>"While the role of the artist isn’t going away soon, the role of stock image sites might disappear. "
Not, yet. While it's cheap relative to stock images, it's time consuming to generate exactly what you want. Prices for stock images will collapse for the common quick to use images but the price for the specialized high end images will hold their value or even increase in value. Those historical and such images will continue to be valuable.
It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise where people will get paid to generate just the right image. It might be called "A.I. image artist " This individual will generate an image with an A.I. but use graphic tools to finalize it for use.
Also there is nothing preventing Stock Image Sites themselves using Dall-E to generate additional images. Heck they can use their own existing images for training (which the other's can't due to copyright issues) to increase the portfolio, but the Stock Image Sites can access free public images.
So, counter-intuitively it may strengthen Stock Image Sites value
Considering how DALL-E is fed with so many stock images that it sometimes spontaneously generates specific stock image websites' watermarks on output,[1] this is the stupidest, blandest possible ouroboros.
Agreed - having played around with DALL-E 2 a fair bit and having made a lot of usage of stock images over the years (for blog posts with specific subjects), I would say the former takes more work/time than the latter. With stock images I can just do a quick search on Shutterstock and find a lot of high quality options (usually), whereas with DALL-E 2 I need to figure out the exact prompt I want and iterate on it for a while. Stock images are not that expensive -- if you buy many it's as low as $2 per image, or on the high end (if you pay to just download a few per month) it's more like $10 per image. It does cost more, but time is money, so...
Time is only money if you someone will pay you for your time. If that’s not true, then it’s just a good excuse to spend your money when you could (in some cases should) be spending your time.
-- I agree with you - however it's not that time consuming to get what you want - it's pretty easy once you get used to DALL-E - so far there isn't anything I've not been able to get on a couple tries (granted after spending ~$30 learning the prompt system)- however once you're used to it - it's fairly easy - I agree that the market for very custom work will go through the roof - but "I need a burger" or "I need an American looking hot dog" eeeek!!! =) --
> It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise where people will get paid to generate just the right image.
I don't think so. People just need the result, so the AI will simply become a tool of the trade and you won't have any more AI image engineers than you have dedicated Photoshop artists right now.
I think the point of differentiation is that being adept at Photoshop is a relatively advanced and specialized skill.
Manipulating an AI prompt to get what you want is also a specialized skill, but may require an order of magnitude or two less training, or obviate the need for the job entirely.
An art director for a campaign wants a set of images created, and a set of stock photos used. They may have a junior person on their team create those images, each of which could take hours to create, or they can produce those images with an AI tool, which might take minutes. Or the director may simply use the tool themselves for a few minutes and then hand it off to someone else to clean up "in post".
Think people who think this is a job will be deluding themselves, eventually the magic of getting a good image or a bad image will just be a set of known good styles it generates at the start that you can then pick and choose from in the backend invisible to the actual thing you type. Same way how Dall-e 2 solves it's diversity issues.
The goal of OpenAI isn't to build a whole new industry of AI Artists, it's to make the AWS of creativity, which means it has to be so simple that you don't even need anyone who can write a good sentence. Just has to get good results from whatever they type.
Help me out. What's a "prompt engineer?" It seems like a very good title for the way we will be using AIs in the future. Many of these AIs will need just the right prompt (question?) to get the info we need. I like the title.
>Prices for stock horses will collapse for the common quick to use horses but the price for the specialized high end horses will hold their value or even increase in value.
This was all true when cars became a thing. What’s the market cap of horse production companies before and after?
You are right. Humans will move on to building more high quality images. But for regular run of the mill stock images, AI is already there. I had done a small experiment to create stock images[1]
[1] https://medium.com/ozonetel-ai/generating-a-landing-page-wit...
OTOH, sometimes stock pictures made by humans aren't even that relevant if the entity using them is mostly just looking for filler: https://www.reddit.com/r/weirdwikihow/
This means the result in the best-use case will be developing a suitable in-house pattern language. I'm sure Adobe's all over this since it's related to language arts and will be a more natural fit for the critical eye of a design & branding team.
And probably still, downstream designers are going to be showing how they can convert DALL·E 2 imagery to polished finals. Especially after reviewing the blog post, it's really clear that if you want things to come together well for a refined corporate environment you'll need someone doing that. "I love the whale imagery, but I don't like the DALL·E 2 look, what can we do about the whale teeth" or whatever will definitely be a thing.
Honestly, this is an awesome use of DALL-E and I'll probably start doing the same for my blog
It's perfect because:
- The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to be perfect
- It's a low-value enough use of images that you'd probably never commission a human artist to do them; instead you'd either use stock photos, or skip having images completely
- The nature of header images for a tech blog tends toward the abstract/surreal, which means it's either hard to find the right stock images, or the ones you do find will be super abstract to the point of being boring
All of these make it a great use of the technology
I can't speak for everyone, but with my own experience of reading (at least partially) a dozen or two technical articles almost every day for many years, pointless media is a hallmark of low quality. these days, I just immediately bail with Ctrl+W as soon as I encounter a twitter-pop-culture meme/gif in the header or anywhere near the top. sure, it does mean I skip the 5 out of 100 that were worth reading, I save a lot of time by skipping the 95 out of 100 that weren't.
