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Comment by tiniuclx | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Stable Diffusion to generate cover images for the music I release & produce for others. It's a massive time saver compared to comping together the release art using image editing software, and a lot cheaper than working with artists, which just doesn't make sense financially as an independent musician.

It's a little bit difficult to get what you want out of the models, but I find them very useful! And while the output resolution might be quite low, things are improving & AI upscaling also helps a lot.

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> artist whose domain has not yet been disrupted by AI fires artist in favor of AI

I'm already using AI to make my music production process more efficient! Namely, I'm using a program called Sononym which listens to my tens of thousands of audio samples and lets you search by audio similarity through the entire library, as well as sort by various sonic qualities.

I think I'd still go for a human artist for a bigger release such as an album! It's a lot less hassle than sorting through (often rubbish) AI output & engineering your prompts, though it does cost £££ which is the main thing making it prohibitive for single releases.

And the rest of the world was better off for it.

If we'd prevented new technologies from influencing our artwork, our paintings would never have left the cave wall. I'm a musician with live published albums as well; if there comes a time when I think AI will help with my creative process, you can bet that I'll be using it.

> And the rest of the world was better off for it.

Except the single mom in a studio apartment trying to get some pay from her art gigs.

"I think we should ban ATMs, online banking, and direct deposit so I can get work as a bank teller" said no one ever. (Well, maybe someone when these were new.)

Displaced workers need support to ensure they can weather these transitions, but it doesn't make sense to artificially create demand by fighting new conveniences. If we want to ensure people have money, the solution is to give them money, not give them money in exchange for busywork.

Are single mom's a special class we should treat differently from others? You have single fathers.. childless couples, singles, parents with kids who have a disability, healthcare workers, transgendered singles, frail elders, mute single males..

Who should you protect?

Jobs come and go all the time. No one is special.

This line of thinking was shared by the original group who called themselves luddites.

> artist who can't afford to iterate his cover art ideas multiple times with a professional finds a creative solution

Everyone is getting disrupted by AI sooner or later.

The trick is to use AI to do things it would take you five lifetimes to learn. It's a tool to lower opportunity cost, financial capital, and human capital. That gives anyone leveraging it a much bigger platform, and the ability to dream big without resources.

If you can become your own "studio", you're the indie artist of the future. You don't need Disney or Universal Music backing.

Anyone can step up and do this. The artists being threatened can use these tools to do more than they've ever done by themselves.

I don't think that will do a whole lot to protect you from the economic harm. If everyone is producing more, the value of the works are reduced. At best, nobody will will make more money, they'll just be working harder to stay at the same place. More likely, there will simply be no room in the market for as many people and most will be out of work.

I disagree. Youtube model has shown that multiple people can produce videos and still earn profit from it. There are thousands of niches that creators can target which big studios don't even touch because masses might not be interested in it.

We can a Big Bang without all the stupid romantic stuff. We can have different ending versions of Game of Thrones. So much stuff is never made because it takes so resources to produce them.

I think the market will only grow when this technology is available to everybody.

I genuinely hope that you're right and I'm wrong!

In the music industry that appears to have been the case since iTunes hit the scene. The ease of distribution has enabled countless artists that nobody has ever heard of and will never listen to. Yet some have risen up and become hits despite this.

The problem isn’t capabilities, it’s having a market that’s saturated with supply twice over - once by the ability to make infinite copies of the product, the other where there’s an infinite supply of distinct high-quality products.

Subcultures used to provide a counterbalancing force here, but they aren’t doing so well these days.

My interests still are not being catered to.

I watch films and media, listen to music, and I'm only truly fully satisfied a single digit number of times a year. That's a consequence of not enough being created and experimented with.

The long tail is longer than you can imagine, and that's what form fits to your personal interest graph.

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