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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I have been creating a large number of Midjourney images for a project recently, and it’s made me remember/realize something that I think the AI Art doomsayers seem to not understand: the importance of curation.

A quick glance at /r/Midjourney or even the images featured in DALLE link above shows how boring the “default result” is when using a generator. While it may be easier to create images, you still need some artistic sense and skills to figure out which ones are appealing. In the bigger picture I think this basically means that illustration-type art will become more of a curatorial activity, in which being able to filter through masses of images becomes the predominant skill needed.

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Something like photography?

Yeah I think that’s a good comparison. Images are cheap to make and everywhere. That doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly taking good photos.

I’m not terribly familiar with the text to image tools, but you can provide source images as baseline, right? I’d wager that if you’re able to create a baseline image to feed in, your results will be better. The better the input, the better the output. It definitely feels like a situation where artists who can leverage ai will be the ones pulling ahead in the commercial sector.

It doesn’t really work that way. Yes, you can use images as a source, but they are more just mined for “pieces” to rearrange, not overall aesthetic effects.

You can do it with ControlNet guidance for SD.

That is not how image-to-image approaches work.

ControlNet is a obvious counterexample. If you think "diffusion is just collaging", upload a control image using this space that cannot exist in the source dataset (e.g. a personal sketch) and generate your own image: https://huggingface.co/spaces/AP123/IllusionDiffusion

It’s not that I think it’s purely collage, but that inputting a high-quality image doesn’t somehow lead to generating better quality output by default. The various silly images created by using keywords like “Greek sculpture” or “Mona Lisa” are an example.

I don't know how long such a phase will last, and I don't think anyone should count on it.

They can probably train an AI to filter based on human appeal. But IMO there's still room for artists with taste and technical talent to manipulate images closer to a curated ideal. Like the current SD photoshop workflows where generated content creates a base. I imagine once the workflow matures, there's going to be more manual imput again, i.e. drafting specific postures / arrangements for controlnet to block out composition before AI fills to 90%, and then human taste tries to refine/reiterate the last 10%.

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