I almost always bail when I see animated gifs in a technical article. They are most often meant to add a touch of humour, so of questionable value to begin with, and I find them painfully distracting from the text I'm actually trying to read.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I use image thumbnails for my blog posts as well but they don't even show up in the article. Instead when the article is linked to on twitter or a message the thumbnail will show up. That's to say that this is pretty awesome and very valuable for a blog even if not used for cringy pop-gif stuff in the article.
You are probably right about meme/gifs (or xkcd comics) anywhere near the top indicating a low-quality post. Though they are fine if you can get a few pages in before finding memes/comics. Meme style gifs below the fold... probably not.
But we are talking here about headers with abstract "art". They are more there for style and "vibe".
Placing a Meme/gif/comic comic above the fold seems to indicate the author was unconfident about the actual content hooking the reader, and they decided to try and hook them with humour or recognisable memes instead. Which is a bad sign in itself.
All that custom abstract art in the header really tells you is the author cares about style/vibe. Which I'd argue is not a bad sign in itself; though perhaps it's a warning sign to quickly check other things, like does the style/vibe match the content you are expecting? Is this just low-effort content to attract newsletter signups?
It's also annoying when the header takes up more than half the screen. Especially more than half of a desktop screen. Phones are somewhat excusable. But I'm not sure there is a correlation between that and bad articles. Caring about style is not the same thing as being good at style.
I've recently started dabbling in short story narrative writing as a hobby and I found a super interesting usage of dall-e is to generate certain art works or art style to draw inspiration from.
For example I came up with [0] after writing a draft about an old warrior/mercenary in a fantasy-like setting and then put something into dall-e and built upon that just to get the right "vibe". Or if you're into more "cosmic horror" kind of stuff I generated artworks like these [1] which gave me a lot of inspiration for future short stories I'm planning to draft.
I only spent about $15 so far, and a lot of it was just experimenting with artstyle (mostly to get some interesting discord profile pictures and logos) but I feel like I learned a lot. I can't stress how ridiculously cheap it is for the amount of quality artwork you get out of it.
> The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to be perfect
I dislike super generic stock photo at the beginning of an article. It’s completely pointless, sometimes aesthetically unpleasant, often disconnected with the actual content, and hence a distraction.
If neither you nor the reader cares about the stock photo, why not just forsake the thumbnail or use your website’s logo?
Agree, especially since it could bring some image variety into blogging. Sometimes I keep seeing the same, overused image again and again. Now you can create super cool looking, unique images and tailor them to how you'd like them to look like.
Oh jesus. 99,5 percent of sites use terrible, bland, uninteresting images. Like people have no sense of beauty at all. Now people will use these horrible abominations that DALLE shits out, well, a very nice and bright future is ahead of us :D.
I'm hoping websites eventually accept that forcing everyone to scroll past a bunch of useless barely (if at all) relevant images to reach content isn't making their sites better.
Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad? They often have weird and unsettling details when you look closely.
I mean, it’s an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate images at this level, but I don’t want them shown to me on a daily basis while I’m reading blogs.
I sunk ~20 hours and $100 playing with DALL-E since last week and I've had a very different experience. Sure--my first dozen attempts with the engine gave bad results, but once I learned to "speak its language" it got easier to generate highly-polished images. The most realistic results come by appending things like "realistic photograph, 4k, in the style of a fashion magazine" to prompts. I suppose any style would work, as long as the body of source material in that style is (mostly) high-quality.
Here's a couple examples I produced with just a little trial and error. FWIW I have an engineering background and zero design experience.
Maybe they're not perfect, but I'm impressed as hell. Exploring what's possible by wording prompts differently feels very much like using a search engine for the first time. Give it a year. This technology is going places.
I find the images to be incredible, but it's very unsettling when you focus on certain details like hands, feet, and eyes. The hands and feet that it draws are almost always mangled, and while it does a good job of drawing an individual eye, it doesn't seem to draw two eyes in a well coordinated manner, either one eye is bigger than the other, or there is something weirdly unsymmetrical about the eyes that makes the image look creepy.
I wonder if there’s a potential cottage industry of GANs that then fix up these details — one that knows exactly what a hand should look like and will fix up anything that looks like (or that you identify as) a hand
The article isn't loading for me, so I can't really comment on the images it contains, but I've found telling the ai to apply an impressionistic filter does wonders for removing the unsettling aspect. Obviously that limits you to a specific style of image, but I imagine there are other stylistic filters you might apply that achieve the same goal.
I could spend all day looking at the output of "impressionist cats" and similar queries.
I'm over 1000 credits into Dalle so far (I know, I know..) and you're on the money. You can go a lot further than impressionism, though. Specifying the names of famous illustrators, photographers or artists. Specifying the media used. Lens types. Colorways. Film types. Lighting. The right combinations can yield some incredibly realistic looking things, even faces, and then for the rest of it, there's Photoshop, Gigapixel, and other tools to patch things up. (I've had more luck creating 'elements' with Dalle and then montaging them the old fashioned way.)
The images used in the blog linked by OP are okay but stylistically all over the place. OP acknowledges how difficult good prompts are to write. Beyond that, though, you still need to think like an art director and establish a way to set a common style to avoid jarring the readers, and Dalle alone can't do that.
I'm with you. I would hate to see these images all over the place -many are just unpleasant to see.
The cover image generated for the cosmopolitan cover is stunning at first but after seeing it a few times it begins to feel uncomfortable to look at. The uncanny valley is alive and well in many of these images.
