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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

This tech is currently barely usable for any real work outside of concepts, but it is easy to envision the development of new powerful tools built on top of refined iterations of the same models and algorithms, with finer controls and better integration.

Artists should rejoice, in my opinion, mastering this type of tool could dramatically increase their productivity, and thus their salaries.

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> This tech is currently barely usable for any real work outside of concepts

I take it you haven't been keeping up. Stable Diffusion 2 and Midjourney are getting really, really impressive. Probably a 10x increase in quality over the original DALL-E already.

Take a look at Jodorowsky's Tron (Tron in the style of Jodorowsky's Dune): https://www.djfood.org/fantasy-jodorowsky-tron-visualisation...

This is seriously impressive. I don't quite know what to think of it.

Now wait a few (years?) until this technology can generate 3d models, environments, lighting, animation, etc. You won't even need animators, just feed the script in and get rendered scenes with virtual acting, dialogue, score, everything out.

Everyone who's dismissing this because it imitates the style of another artist (as if that was a hard technical limitation rather than a specific prompt) or lacks the je nais se quoi of "real" art is missing the point. No one would ever hire a concept artist capable of doing this when they can hire someone for a fraction of the salary to write prompts that return acceptable results in a fraction of the time.

The key point is that this is a different kind of tool, and you'll still need artists to use them.

Pretty much like power tools for carpenters. The house won't build itself, but the process will be improved.

The difference is that it can effectively turn someone with very little artistic training into an artist. Sure, it's not usable for every use case, but it would be usable for album cover, or just to have nice illustrations to draw people to a website, and some cases of concept art.

Art and entertainment hinges on novelty and message. If you have too much of something, eventually it becomes boring, with or without AI. Until we have something that could pass for AGI, you're going to need people making something meaningful and novel for you, regardless of the sort of their technical skills they currently happen to have.

>Art and entertainment hinges on novelty and message.

Do they? Show me something truly novel either in terms of art or message created by Hollywood in the last decade. Art and entertainment are risk averse industries - novelty is risk, genre is safe, and within genre you have well defined aesthetics, themes and material from which to derive new iterations on a theme.

The mashups in the blog posted upthread (particularly the Giger/Henson posts[0]) look far more visually striking to me than most modern sci-fi. I want to see that movie based on the look alone, and the look is literally just "what if Dark Crystal, but xenomorphs?"

That's still "barely useable for any real work outside of concepts". It makes for some impressive thumbnails, but it still has all the obvious signs of an AI-generated image. This is despite it being a situation that's heavily playing into the AI's strengths by using abstract or fantastical content where departures from reality and mistakes of scaling or logical arrangement of elements are less obvious. The lighting is also something that's really helping the AI there, as the highly unnatural lighting will cover up any illogical shadows or highlights. Everyone's hands are all mutilated, it has real trouble with text, symmetry, circles, multiple instances of the same object, and if the scene has more than one subject, everything starts to get all melty.

I have tried all the new toys and I am keeping track of this fascinating development.

I work in the video games "industry", we need concepts and mockups, but a much larger part of the production is assets, meshes, textures, materials, shaders...

We're seeing huge improvements, from photogrammetry to simplified production pipelines and more powerful light models.

ML based tools will also help to iterate faster, but the key point is control, human control.

I'm keeping up with this pretty well, and it's very far away from being practical and controllable enough to get the actual job done. Txt2img is largely irrelevant for the real work, generation from text alone isn't going to work well beyond toy and novelty purposes.

I think you’re missing out a little on how fast this is improving and what exactly is possible already, especially if you have a powerful graphics card. Stable Diffusion has barely been out for three months and I am training my own custom models from my desktop for generating photos featuring my friends which would fool their families.

At first yes, faces and hands weren’t perfect but in the recent models and especially with model blending I can now generate super realistic photos of humans with perfect faces and eyes and perfect hands. Basically what is possible and the quality is rocketing forward right now and I can’t even begin to imagine where it will be in a year.

I would also add, the advances in prompt engineering, in-painting and image to image generation mean getting exactly the result you want with the composition you want is also very possible. If you’ve only generated a few images then you really have no idea of all of the tools and options you have. Over the last few months I’ve probably made 5000-10000 images and my own personal skill level for being able to get what I want has gone up massively.

>Artists should rejoice, in my opinion, mastering this type of tool could dramatically increase their productivity, and thus their salaries.

Salaries do not increase with productivity. Rather, they tend to remain constant or even decrease as productivity rises, as technology makes that level of productivity easier to hire for, and thus less costly for the employer.

Do you think that people who are building houses are more or less productive now compared to before the invention of power tools?

How many office jobs have been replaced by computers?

> Do you think that people who are building houses are more or less productive now compared to before the invention of power tools?

More productive. And I would argue still mostly underpaid given the value they create.

> How many office jobs have been replaced by computers?

Most of them?

I'm not sure it works like that. There's not an unlimited market for "things that look like original paintings". Demand won't scale with supply and "and thus their salaries" seems to ignore a couple of iron laws of economics.

However - I do wonder if this will increase the value of non-digital arts and crafts. They can't easily be substituted for - which is probably one of the key factors in establishing value in the art market.

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