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hafriedlander · 2 years ago
Somewhat tangential, but the Krita community and core team have been pretty explicitly anti-AI. https://krita-artists.org/t/change-in-policy-for-topics-rela...

(I am part of a group that builds UI on top of open models, but we stopped working on our Krita version for that reason.)

raincole · 2 years ago
I think at one point Krita will fork to two apps because of this exact reason. AI-based tools are clearly the next step of painting apps (to me at least, but I can't be the only one who believes in this).

I think in 3~5 years an painting app without AI generation feature is just like a painting app without pen pressure today. It's still usable, you can make great art with it if you have the skill, but it will be so out of fashion to a point it starts becoming cool again.

makeitdouble · 2 years ago
Is it that different from how we view Github copilot ?

As far as I know there's a sizeable number of devs who don't intend to ever rely on copilot, and I would expect the a similar trend in the drawing community with amateurs and pros not specially anti-AI, but not wanting to have a random generator meddle with their art.

__loam · 2 years ago
I think you don't know a lot of people in the art community if you think this. Good to see Krita standing with the people who actually use their tools.
boredtofears · 2 years ago
thats such a bummer. are we then doomed to only sample previous artists interpretation of an owl for the rest of time?
lbeltrame · 2 years ago
Which is kind of funny in a way. I am no artist but I'm using Krita with a smallish Wacom tablet to manually refine illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion.

But again, some of the Krita team have had strong ideological positions on many themes. Luckily you can keep using the software whether you agree or not (and you can contribute, too).

ouraf · 2 years ago
A tool is a tool. If the krita team is anti AI, they can choose to just ignore a plug-in or extension made by an independent team.

Do your thing.

GabeIsko · 2 years ago
I am a firm believer that the creator should choose the way their work is licensed, but man - it is weird seeing an open source project have such a commitment to Intellectual Property. It seems like it is mostly developed by volunteers. So the expectation is that artists take these devs hard work and use it to create proprietary paintings.

I'm on board for this on the basis that the creator should ultimately get to choose how their work is released. Open Source has to be a choice. But dang, I would hope that one of the outcomes of a project like this would be more public domain digital art.

thot_experiment · 2 years ago
The AI hate is suuuch a meme in the art community, it's very frustrating/alienating. (Though understandably, neoliberal capitalism is also extremely frustrating, so I see why artists mad, I just wish they'd be mad at the root cause.)

((the root cause is that an economic system fundamentally based on scarcity == value doesn't make sense when applied to things that are essentially infinite, and kludgeing in artificial scarcity to make things work is not a good take))

ben_w · 2 years ago
Mm. Possibly, but not necessarily.

I have a suspicion that art is to humans as fancy tails are to peacocks: the difficulty is the point.

I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots.

It's also why photographs as a category were initially dismissed (in an era that had come to praise extreme realism in paintings), but when photographers went on long trips to visit unusual places, people, and events, those photographs suddenly did count as art.

Bit of overlap between arts and knowledge shown by the wiktionary entry for the Latin "ars", so this can be extended to the way Socrates didn't like writing, and the desire for hand-made foods and durable goods over mass produced foods and products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

wokwokwok · 2 years ago
> it's very frustrating/alienating

Mm. I’ve spoken to a number of artists who have expressed similar feelings of despair, frustration and anger.

There are many upset people over this technology, and calling it a meme diminishes them to meaningless copycat haters.

I don’t think that’s true; and doing it, really reallllly makes them angry.

Consider: this attitude it part of the reason why that attitude exists.

:|

If the stable diffusion folk hadn’t gone crazy cloning every art style they could and laughing about it, we could all have had a very different AI art future.

…but apparently we can’t have nice things because (some) people suck.

whywhywhywhy · 2 years ago
It’s more just ridiculous because the same community is completely fine with photobashing and “paint overs” (aka tracing) and “fan art” (aka profiting from IP you don’t own).
bsenftner · 2 years ago
I've had the situation where long term friends contact me with a child/teen either entering or graduating art/animation/film school and want me to give advice to their kid. My background is 3D graphics, animation, film VFX, video games, and AI - from the software developer and digital artist sides.

Every one of those conversations has been their kid telling me they will never touch AI, AI is evil, AI is the death of art and artists, and they refuse to see it any other way. One is graduating this year, wants to be a concept designer for high concept film and games: a role that is leaning heavy into generative art simply for the variations it generates. They refuse to discuss how their intended industry already uses and is adopting AI generative art en mass.