The pictures are certainly deep down in the uncanny valley, but I think they would be great for nightmarish games. In fact, game developers (and especially game artists) might be the next profession on the line, to be automated by AI.
I don't understand your assertion. Neither game developers nor artists are in any danger of being automated by AI.
Until Copilot can make the game you want, you cannot replace developers. And until you think AI is ready to replace artists in general, you won't be able to automate game artists.
That's not to say a game with assets largely drawn by AI, and heavily assisted by Copilot, wouldn't be a cool artistic experiment!
> Am I one of the few people who finds these generated pictures really bad?
Well they're bad at not looking like AI generated art. It's impressive, but I've yet to come across an example that doesn't look like AI generated art. A few seconds of surface level inspection and you can see the weird AI psychodelic circling effect (no idea what the technical name is - eye-ball-ification?)
There's a cyberpunk art Facebook group where some people have taken to sharing AI generated cyberpunk cityscapes, and I've been hard pressed to tell it apart from human art on occasion.
To be fair, I think this is because "cyberpunk cityscape" as an artform has become so cliché and generic, it's easy for an AI to copy it!
The results tend to be residents in the uncanny valley. They are nice if you want something unsettling. They are very impressive, can be very aesthetically pleasing(especially with midjourney) but they look very alien.
Maybe part of the reason we are so impressed with those is because they break our perception of reality. It looks like the renaissance statues that are made from marble but looks like cloth.
It's not about being perfect, it's about having something that doesn't take time to produce. like the article says, searching google and stock image sites looking for a picture that very few people are going to ingest is a huge waste of time.
I would suggest scanning through the r/dalle2 sub-reddit, as the submissions there are rated. There are limitations in the way the current crop of AI generators work, but in the hands of someone who knows these and know what prompts to specify you get completely amazing results that you as a layman can't tell is AI generated (without an expert investigation maybe into pixel-level artifacts).
They are good enough for most people and over time those details will get better until we have no need for illustrators.
Already I see website agencies and bloggers using DALL-E. What I do see is that it is easy to pick out DALL-E generated images, in that its too fantastic. Way over the top to a fault.
it's like the über-modern modern art. the next level of those goofy over-the-top meme images that make the rounds in socials
while you may not like it, you just know that this will be a thing on how to create AI-like images without AI. I used to refer to that as grade school ;P
It won't be long before most software engineer positions are eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code. Perhaps the technicians will be tasked with building tests and some automation, but even that stuff can be delegated to AI to an extent.
This may seem far off because the present economy is accustomed to paying engineers large sums of money to write apps. Even with the retractions we've been seeing in hiring and venture capital, there's just enough easy money still there and the capabilities of code-writing AIs isn't quite there yet.
All we need is a significant market correction and the next generation of AI to wipe out a large swath of tech jobs.
The next step regardless is applying technologies like DALL-E to web design, and for said technology to be widely used, open and affordable. We won't need web designers or even UXD.
Then we won't need as many engineers when AI can solve a lot of common problems in building software. AI can do it better because it won't spend inordinate amounts of time dillydallying over next-gen frameworks, toolchains, and preprocessors. AI won't even have to worry about writing "clean" and maintainable code because those things will no longer matter.
For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be developed first.
A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.
Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs, non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation; these are the "common problems" in building software. Current AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental breakthrough in the field is achieved.
Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong or right, it just is.
Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to live long enough to see it.
AI is great for recommendation systems and art because they are fuzzy. "Good enough" results are relatively easy to achieve. There is lots of tolerance for errors, because human preferences are flexible and fuzzy themselves.
Engineering is a different ballgame... If anything, all the code monkeys will simply become QA monkeys/test-engineers, because you need to be really sure that your black box algorithm is actually doing what you think it should be doing.
> software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code
People keep trying to make simplified programming environments for significantly less-trained people and they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it easier to get a result that has no crippling bugs?
Judging by the current state of DALL-E, the generated software will look good at first impression, but have lots of weird bugs when examined closely. So yeah, not much different to current software dev.
"Physical" engineering fields will probably come first... think AI-generated architecture, with AI-generated structural engineering, plumbing, electrical wiring, etc... with human-guidance of the generative process, and human-review/accountability of final output. Amplification of humans, not obsolescence.
In software, yeah boiler-plate and function-level code-generation... I could also see generating trivial UIs for CRUD apps, or no-code data-pipelines for small businesses... maybe even generating high-level architectures for new services... but we're far off from AI auto-generating code for enterprise applications or foundational services. The differentiation being making changes within an existing complex domain/code-base, in contrast with generating new assets from nothing.
It will never come for us. You think it will, but that’s because you don’t understand software.
Pick any random Jira ticket for a large software project. Could an AI understand and implement that feature into a larger project? Can it correctly deploy it without interruptions to production jobs? Will it correctly implement tests and decent code coverage? If there are regressions will it know how to go in and fix them? If there are bugs reported by users will it be able to investigate and accurately fix them? What about when multiple branches of feature development have to be merged, will it know how to do it correctly? Will it know how to write high performance software or just use shitty random algorithms?
If it can’t do these things AI is basically useless. Because this is basically 90% of software development.
I don't think it will be like that, for two reasons.
One, coming up with a correct description of a program is what computer programming actually is. Implementation is something we're always looking to do faster, so we can describe more behaviors to the computer.
