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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Although AI artists will destroy a lot of jobs, it will also create demand for new jobs for people who specialize in “paint overs” – taking a high concept output created by AI artists and touching it up to perfection.

Or perhaps even beyond just a paint over, and into the realm of recreating an entire AI artwork but with a human touch to get details just right.

Looking forward to it.

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I am already doing exactly that, and am getting paid for it.

I am a logo artist and I sell pre-made logo designs. Before the current AI services I had to come up with visual ideas by myself, like a caveman. Now I use the AI to generate a bunch of sketches and blurry ideas, and then use my graphic design experience to polish them up to a usable level. Here's how it looks. https://imgur.com/a/DKTsKdC

I am absolutely sure that a lot of people are doing the same right now, just keeping quiet about it.

Thank you for that perspective. The linked work is clearly the work of a skilled professional.

I am intrigued by the use of AI as a form of creativity assist. As someone without any talent for this, the left pictures are useless for me, as I don't know how to take them into something like the pictures on the right. The point of a sketch is to show them to a customer, but if you would show these sketches to me, I wouldn't know which one would turn out great and which one wouldn't.

Given that, do you feel that the generated sketches are useful as a base sketch? I mean, you could probably have used any of the existing NFL teams logos and as inspiration, instead of letting the software remix them for you.

Using existing logos for inspiration (like the NFL ones) is a tightrope because when you get inspired too much you get into legal problems. No one wants a plagiarised or copied logo. Every small borrowed idea, color, composition or a detail is a potential problem. And if you share too much of them - you have an unusable logo. No such problem with AI logos. You can be as much inspired as you want by it, up to a straight copy if you find it good enough.

Just tested it after looking through your album, and DALL-E seems pretty good for getting a logo concept generated.

This is what I got for the prompt "honey badger logo for an NFL sports team"

https://imgur.com/a/i2nnii2

Dunno what's going on with that last guy though, perhaps he's had one too many concussions on the field...

Yes, Dall-e 2 is definitely much better at it than other current AI services. But, most people still don't have access to it. Like me for example. I've been in the waitlist from the start, got a cool portfolio - still didn't get in. Maybe I'm just unlucky, or maybe the problem is that I'm in Ukraine. For some reason OpenAi GPT-3 Playground is restricted in our country, so I expect that other OpenAi products might be closed to me for the same reason.

I've seen many examples of Dalle-2 logos similar to yours. It seems like it got at least to a step "good enough to be usable, but with quality on the cheaper side". Which is super impressive and already puts a lot of designers out of work. I sell cheap stock logos on the side, I would feel that loss of income. But right at this moment there's definitely still a quality ceiling for it and the AI didn't put me out of the job completely. If you want a good and expensive-looking logo, you still need a professional human.

I won't be surprised when that changes too and the AI's get to my level. They are already so much closer than I could ever imagine. But at this moment they aren't there.

Here's another spin on this:

Imagine you're a software developer. In the near future, your manager wants a feature implemented in your company's app. He throws together a short mail with requirements and sends it to the prompt engineering department.

The prompt engineers fix a few typos, clean up the grammar and pepper a few secret sauce keywords around like "in the style of firefox", "in the style of kde". This get thrown into Microsoft Copilot 3.0 that barfs out a bunch of code.

Copilot's code has inconsistent indentation, three different method naming conventions and some variables named in a foreign language. It runs, but crashes if you tap on the lower left corner of the screen and allows you to drag the order quantity below 0. But that's ok, it's why we employ software engineers like you in our company. You will use your years of coding experience to touch up AI code to perfection. Better get the details just right until Monday all-hands!

Still looking forward to it?

sounds to me like I still get paid handsomely

That sounds better than my current job where I try to clean up other people's shitty code with atrocious dynamic typing, until the type checker is happy with it.

Honestly, kind of yeah.

Something I've come to realise is that I'm much better at fixing other people's code than coding from scratch.

I could definitely work with that kind of tool.

> taking a high concept output created by AI artists and touching it up to perfection.

When you put it like that, it sounds like a nightmare up side down world. It's not AI that's the tool for enhancing human creativity. It's humans that are the AI's tool, cleaning up the edge cases the AI artist can't handle (yet). It destroys creative jobs that give joy to people and creates assembly line jobs for them to slog in.

The purpose of jobs has never been to give people joy, but to extract value from their labor as quickly and efficiently as possible. Getting any kind of emotional satisfaction from one's work is a privilege which arguably points to an inefficiency in the market, as that energy is wasted which could better be put to productivity.

Artists, programmers and everyone else will have to find their joy somewhere other than than selling themselves to a corporation, once AI driven markets optimize away any room for "joy" and the like, and that's going to be one of the few good things about automation. The sooner we break people from the Puritan delusion that work defines a person's meaning and the value of their expression, the sooner we can once again decouple culture from the machinery of capitalism.

The humans are also the people that come up with the concept in the first place...

Also sounds like an upside down use of the tool, since AI generated art really isn't that great at composition once you've got over the magic of it being able to respond to the prompt at all (but is much better at texture and filling in boring details), and the current state of the art AI tools can produce images which conform to a human guideline sketch...

The AI is enabling the creativity of laypeople. That's still an enhancement, even if they don't have the technique to make a polished product

The new copyright washing industry is nearly upon us.

This is the most underrated/prescient comment I've seen on hn. Once prompt engineering become a mature field this is going to be a serious issue.

Finally, the crossover of creative writing x cs... for graphic design? I can't wait to watch the lawyers recoil. ::Prepares Popcorn::

As a professional artist, this sounds like hell.

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