Times when I wish I had the eloquent voice of another.

opyate · 2 years ago
I don't get AI hate. It's nothing other than "technology hate".

As a web developer who started out in 2001/2002, I watched as custom web design jobs dried up, and more and more people (and ahem artists) started using online tools to create a templatised website on the cheap.

Did I throw a tantrum? Nope! I learned to do backend dev so I could make my own automation tools.

Seriously, just embrace these new superpowers already.

bayindirh · 2 years ago
I don't agree. I take photographs as a hobby, and share them, just for showing them off.

They're generally licensed with CC-NC-BY plus no derivatives (akin to GPL), but I don't want my images to be taken to a training set to feed a generative model without my consent, because you're violating the license terms I put on it.

Same is valid for my code. I stopped using GitHub, because it devours any and all open repositories regardless of its license and without asking for consent.

This is not about scarcity, but respect and ethics mostly. At least, from my perspective.

kranke155 · 2 years ago
Yet this terrible economic system you describe determines whether these people can afford food, rent and their children's education.

Yeah it must be a meme.

boppo1 · 2 years ago
Artist here. It's totally reasonable for artists to be mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent.

Anger about using AI is less justifiied.

loki-ai · 2 years ago
It is not just in the art community: check the currently top post and see how many devs are saying they would never use AI on their work. They hate and are alienated as much as any artist.
__loam · 2 years ago
It's super rich to call artists being mad at a labor alienation machine, alienating for being mad at it.
gumballindie · 2 years ago
Is it though? Veryone I know in the art community is quite pissed at copyright violations.
hafriedlander · 2 years ago
I have tried to explain "you're not mad at generative AI, you're mad at late stage capitalism" before.

Most people aren't really willing to smash the state though (I understand, that's where all my stuff is) so look for less drastic ways to protect themselves.

Gormo · 2 years ago
Agreed that trying to create artificial scarcity is not good (and isn't really compatible with any ethical system, least of all "neoliberal capitalism"), but it should be pointed out that natural scarcity is an a priori fact of nature that economics itself is our method of dealing with, and is not a normative contrivance of any "economic system".

I'm not entirely sure how any of this relates to artists agitating against AI, unless they are themselves seeking to create artificial scarcity to prop up the market value of their services, now that the supply of art ability is no longer as constrained as it previously was.

pxoe · 2 years ago
you're a meme. do you "see" why artists are mad?

it's quite simple. artists offer to make their art for a price, as a 'service'. then, something comes in, that pirated their previous works, and offers to make imagery in that art style for free (or at a low low price), undercutting and displacing that artist.

really it's a 'yet another spin on piracy'. cause that's just the 'services' part, besides the 'selling works/artwork' which has long been rife with piracy, but the 'pirating what's been offered as a service' thing is new. piracy expanding into 'services' field as well. services (particularly those that rely on someone specifically taking their time to do something, and not just 'press button, service gets performed unattended') are scarce. there's only so many hours and so much time in one's life.

Topgamer7 · 2 years ago
Sounds like burying your head in the ground and pretending it's not happening.
shultays · 2 years ago
Huh, I wasn't aware Krita was a thing. As a software engineer that rarely needs image editing Gimp was my go to software. Why there is a second open source image editing software now?
elaus · 2 years ago
I think it's totally fine and normal for multiple OSS tools existing in the same space.

Krita is almost 20 years old and is more focused on painting than on image editing – but personally, I use it for both, liking the UI much more than that of GIMP.

diputsmonro · 2 years ago
As a software engineer and artist, Krita feels more focused on drawing/painting with a pen, while GIMP has always felt to me as more focused on photography/editing.

Obviously they both manipulate images so there's lots of overlap in features, but the idea of painting or drawing in GIMP seems really alien to me. I'm sure the interface and pen support was even worse when the Krita project was started.

lmm · 2 years ago
Gimp has a notoriously unusable UI. I think that's honestly probably the main reason.

I'm actually more confused by the converse: why do people keep using and recommending Gimp when Krita has existed for decades and is so much easier to use?

duckmysick · 2 years ago
> Why there is a second open source image editing software now?

Because it's possible and someone wants to. Same reason why we have multiple Linux distros, multiple databases, multiple browsers, multiple text editors.

Are you surprised that open source software in general is duplicated? Or is this specific just to image editing software. If yes, what makes image editing software special so that having a second option is surprising?