Two, we're nowhere near the scale of software production which would clear market demand. If everyone who writes code for a living woke up and was ten times as productive, there would be more churn than usual while the talent finds its level, but the result would be ten times as much code per year, not five times and 50% unemployment.
Today I wrote a little bit of code to generate a prefix trie and write it out in a particular format, with some extra attention to getting the formatting 'nice'.
This took me about three hours.
It won't be long before something in the nature of Copilot could have gotten this down to, maybe, a half hour for results of the same (minimal, acceptable) quality.
Wonderful! Can't wait, I'll be six times as productive at this kind of task.
This might make it hard, on the margin, for some of the more junior and glue-oriented developers to find work, but I think the main result will be more software gets written, the same way using a structured programming language got people further in a day than writing in assembler did.
Imma be honest, working as an artist who has to come up with Dall-E prompts and as a programmer who has to maintain a codebase slapped together from GPT-5 output sounds equally horrifying. I think I'll stick to my grug brain engineering.
I am personally bearish on this assumption unless a few hurdles are reached. Being a software engineer involves a lot of translation of intent from a required feature into an efficient and maintainable implementation.
In a good number of cases it is more difficult to communicate what needs to be built rather than actually building the end product.
The recent work with DALL-E 2 echos a similar problem, coming up with a descriptive prompt can be difficult to do and needs fine tuning to be done. Not unlike trying to communicate with a graphic designer your expected intentions and giving similar works to draw from.
I agree. Most people fail to see it, because they see all the effort they need to put into producing good results (regardless of their actual job, BTW). Programmers keep thinking their job is secure, because, after wall, we are the ones, who write the software. Even if it's a ML system. (But ML systems don't necessarily need much coding.)
However, software development is probably the most thoroughly documented job, the job with the most information online how to do it right, the job with the best available training set. There is a lot of quality code (yes, bad code too), a lot of questions and answers with sample code (stackoverflow...) available. Maybe we've even already written most the software needed in the near future, it's just not available to everyone who needs it (because no one knows all the things out there and also these might be in several pieces in several repos).
Now the one critical thing I think is still needed, based on how actually we create software is an agent that has reasonable memory, that can handle back references (to what it has been told earlier), i.e. one that can handle an iterative conversation instead of a static, one time prompt.
This might be a big leap from where we are now or it may seem like one but AI/ML keeps surprising us for the past decade or so with these leaps. Another thing that may be needed is for it to be able to ask clarification questions (again, as a part of an iterative conversation). I'm not sure about this latter one, but this is definitely how we do the work.
The problem with that theory is that writing code is easier than reading code. This is generally not the case in other professions. It is definitely not the case for an artist.
You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the code the AI wrote.
AI has been over promising and under delivering for 50 years.
There's a reason why the general models aren't being released. The second you look under the hood and start poking the unhappy paths you see that it doesn't understand anything and you're talking to something dumber than a hamster.
Programming requires far more breadth and precision than 2D art.
I think that in the very long run programming work will be automated, but by that stage we will either be post-scarcity or reconstituted in computation substrate.
And digital artists aren't still pretty low on your ranking?
I don't know, after all the predictions about self-driving cars, I'm cautious. Especially considering that back then, it almost seemed obvious that we'd have self-driving cars by now. Cars were certainly capable of driving themselves back in 2016, it just seemed like we needed to iron out a few kinks. How long could that possibly take?
Now, I have no idea when it'll happen.
I'm not necessarily saying that it'll take AI forever to do what humans can do. Rather, I think its very hard to make good predictions with all the hype slightly deceptive marketing.
I think self-driving cars might be one of the hardest domains ever, considering they need to do the right thing (or at least avoid doing the wrong thing) 99.99% of the time to be even considered viable.
An AI artist can get away with a 5% success rate and still be considered viable for replacing humans.
Likewise, and AI programmer can be right only 50% of the time with expert oversight (someone sitting there fixing the code), or 90% with non-expert oversight.
Same. I would have thought the arts would be the last to move to AI. What do you put at the end of the list now? It's not trucking. Or ordering. Or anything related to porn. Eliza is 50+ years old, not actually a good replacement for a psychotherapist yet but I would imagine it could go a long way.
I'm biased from the terrible experience I had trying to get my kids to learn online in the pandemic, but I think schoolteacher might be one of the mass professions that is least susceptible to being AI Engineered away.
Ethicist is probably a safe career path too, but there aren't that many of those. And Politicians will of course prevent robots from taking over their jobs.
God it’s so fucking depressing to see all you techies debating whether or not the skill I have dedicated my life to getting good enough at to earn a quiet, modest living with should be automated away or not. And insisting that surely your jobs are too special and complex for this to ever happen to you.
At least I can take solace in the fact that for now these things aren’t gonna be taking a bite out of the furry art commissions I like to take, since that’s way too associated with crazy cartoon porn for them to not censor relevant keywords.
Of course it should be. You aren't entitled to my money for your services if a computer can do a good enough job for free. And human history is full of examples of innovations displacing humans and temporarily unemploying them until they found other jobs. That's basically what "productivity" is about in economics, and overall it's a good thing we're not still in the stone age in the name of protecting people's jobs.
Please save this comment somewhere and read it to yourself when the successor to GitHub’s Copilot makes you start worrying about your ability to earn a living. Thanks in advance.
