media as formulaic and uninspired, unless you can demonstrate how you know the opinions of enough artists in enough genres (apparently all of them) to be able to diagnose all of it with "a kind of ennui." Maybe you're a creative who feels this about your own work, but from what I've seen following a number of creatives on Twitter, a lot of them are angry that this technology sources their work without consent, and threatens to take away their livelihood.

Some are embracing it as a creative outlet, but most of them were doing just fine without it.

>Artists might be able to use it to find the negative space where new exploration is possible and finally start creating inspiring art again.

>Imagine coming up with an idea then feeding it to an AI and seeing if it's already been done? If the AI can't express it, then there might be something interesting there.

You seem to be making the common mistake of equating novelty with quality. I suspect this has a lot to do with the differences in how innovation and "hype" work in tech culture, and many creative fields, where in the latter cases it's more accepted to work within established genres and draw upon prior elements and motifs rather than try to find the next "empty, legally distinct slot" in the market to fill and become the next big thing. But art rarely tends to be about doing something completely unique.

Not that it would work anyway - these systems have such a vast corpus to draw from that they would generate something based on an input, no matter what.

>I think, creatively speaking, this is bad for Bob Ross and good for Dali. I'm sure Bob Ross himself wouldn't mind though.

If you think it's any more difficult for an AI to crank out something in the style of Dali than Bob Ross, you aren't paying attention.

> If you think it's any more difficult for an AI to crank out something in the style of Dali than Bob Ross, you aren't paying attention.

I don't think you understood what I said. Of course it can copy Dali now. Dali is old hat. Stale. I'm talking about someone with the artistic ambitions of Dali - except today. Someone who hasn't found their unique artistic voice yet.

As for the rest of your comment, it just seems like you haven't been paying attention to any artistic communities because your claim is basically like saying "there is no inflation" just because you don't really notice it.

I may be focusing too much on "originality", but the overall assessment is accurate: modern art is not nearly as inspiring as people would like it to be. Whatever inspiration means to you, I can't exactly say.

For some glimpses into the status quo of Western art:

- https://www.e-flux.com/journal/28/68012/the-time-that-remain...

- https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/comments/kgy8j4/how_do...

- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41784198-the-decline-...

>You talk to any striving and ambitious artist and they'll tell you there's not much inspiring art anymore.

Jaded bastard is a property of the person, not a property of art.

>It's much better than clip art.

I agree, that's why I called it fancy clip art.

Isn't that basically the same as commissioning some art from a digital artist? You could say it's fancy clip art too.

If you equate the uniquely individualistic style of a human artist and the totality of the human condition that informed that artist's style with a machine cobbling together a collection of data points then uhhh, sure?

No human artist is uniquely individualistic. All human artists are informed by their education, environment, and the styles of their peers. Even in the "radicals" you can see influences, and a context in which their work fits.

Also, no human has ever experienced, much less can be informed by, the "totality" of the human condition. Whatever that's even supposed to mean, besides the effect of a human being having "cobbled together a collection of data points" through life experience.

You're trying very hard to frame creativity as transcendent in scope and almost supernatural in scope, as if art were a divine spark no machine could ever be capable of reproducing. But history is littered with examples to the contrary, and so far only examples to the contrary.

I think you're greatly underselling the potential here. Stable Diffusion and Dall-e 2 can already make some legitimately great stuff, and they're going to keep getting better.

For example, here's some art from a modified Stable Diffusion model: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wkd77a

I don't know how you can look at this and think, "ah yes, just some more generic junk."

A class of things starts to become generic when they are predictable and summarizable by words to a degree where people can form mental representations of them to a higher accuracy.

> here's some art from a modified Stable Diffusion model: https://www.reddit.com/gallery/wkd77a

The "fantasy girl" style of paintings has always looked generic to me (even back when it was painted by human artists). They are cute to look at, for sure. And so is looking at photographs of models, unless it is your friend and you miss her. Otherwise the story just ends there. I think in the end images are just story-telling devices. They are a means to an end. The nice thing of AI art is that it'll inspire more people to realize that. And the same goes with words and representations around us. What's important are not the words and representations, but the story they are telling, which in terms has physiological and emotional ramifications, and may provoke thoughts and feelings and actions, or the change of a habit, a new sentiment, a grain of salt, a breath of fresh air, etc. Those are what the human experience is about. And yet we always tend to focus too much at the finger pointing to the moon. I really hope that's the change AI would bring into this world. More awareness to the moon. And then there will be aspirations and new movements as we restructure soceties.

More Stable Diffusion examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493516

This is crazy. I'm an an early DallE2 user. And looks like Stable Diffusion is much better than DallE2 (at least for these genres of gen)

Well keep in mind this is cherry picked, obviously. All the good stuff you see is.

That said, yes, it's still very impressive.

The vast majority of commercial illustrations is just beautiful/cool looking characters or landscapes, focusing purely on looking pretty rather than some deep meaning behind it.