Yes, open source promotes collaboration. It also promotes forking and starting new projects.

wastewastewaste · 2 years ago
It's much closer to how photoshop generally works, with an extra focus on drawing. Gimp is not a good replacement for photoshop for artists. It's quite popular for this.
pkkm · 2 years ago
> now

Krita is actually quite old. The reason you haven't heard of it is probably that it's more focused on digital painting than on general image manipulation.

dragonwriter · 2 years ago
> Why there is a second open source image editing software now?

There are actually more than two.

mcpackieh · 2 years ago
GIMP isn't designed for drawing. Sounds like bullshit, right? But that's what the GIMP manual says: "GIMP is not designed to be used for drawing." https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-using-rectangular.html

Krita on the other hand is designed for drawing and painting.

ChrisRR · 2 years ago
Even ignoring the fact that Krita is a digital painting piece of software, not general image editing

The fact that you think there's only one open source image editor out there is fascinating.

raincole · 2 years ago
Krita aims for SAI/CSP, GIMP aims (well... sorta) for PS.
vonjuice · 2 years ago
Krita is much better than GIMP, I hope you can make the switch.
2Gkashmiri · 2 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly6USRwTHe0

the video is mindblowing because on one hand, adobe photoshop announced this as "their own next big thing" and here we have an open source software replicating this same thing, so cool.

edit:

this also means photoshop doesnt have the "moat" they seem to have built around the generative ai thing and their software.

unstuck3958 · 2 years ago
What Krita and the KDE project in general have achieved is nothing short of phenomenal, and I don't believe the power of libre software is recognized enough even in dev communities like Hacker News.
mikeiz404 · 2 years ago
Another video from the page showing pose editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QDPEcVmdLI
wodenokoto · 2 years ago
That is absolutely amazing, but it is a shame it has to update the entire image on pose change, and you get a new background everytime.
seanthemon · 2 years ago
this is insane, I don't even know if adobe could replicate this easily with photoshop, too many missing features. Excited to see this going forward.
instagraham · 2 years ago
Krita support for generative inpainting has been around since the beginning of the Stable Diffusion craze. It was one of the first AI projects I saved. It definitely predates Photoshop adding it.

Off the top of my head, this plugin is from Nov 6, 2022, and I know there were others before this (or maybe it was just this shared in earlier form). https://github.com/sddebz/stable-diffusion-krita-plugin

Stable Diffusion heralded an explosion in generative AI that predated ChatGPT. Weird how OpenAI got all the credit when it was Stable Diffusion that first opened the gates.

zerd · 2 years ago
> Weird how OpenAI got all the credit when it was Stable Diffusion that first opened the gates.

Stable Diffusion came out much later than DALL-E by OpenAI, so I'd say they deserve some credit.

dragonwriter · 2 years ago
> or maybe it was just this shared in earlier form). https://github.com/sddebz/stable-diffusion-krita-plugin

Nah that is an early version of a plugin that uses A1111 as the backend instead of ComfyUI (it does have a newer and maintained replacement, but its not the one in OP, which uses a ComfyUI backend.)

qwertox · 2 years ago
While watching the video I was also thinking "just like Adobe's stuff". Many of the Photoshop users will ask themselves why they should continue to pay them, if the evolution continues this way. Nice to see.

Sure, Krita is not Photoshop, but for the tasks certain creators will be doing in the next decade, they won't have a need for Photoshop anymore.

Interesting to see that the video is 2 months old.

unstuck3958 · 2 years ago
> they won't have a need for Photoshop anymore.

That is already true for not just Photoshop, but for almost any kind of proprietary software. If you are willing to embrace the caveats and DIY nature of FOSS, for almost every task FOSS Software is good enough (and sometimes better than proprietary).

I think one of the major reasons of popularity of proprietary software vs FOSS is marketing.

jasonjayr · 2 years ago
From that video you posted:

https://youtu.be/Ly6USRwTHe0?t=127 <-- "now draw the rest of the owl"

Traubenfuchs · 2 years ago
Thanks for linking the video. The GitHub screenshots are completely useless, because there are no before/after comparisons.
simbolit · 2 years ago
If you look at the very right of the screenshots, there is a "history" of generations with unused alternatives. Me and my visual cortex managed to synthesize "before" images from this information.