Not to mention that the whole goddamn trick here is basically taking the output you and your peers have created, anonymizing it, throwing it in a blender, and then acting like the AI has generated something new and humans aren't needed anymore.
“Draw me Elon Musk fellating a Bitcoin in the style of an artist who spent decades refining their craft and producing enough art to train a neural network to make something resembling it, and completely ignore any potential copyright issues because it’s maybe right on the edge of sufficiently transformative, and anyway we have no idea what’s going on in these damn black boxes any more.” That’ll be one compute token, please.
Thats a bit unfair. The discussion is not about what should happen. But a prediction of what will happen, given these technologies exist. This is a tech forum after all, and speculation about tech and society is a big part of that.
Personally my societal concern is yet another industry where we had multiple small jobs will be ruled by a few conglomerates.
Small business are like democracy in a free market. And we keep evolving to it all ending in the hands of a few.
Wait until the world becomes oversaturated with AI generated imagery and then make a killing when people realize that real artists can actually produce something original.
I can only hope that this doesn’t happen after it has become impossible for young artists to make enough money with almost-pro work to be able to get in enough practice to become pros worth paying for. Finding your particular creative voice is a long process; the Internet opened up a lot of opportunities for people to do that.
I also hope this oversaturation doesn’t happen while I’m still alive, or that it happens as quickly as people became obsessed with Mandelbrot sets. You saw them everywhere and then suddenly they weren’t cool any more, and it always feels faintly embarrassing to see one used when you go back to look at something from that era.
I’m fifty years old and I doubt the people making these AI art tools are gonna send a single penny towards supporting and/or retraining the artists they displace, even the ones whose names constantly show up in the lists of things to type into the text box to get a better image.
Have you seen the Dall-E outputs? If anything they do better than the vast majority of artists in terms of originality. Sure there's probably some people out there who can do better, but no where near the amount of people employed in the field today.
> insisting that surely your jobs are too special and complex for this to ever happen to you
This insistence bugs the crap out of me, and shows just how arrogant tech-types (and even more so, business-types) can be. The late David Graeber noted this attitude, and while he's talking about investors/entrepreneurs/financiers, it could equally apply to the cocky software engineers I've met over the years:
"It's possible for futurologists to imagine robots relpacing sports editors, sociologists, or real estate agents, for example, yet I have yet to see one suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consist of figuring out the optimal way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. Why not?"
I optimistically believe that art will never be automated away like software engineering has the potential to be. The human creative element is so core to what art is that replacing it with a machine misses the point entirely, even if a machine could fully replicate an aesthetic.
Trust me, we (the techies) are in strong denial about how much time we have left. I've been programming since the late 1980s and have learned everything from VHDL to Clojure and give us till no later than 2040. Realistically, more like 2030, due to the billions of dollars being thrown at AGI for finance and other monetizations. Of course, money won't be worth anything after that, but I doubt that will stop anyone.
In my own life, I've decided to transition away from shared truth towards manifesting the reality that I want to live in. I try to help people now, I meditate a lot about humans becoming aliens, I try to be in the moment whenever possible and be thankful for consciousness. But I no longer put my energy into the ego-based materialism that captured tech. Since wealth inequality can't be stopped, I feel that the only salvation lies in nonattachment.
Don't worry, while the rest of the industry is busy making artsy abstract images of chimpanzees surfing on a wave of coronavirii, you can quietly work on UX design I guess.
God that’s a fucking sure route to suicide right there. From sitting at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to shitting out buttons for yet another fucking weather app on Dribble.
This is very interesting, but why are all the images just showing up as blurred out pre-loads for me? Makes it a lot less communicative, since it's literally about the images!
I mean, I'm guessing these aren't the intended images, since you don't need DALL-E to generate blurry splotches!
IMO, Using AI for image generation is the trend, whether we like it or not. But for me, as a software engineer, I still insist on creating pictures for my own blogs or presentations, etc.
I'm not a painter, of course I paint badly. But I find that it is not so difficult to create a picture that expresses my ideas. Mostly I try to use https://excalidraw.com/ for sketching hand-drawn, and find the free stock pictures from https://www.freepik.com/.
I think this is another joy of creation, like programming :-)
Readit News
Not, yet. While it's cheap relative to stock images, it's time consuming to generate exactly what you want. Prices for stock images will collapse for the common quick to use images but the price for the specialized high end images will hold their value or even increase in value. Those historical and such images will continue to be valuable.
It will be interesting to see if a specialized job will rise where people will get paid to generate just the right image. It might be called "A.I. image artist " This individual will generate an image with an A.I. but use graphic tools to finalize it for use.
So, counter-intuitively it may strengthen Stock Image Sites value
[1] https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/1551964984325812224
Apparently using copyrighted training data is okay in EU: Directive (EU) 2019/790 … on copyright and related rights Article 4 [1]
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Be sure to pass this along to Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.
Oh, and if you generate an image with Dall-E and there's a face that is distorted, you can use this tool to restore the facial features. https://arc.tencent.com/en/ai-demos/faceRestoration
What a weird decision to only display prompts in the page title, and nowhere else on the page
Very interesting and promising, thanks! But I always get a 500 error when trying to upload an image... Were you able to make it work past the demo?
https://i.imgur.com/32Cq2M3.png
https://i.imgur.com/UAlAzfl.png
My dall-e experience is very limited but looking for the right photo out of many is a very time consuming process, at least at designer level.