I think it's totally understandable if you don't care about this kind of art and it losing value, but what you're really saying then is "The art apocalypse will happen and that's good". I share this opinion, but I can also definitely see why working artists don't like it!

> The vast majority of commercial illustrations is just beautiful/cool looking characters or landscapes, focusing purely on looking pretty rather than some deep meaning behind it.

Most commercial illustrations (esp commisioned by companies/institutions) are mostly created to evoke a longing for consummerism (eg lifestyle advertisments), and it is often mindless. People's interests are in the feeling they are promised the thing would give them, and often not the thing itself. Or, at worst, as a stress-coping mechanism that has direct and grim consequences. eg America's sugar addiction (which are implanted into the population at young age when they are most vulnerable.)

These are not arts. They are Machiavellian traps for the mind.

Arts, in the simplest defintions, are just things one makes to express a certain feeling/thought/sentiment/etc. A piece of art is good when it can connect/resonate with you. It's a human connection thing. Tech would be an enabler for more novelties. But the story has always been there. A story about mankind.

Okay cool, but what we were talking about was the job market for artists, and that includes people making commercial "art", not just people making emotionally moving pieces to be hung up in art galleries.

You seem to have completely missed the point of this discussion:

> ShutterStock should be concerned, but artists and graphic designers don't need to worry. Just another tool.

That's the thing I was disagreeing with, and they're obviously talking about artists in general, including commercial artists, not just ones who are engaged with the platonic ideal of art.

Everything changes. The notion of commercialism and the "art" job markets in the next 10 years will definitely be very different from now.

And so are urban consumerism, artistic demands from brands, the arts industries, the defintions of galleries (eg Can an amber wine bar also be an actual gallery? What about a BOBBLEHAUS clothing store in Manhattan? What defines a space for "fine" arts really)... people's thinking will change. I can assure you things gon be very different in the next 10 years.

Some people may get angry about it. But that is how society progresses.

There are two types of people: those who keep still and those who move.

I may be an outlier here, but when I look at those images I can see that they're pretty but I'm not getting any sense of, well, character, backstory from them. Maybe when the AI used to create them learns to go back and add some characteristic imperfections into the final output it will help, but at the moment they push me just the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley - I wouldn't want to have these portraits hanging in my living room.

Are you saying you can see these were generated by an AI based on lack of character? Would you pass a blind test?

More Stable Diffusion examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493516

The bar people are putting here on AI art seems kind of insane to me.

Like, of the millions of working artists out there employed by various companies, what percentage of their output do you think meets this bar of "I wanna hang it up in my living room"?

Maybe AI art won't be able to hit the bar of seriously moving people to feel deep emotions consistently, but what percentage of human-generated art manages to hit that?

> I wouldn't want to have these portraits hanging in my living room.

There's a huge market of artwork that I don't like, that I would never hang up anywhere.... That's what this technology will compete with.

Yeah, that image is the very definition of generic. It looks great, but it's a soulless recreation of a popular art style I've seen a million times before. Hence, generic. It's the background noise of the art world.

Absolutely this but in the short term. I had a similar thought the first time I saw the sensational results of Dall-e. It reminded me of how many times I was impressed with technology only to see it go into the background and take their place not having taken over the world how it was expected in my naive mind. But I don’t doubt this will make a large impact in the future generations. I paint and this will indeed not deter me from painting - even if to never be seem by anyone - but am not sure I would have taken to painting if I had some future version of some AI generating tool at my fingertips from an early age… I think it will become something the rich will afford rejoice in, and also the rich will most likely afford to shield their children from technology.

This sounds overtly negative and cynical, I wonder why that is? These are basically first generation open image generation AI services and your post sadly reminds me of the "get off my lawn attitude" of an old grampa who doesn't understand why cars aren't made of steel anymore despite all the information being out there and easily accessible.

Criticism is fine and certainly warranted. Discussion and disagreement is encouraged - that's what makes us democrats after all. I don't disagree with images of Midjourney having a distinct look either, or things getting repetitive, for example. But what does

> Was certainly cool for a few minutes though.

even mean in the face of Midjourney running a bigger Discord server than Minecraft (!) and heaps of articles appearing how low hanging fruit in digital art are obviously subject to be replaced by these apps in the foreseeable future?

There might or might not be a market for AI art (who knows with art, everything people consider desireable has a legitimate market), I don't know because I don't have the slightest clue about art besides "I like that". I am sure so that stuff created by humans will always something specual about it that a soulless machine (heck, that sounds like something straight outbof Terminator) cannot reproduce. I think there will always be artists, collectors and hobby artists pursueing manual creation of things, maybe even more so the more AI / digital art we have, even if as a simple counter weight and outlet of creativity.

> cars aren't made of steel anymore

Aren't they? Aluminium cars are still quite rare right?

It's a great service, and it'll do really interesting stuff. From an artistic perspective though, it's really bottom of the barrel for me. Maybe that'll change given enough time and some people doing some really cutting edge stuff utilizing multiple mediums. But right now, it's just soulless, and that's a good thing for human artists.

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