Very inconvenient? Yes. Completely useless? No.

vonjuice · 2 years ago
At this point selecting good screenshots for git readme's should be a profession of its own, it's baffling how many projects' appeal could be really enhanced by simple informative screenshots.
shultays · 2 years ago
It is not very obvious but the first image was a link to youtube video. The developer should put a play button on it, using his tool perhaps!
dr_kiszonka · 2 years ago
The beginning is impressive, but the owls made me actually want to try this. Super cool.
esjeon · 2 years ago
I saw a person using this. The system had 4090, which can pull about 20-30 iter/sec. This roughly translates to 4 image/sec with 8 iter/image. This allows interactive AI drawing (thou a bit quirky). Once the desired image is reached, the user can re-run w/ 30-50 iterations to finalize the image. This is really cool.
pedrovhb · 2 years ago
Latent consistency models are a pretty radical game changer that came up recently. There are LoRAs [0] that you can just use alongside any SD or SDXL that just cut the number of inference steps you need to 2-8, rather than the usual ~25+. It's as close to magic as one could expect, and on ComfyUI my modest RX 5700XT spits out 512x512 images in probably around a second each, or a couple of seconds for a 4x batch. A more beefy GPU could certainly enable high res, very low latency interactive use.

For even better latency perception, you could hook into the generation steps and have TAESD [1] decoding intermediate latents.

[0] https://huggingface.co/collections/latent-consistency/latent... [1] https://github.com/madebyollin/taesd

irusensei · 2 years ago
> AMD GPU: supported via DirectML, Windows only

Uh... I'm not happy with this trend. Thankfully there is an option for using a ComfyUI, a torch based project as a backend.

azeirah · 2 years ago
ComfyUI works perfectly fine with ROCm on Linux. Using it with this krita plugin also works flawlessly. The docs are simply incorrect in saying that it's Windows-only.

I assume it's the case because the automatic ComfyUI installer that comes with this project doesn't know how to install/configure ROCm. Using your own ComfyUI installation works perfectly. I'll open a ticket with the author of the project to discuss this.

Source: I installed this yesterday on my Ubuntu computer with a 7900xtx and ROCm in Comfy

Zetobal · 2 years ago
That's not a trend that's basically the norm for generative ai and AMD is to blame for it not the devs.
irusensei · 2 years ago
It should not be. Torch and AMD has been a thing forever on Linux even before Windows. The underlying comfyUI supports it. In fact someone replied here it might have been a mistake.
dbrgn · 2 years ago
Why is that the case? Tools like OpenCL do exist, but I assume CUDA is simply better suited for these tasks, is that true?

(With the dominance of CUDA, choice of a GPU on Linux gets even harder. It used to be a clear "fuck you Nvidia" if you wanted to use Wayland, but Nvidia definitely has the lead when it's about video editing and machine learning.)

sorenjan · 2 years ago
I'm on mobile and haven't looked at this project, but usually DirectML support is added as a torch backend. Instead of device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu" you add import torch_directml device = torch_directml.device()

How else are you supposed to support AMD in Pytorch on Windows?

irusensei · 2 years ago
My comment was about the “AMD - Windows only” part of readme.
dragonwriter · 2 years ago
> Thankfully there is an option for using a ComfyUI

Its not an option for using ComfyUI; its an option to use an external ComfyUI instance instead of one embedded in the plugin, this uses ComfyUI one way or the other.

jstummbillig · 2 years ago
Is it a trend, already? I mean I can get behind ambition, but jesus, everything is new, people are cooking. Let's give it a few month.
thot_experiment · 2 years ago
It's always been a trend and always will be until AMD gets their shit together. NV spends a lot to make sure CUDA has the market share it does (marketing, establishing a foothold in academia, partnerships etc), AMD is working on it but progress is slow.
throwaway30230 · 2 years ago
At this point it seems pointless to even bother to try given that AI will generate all possible artwork within a couple years.

I mean. Say you get "good" at using this. What's the life expectancy at any kind of creative outlet you could have that would support you? I mean if we're talking this is fun as a toy, yeah ok. I could see that. But as a job? When everyone can paint no one is paid for it.

I suppose that we could all go back to paying people who can physically lift things or wait on tables, but that's about it.

I want to use this, but then I just think "Holy shit, what if I get good at this and then get my hopes up like I did with React? What am I going to do, sell artwork that anyone can make for next to nothing on the internet?" I believe I could probably come up with some cool paintings, but the question is "why"? Everyone else on the internet will generate all the possible content it's possible for me to come up with anyway, so why does it matter?

And if that makes me care about "money" then yeah, I care about money. So what?

All of that being said I'm now going to draw a latex glad ninja being molested by a demon. Also I'm broke and living in a homeless shelter. But I can get a supercomputer to make me draw sexy girls so I have that going for me.

sndwnm · 2 years ago
Seems pointless to learn to make singular highly detailed visual art pieces? Maybe. Maybe it always was pointless.