I don't think so. People just need the result, so the AI will simply become a tool of the trade and you won't have any more AI image engineers than you have dedicated Photoshop artists right now.
Manipulating an AI prompt to get what you want is also a specialized skill, but may require an order of magnitude or two less training, or obviate the need for the job entirely.
An art director for a campaign wants a set of images created, and a set of stock photos used. They may have a junior person on their team create those images, each of which could take hours to create, or they can produce those images with an AI tool, which might take minutes. Or the director may simply use the tool themselves for a few minutes and then hand it off to someone else to clean up "in post".
The goal of OpenAI isn't to build a whole new industry of AI Artists, it's to make the AWS of creativity, which means it has to be so simple that you don't even need anyone who can write a good sentence. Just has to get good results from whatever they type.
This was all true when cars became a thing. What’s the market cap of horse production companies before and after?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk
And probably still, downstream designers are going to be showing how they can convert DALL·E 2 imagery to polished finals. Especially after reviewing the blog post, it's really clear that if you want things to come together well for a refined corporate environment you'll need someone doing that. "I love the whale imagery, but I don't like the DALL·E 2 look, what can we do about the whale teeth" or whatever will definitely be a thing.
It's perfect because:
- The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to be perfect
- It's a low-value enough use of images that you'd probably never commission a human artist to do them; instead you'd either use stock photos, or skip having images completely
- The nature of header images for a tech blog tends toward the abstract/surreal, which means it's either hard to find the right stock images, or the ones you do find will be super abstract to the point of being boring
All of these make it a great use of the technology
I can't speak for everyone, but with my own experience of reading (at least partially) a dozen or two technical articles almost every day for many years, pointless media is a hallmark of low quality. these days, I just immediately bail with Ctrl+W as soon as I encounter a twitter-pop-culture meme/gif in the header or anywhere near the top. sure, it does mean I skip the 5 out of 100 that were worth reading, I save a lot of time by skipping the 95 out of 100 that weren't.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
But we are talking here about headers with abstract "art". They are more there for style and "vibe".
Placing a Meme/gif/comic comic above the fold seems to indicate the author was unconfident about the actual content hooking the reader, and they decided to try and hook them with humour or recognisable memes instead. Which is a bad sign in itself.
All that custom abstract art in the header really tells you is the author cares about style/vibe. Which I'd argue is not a bad sign in itself; though perhaps it's a warning sign to quickly check other things, like does the style/vibe match the content you are expecting? Is this just low-effort content to attract newsletter signups?
It's also annoying when the header takes up more than half the screen. Especially more than half of a desktop screen. Phones are somewhat excusable. But I'm not sure there is a correlation between that and bad articles. Caring about style is not the same thing as being good at style.
https://ogp.me/#metadata opengraph requires an image, for example
For example I came up with [0] after writing a draft about an old warrior/mercenary in a fantasy-like setting and then put something into dall-e and built upon that just to get the right "vibe". Or if you're into more "cosmic horror" kind of stuff I generated artworks like these [1] which gave me a lot of inspiration for future short stories I'm planning to draft.
I only spent about $15 so far, and a lot of it was just experimenting with artstyle (mostly to get some interesting discord profile pictures and logos) but I feel like I learned a lot. I can't stress how ridiculously cheap it is for the amount of quality artwork you get out of it.
[0] https://twitter.com/xMorgawr/status/1555728353780310017
[1] https://twitter.com/xMorgawr/status/1556667345443049473
I dislike super generic stock photo at the beginning of an article. It’s completely pointless, sometimes aesthetically unpleasant, often disconnected with the actual content, and hence a distraction.
If neither you nor the reader cares about the stock photo, why not just forsake the thumbnail or use your website’s logo?
> Blog posts with images get 2.3x more engagement
I mean, it’s an incredible achievement in AI that we can generate images at this level, but I don’t want them shown to me on a daily basis while I’m reading blogs.
Here's a couple examples I produced with just a little trial and error. FWIW I have an engineering background and zero design experience.
"Frida Kahlo crossed with Julia Child, 4k realistic, expressive photo, hdr" https://labs.openai.com/s/hvFClrAMCXN6zwqJUJwsmYSB
"John Lennon crossed with Paul McCartney, 4k photograph" https://labs.openai.com/s/lb7qw07tdvRPZ9nmkrCmU0RA
Maybe they're not perfect, but I'm impressed as hell. Exploring what's possible by wording prompts differently feels very much like using a search engine for the first time. Give it a year. This technology is going places.
I thought 2GB ought be enough for everybody.
"Jesus takes a selfie" - https://imgur.com/a/togE2ko
I'm pretty sure this snap was three days after the resurrection.
I really, really REALLY don't like this fact and I won't be using or endorsing the technology until it's improved.
I also always hated the "deep dream" pictures of lovecraftian dog horrors
I could spend all day looking at the output of "impressionist cats" and similar queries.
The images used in the blog linked by OP are okay but stylistically all over the place. OP acknowledges how difficult good prompts are to write. Beyond that, though, you still need to think like an art director and establish a way to set a common style to avoid jarring the readers, and Dalle alone can't do that.
The cover image generated for the cosmopolitan cover is stunning at first but after seeing it a few times it begins to feel uncomfortable to look at. The uncanny valley is alive and well in many of these images.
