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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I think AI-generated images are worse for training AI generative models than LLMs, since there are so many now on the internet (see Instagram art related hashtags if you want to see nothing but AI art) compared to the quantity of images downloaded prior to 2021 (for those AI that did that). Text will always be more varied than seeing 10m versions of the same ideas that people make for fun. AI text can also be partial (like AI-assisted writing) but the images will all be essentially 100% generated.

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That's far from unique to instagram. I loathe Stable Diffiusion and co solely because they've utterly FLOODED every cool art-adjacent website with endless mediocre derivative shit. Like there was always low-effort content of course, but holy fuck, there is SO MUCH MORE now. And some of these people are trying to CHARGE for this uninspired junk!!!

I agree with this despite using SD a lot myself. It's fun to use until you realize the majority of people posting stuff generated with it have almost no creativity, all generating the same things over and over again, mostly without any manual work involved. that uncanny realism style with the generic Stable Diffusion face and one of 5 different poses. The number of people putting any sort of effort into it is way, way lower than the number of users thinking they are making art. It's more of a slot machine in the majority of cases

Unfortunately, yeah 99.9% of images you're going to see generated from stable diffusion models are going to be either selfies, portraits, or porn.

What's you're not going to see is things like "a divine gigantic textile loom sewing together a white horse and a black horse in an interlaced pattern to create a zebra." for example.

Honestly, if you want to make art, AI is a hindrance not a tool. You have to engineer what you say to maximum exactness, and even then it'll still just ignore certain words, or skip them over, or get basic details wrong.

Way back when all this stuff first popped off, I did try it out. I was unimpressed. It was like playing a game of telephone with my ideas, having to describe them into one end and have a thousand people repeat it to one another and make little contributions till it came out the other end, most of the time looking absolutely nothing like I expected.

People who say this makes art accessible... I dunno, I've never gotten it. I've seen people with all manner of disabilities, deformities, etc. all manage to express themselves creatively with practice and accessibility tools far more reliably than trying to make an AI pop out what you actually want. It seems to be the accessibility claims really only hold water if the accessibility feature is "I don't want to learn any skills" which... I mean, okay. But as with all art, your end product will reflect that level of care.

I definitely think the flooding of art spaces is hugely problematic, but it is pretty funny to watch people try to "be an artist" by putting essentially no effort in. It definitely points to a lack of understanding in the field when all these people are basically generating a ton of images that are all derived from the same models. There's a lack of understanding of supply and demand, when the expectation is that your ai illustration that you made in like an hour with the same software as every other ai artist is that it's somehow going to be competitive on engagement with an original piece from an artist who has an audience. There's a lot of demand for artists like Mika Pikazo and Frank Frazetta, not the 100,000 ai artists out there.

I mean it's hard to fault those people when that was essentially how these were sold way back. "Automating art" and all that. All the most insufferable people on twitter jumping from shilling crypto scams to shilling AI and telling real artists in their ivory towers that their days were numbered.

Guess put it on the pile with all the other broken promises.

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