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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images.

There are some scifi-themed subreddits that I visit that allow posting art, and at this point it feels like 50% of all submissions are Midjourney/Dall-E generated art. Fine, it looks ok, but there's such a low barrier to creating and posting these, it's beginning to drown out other valuable content. The article even speaks about this:

> In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds

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>Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images.

Just subbing to the StableDiffusion sub has added a ton of art to my feed in Apollo. I agree the concern isn't that it's art, but that it's being produced so fast. I've seen dozens of showcase/portfolio worthy pieces generated in the past week. That manually created would probably take 40-160 hours (I'm not an artist so hence the huge range).

It's pretty comparable to handcrafting a letter vs. a spambot in terms of the volume jump.

This could be solved on basically all arti communities by simply putting in a post limit per day. Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?

But now everyone's an artist.

So what? Are you the appointed gatekeeper on who's an artist? If you are then you won't be out of work any time soon.

I mean, practically it means that you haven't solved the problem of "now the website is flooded with content". Arguably, the core problem is just that the premise of the website fundamentally doesn't scale to having too much of a maybe-good thing.

No, I was talking in the context of the discussion thread. Everyone being an artist isn't a problem.

But when communities are flooded with cheap-to-make art - even if the art is pretty good - the community becomes a worse place to be.

More like one image per X days. I don’t care how many different things you can type into an AI in a given period of time. I only want to see the best of the best of the best.

This is like when we discovered stereo recording, and mixers would put tracks at either 100% left or 100% right, just to show off the novelty of it.

Or when 3D movies became ubiquitous and every movie (even those shot completely without the third dimension as a consideration) got released in 3D.

Once the novelty wears off, I imagine things will be better.

For now, it’s just a deluge of low-effort, yet high (relative to traditionally produced art) apparent quality artworks.

> Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?

There's been more than a few days when I've uploaded more than 5 images a day to flickr/Instagram (according to my backup, I uploaded 27 images to Instagram on 2007-02-04 during a day-long walk.)

Or just add tags, so people could filter out AI generated content if they don't like it?

because they're migrating there from another platform

I think this will subside significantly once the novelty wears off, and examples of truly outstanding generated art become more prominent (establishing a consensus baseline for quality).

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