Until Copilot can make the game you want, you cannot replace developers. And until you think AI is ready to replace artists in general, you won't be able to automate game artists.
That's not to say a game with assets largely drawn by AI, and heavily assisted by Copilot, wouldn't be a cool artistic experiment!
Well they're bad at not looking like AI generated art. It's impressive, but I've yet to come across an example that doesn't look like AI generated art. A few seconds of surface level inspection and you can see the weird AI psychodelic circling effect (no idea what the technical name is - eye-ball-ification?)
To be fair, I think this is because "cyberpunk cityscape" as an artform has become so cliché and generic, it's easy for an AI to copy it!
Just like AI generated articles are good enough for 99% of content farms out there.
I would not have any of the ones that I've seen this far on my wall, or as my blog icons.
Maybe part of the reason we are so impressed with those is because they break our perception of reality. It looks like the renaissance statues that are made from marble but looks like cloth.
Already I see website agencies and bloggers using DALL-E. What I do see is that it is easy to pick out DALL-E generated images, in that its too fantastic. Way over the top to a fault.
way over the type as a style
it's like the über-modern modern art. the next level of those goofy over-the-top meme images that make the rounds in socials
while you may not like it, you just know that this will be a thing on how to create AI-like images without AI. I used to refer to that as grade school ;P
https://www.instagram.com/openaidalle/
Bad compared with what? They certainly convey a lot more information than a randomly generated gravatar.
It won't be long before most software engineer positions are eliminated while some are replaced by software "technicians" with enough expertise to command AI to generate working code. Perhaps the technicians will be tasked with building tests and some automation, but even that stuff can be delegated to AI to an extent.
This may seem far off because the present economy is accustomed to paying engineers large sums of money to write apps. Even with the retractions we've been seeing in hiring and venture capital, there's just enough easy money still there and the capabilities of code-writing AIs isn't quite there yet.
All we need is a significant market correction and the next generation of AI to wipe out a large swath of tech jobs.
The next step regardless is applying technologies like DALL-E to web design, and for said technology to be widely used, open and affordable. We won't need web designers or even UXD.
Then we won't need as many engineers when AI can solve a lot of common problems in building software. AI can do it better because it won't spend inordinate amounts of time dillydallying over next-gen frameworks, toolchains, and preprocessors. AI won't even have to worry about writing "clean" and maintainable code because those things will no longer matter.
For that scenario to be possible, general AI needs to be developed first.
A huge (and awful) part of software engineering is figuring out what exactly the stakeholders want you to build or fix. Sometimes, they themselves don't even know.
Dealing with ambiguos jira tickets, poorly reported bugs, non-existent requirements, missing or outdated documentation; these are the "common problems" in building software. Current AI technology isn't even close to being able to sort these types of problems today, and it won't be until a monumental breakthrough in the field is achieved.
Generating art is "easy" in the sense that art can't be wrong or right, it just is.
Generating the backend of a streaming platform? I'd like to live long enough to see it.
Engineering is a different ballgame... If anything, all the code monkeys will simply become QA monkeys/test-engineers, because you need to be really sure that your black box algorithm is actually doing what you think it should be doing.
People keep trying to make simplified programming environments for significantly less-trained people and they keep failing. Is mixing in an AI actually going to make it easier to get a result that has no crippling bugs?
In software, yeah boiler-plate and function-level code-generation... I could also see generating trivial UIs for CRUD apps, or no-code data-pipelines for small businesses... maybe even generating high-level architectures for new services... but we're far off from AI auto-generating code for enterprise applications or foundational services. The differentiation being making changes within an existing complex domain/code-base, in contrast with generating new assets from nothing.
Pick any random Jira ticket for a large software project. Could an AI understand and implement that feature into a larger project? Can it correctly deploy it without interruptions to production jobs? Will it correctly implement tests and decent code coverage? If there are regressions will it know how to go in and fix them? If there are bugs reported by users will it be able to investigate and accurately fix them? What about when multiple branches of feature development have to be merged, will it know how to do it correctly? Will it know how to write high performance software or just use shitty random algorithms?
If it can’t do these things AI is basically useless. Because this is basically 90% of software development.
One, coming up with a correct description of a program is what computer programming actually is. Implementation is something we're always looking to do faster, so we can describe more behaviors to the computer.
Two, we're nowhere near the scale of software production which would clear market demand. If everyone who writes code for a living woke up and was ten times as productive, there would be more churn than usual while the talent finds its level, but the result would be ten times as much code per year, not five times and 50% unemployment.
Today I wrote a little bit of code to generate a prefix trie and write it out in a particular format, with some extra attention to getting the formatting 'nice'. This took me about three hours.
It won't be long before something in the nature of Copilot could have gotten this down to, maybe, a half hour for results of the same (minimal, acceptable) quality.
Wonderful! Can't wait, I'll be six times as productive at this kind of task.
This might make it hard, on the margin, for some of the more junior and glue-oriented developers to find work, but I think the main result will be more software gets written, the same way using a structured programming language got people further in a day than writing in assembler did.
In a good number of cases it is more difficult to communicate what needs to be built rather than actually building the end product.
The recent work with DALL-E 2 echos a similar problem, coming up with a descriptive prompt can be difficult to do and needs fine tuning to be done. Not unlike trying to communicate with a graphic designer your expected intentions and giving similar works to draw from.
However, software development is probably the most thoroughly documented job, the job with the most information online how to do it right, the job with the best available training set. There is a lot of quality code (yes, bad code too), a lot of questions and answers with sample code (stackoverflow...) available. Maybe we've even already written most the software needed in the near future, it's just not available to everyone who needs it (because no one knows all the things out there and also these might be in several pieces in several repos).
Now the one critical thing I think is still needed, based on how actually we create software is an agent that has reasonable memory, that can handle back references (to what it has been told earlier), i.e. one that can handle an iterative conversation instead of a static, one time prompt.
This might be a big leap from where we are now or it may seem like one but AI/ML keeps surprising us for the past decade or so with these leaps. Another thing that may be needed is for it to be able to ask clarification questions (again, as a part of an iterative conversation). I'm not sure about this latter one, but this is definitely how we do the work.
You still need correct code, and the halting problem says you can't prove whether code does what you want it to. At the end of the day, someone needs to be able to go in and fix shit the AI did wrong, and to do that you need to understand the code the AI wrote.
There's a reason why the general models aren't being released. The second you look under the hood and start poking the unhappy paths you see that it doesn't understand anything and you're talking to something dumber than a hamster.
I think that in the very long run programming work will be automated, but by that stage we will either be post-scarcity or reconstituted in computation substrate.
however, I find that my job (SWE) is about 1% programming and 99% strategizing, designing & communicating.
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After experimenting with GitHub Co-Pilot I can see that day being 50% - perhaps even just 25% - as far as it used to feel.
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I don't know, after all the predictions about self-driving cars, I'm cautious. Especially considering that back then, it almost seemed obvious that we'd have self-driving cars by now. Cars were certainly capable of driving themselves back in 2016, it just seemed like we needed to iron out a few kinks. How long could that possibly take?
Now, I have no idea when it'll happen.
I'm not necessarily saying that it'll take AI forever to do what humans can do. Rather, I think its very hard to make good predictions with all the hype slightly deceptive marketing.
An AI artist can get away with a 5% success rate and still be considered viable for replacing humans.
Likewise, and AI programmer can be right only 50% of the time with expert oversight (someone sitting there fixing the code), or 90% with non-expert oversight.
I'm biased from the terrible experience I had trying to get my kids to learn online in the pandemic, but I think schoolteacher might be one of the mass professions that is least susceptible to being AI Engineered away.
Ethicist is probably a safe career path too, but there aren't that many of those. And Politicians will of course prevent robots from taking over their jobs.
At least I can take solace in the fact that for now these things aren’t gonna be taking a bite out of the furry art commissions I like to take, since that’s way too associated with crazy cartoon porn for them to not censor relevant keywords.
“Draw me Elon Musk fellating a Bitcoin in the style of an artist who spent decades refining their craft and producing enough art to train a neural network to make something resembling it, and completely ignore any potential copyright issues because it’s maybe right on the edge of sufficiently transformative, and anyway we have no idea what’s going on in these damn black boxes any more.” That’ll be one compute token, please.
Personally my societal concern is yet another industry where we had multiple small jobs will be ruled by a few conglomerates.
Small business are like democracy in a free market. And we keep evolving to it all ending in the hands of a few.
I also hope this oversaturation doesn’t happen while I’m still alive, or that it happens as quickly as people became obsessed with Mandelbrot sets. You saw them everywhere and then suddenly they weren’t cool any more, and it always feels faintly embarrassing to see one used when you go back to look at something from that era.
I’m fifty years old and I doubt the people making these AI art tools are gonna send a single penny towards supporting and/or retraining the artists they displace, even the ones whose names constantly show up in the lists of things to type into the text box to get a better image.
You are not special. I am not special.
This insistence bugs the crap out of me, and shows just how arrogant tech-types (and even more so, business-types) can be. The late David Graeber noted this attitude, and while he's talking about investors/entrepreneurs/financiers, it could equally apply to the cocky software engineers I've met over the years:
"It's possible for futurologists to imagine robots relpacing sports editors, sociologists, or real estate agents, for example, yet I have yet to see one suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consist of figuring out the optimal way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. Why not?"
I optimistically believe that art will never be automated away like software engineering has the potential to be. The human creative element is so core to what art is that replacing it with a machine misses the point entirely, even if a machine could fully replicate an aesthetic.
In my own life, I've decided to transition away from shared truth towards manifesting the reality that I want to live in. I try to help people now, I meditate a lot about humans becoming aliens, I try to be in the moment whenever possible and be thankful for consciousness. But I no longer put my energy into the ego-based materialism that captured tech. Since wealth inequality can't be stopped, I feel that the only salvation lies in nonattachment.
There are already enough offbeat companies dedicated in generating porn, I am sure.
I can‘t wait for a dalle2 level model trained on all of e621, rule34, x-hentai, furaffinity, sofurry, inkbunny and u18chan. It‘s gonna be great.
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Here are cups rendered in the style of a famous architect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/w7buyx/a_coffee_cup...
Dalle 2's influence will be felt outside the graphic artist realm too.
I mean, I'm guessing these aren't the intended images, since you don't need DALL-E to generate blurry splotches!
I'm not a painter, of course I paint badly. But I find that it is not so difficult to create a picture that expresses my ideas. Mostly I try to use https://excalidraw.com/ for sketching hand-drawn, and find the free stock pictures from https://www.freepik.com/.
I think this is another joy of creation, like programming :-)