But most visual art is not just single pictures in a vacuum. Say you want to make a game with 2d still-art, or say a comic. You will need dozens or hundreds of images and they will have to be tied together by a common design — characters and style that look similar in the different images, and most of all you have to have a story to back it up. This is not something AIs can do well, not for a long while, but a human artist now may do significantly better than before with help of "dumb AI", such as the featured Krita plugin.

Finally, most artists don't think like you. It's not "pointless" to do something that can be technically repeated by other humans or AI. You do art because you want to express yourself.

awfulneutral · 2 years ago
> Finally, most artists don't think like you. It's not "pointless" to do something that can be technically repeated by other humans or AI. You do art because you want to express yourself.

I've seen this sentiment a bunch of times, but I don't agree. Most people practice skills and make art in order to demonstrate their value to society. Art (and media) doesn't exist in a vacuum, it surely exists for societal reasons.

A person may want to make a game or a comic, but the reason they want to make those things, instead of just consuming existing media, is also to demonstrate their value to society. But they won't have any value either when everyone else can easily make games and comics.

lock-the-spock · 2 years ago
Maybe a nice analogy are the old trades: knitting, weaving, ceramics, glass blowing, woodworking, ... Still down for pleasure and a niche audience.
lucubratory · 2 years ago
Being a painter, a photographer, a musician, an actor, a freelance artist in any medium, has never been a viable career for any significant fraction of the people that want to do so. It has always been a hobby that some very small percentage of people manage to make enough money from to scrape by, and some infinitesimal percentage make enough money from to be wealthy. AI is unlikely to change that, because there will very likely still be a demand for celebrities that some infinitesimal proportion of lucky aspirants will fill, and the vast majority of the industry by numbers will be hobbyist or hobbyists-in-denial who think their small business drawing commissions for some normies & wealthy furries on Twitter will be an economically sustainable career for all the people that want to do it. The most likely outcome of AI in the long run is that a lot of these people produce significantly more work of equivalent quality without being paid any more because demand won't rise (there is already massive oversupply of art, demand is the limiter for financial feasibility), a lot more hobbyists are making art because of the lower barrier to entry, and animators + VFX artists have their productivity go up by a lot and can maybe trade that into real gains in conditions if they're willing to unionise.
LoganDark · 2 years ago
Never underestimate the number of kinks out there
lfkdev · 2 years ago
I'm quite sure the will be models specific for all kind of kinks.
Fraterkes · 2 years ago
A theoretical nice thing about Krita and art in these past decades was that you could be an 18 year old with some ok drawing skills, a thinkpad, a secondhand wacom tablet and a version of krita, and the internet, this wonderful innovation, could enable you to make some money as an artist. If the future expectation is that artists all have 2000 euro graphics cards, I think that will really make art a lot less democratic.
orbital-decay · 2 years ago
That's not the expectation at all; a lot of work is being done to make it run on underpowered hardware. SD in particular runs on a 8-years-old potato, albeit slowly and with limitations, despite originally barely fitting into 10GB VRAM.

>A theoretical nice thing about Krita and art in these past decades was that you could be an 18 year old with some ok drawing skills, a thinkpad, a secondhand wacom tablet and a version of krita

You never needed a computer for that, just a pen/pencil and paper.

For digital painting in particular though, that only became possible in the recent years. Free digital painting software sucked until recently, so 20 years ago every 18 years old just pirated commercial software. And drawing tablets only became cheap and good after Wacom battery-less patents expired (alternatively, with the advent of iPads with pens that a lot of parents bought for their kids, and cheap drawing software in the App Store).

I'm not even starting on 3D, which always required beefy hardware. Tinkering with Maya/3DSMax/Lightwave in early 2000s required a really powerful gaming PC. These days you can at least rent a powerful GPU for peanuts to run the AI model.

Fraterkes · 2 years ago
Sure, the part about everyone just pirating photoshop is absolutely tue (it comes out to be the same thing though, you can't pirate hardware). My point is the gap in potential quality and art output between photoshop on a powerful pc an a pirated copy of ps on a thinkpad is pretty small: you need a lot of ram to produce 4k art, but a thinkpad is fine for most comissions. The gap is obviously a lot larger with ai: you yourself mention that sd (just one of the models people are currently using) runs slowly and with limitations. If the expectation becomes that you deliver 100 4k permutations on a certain theme, the time it takes to achieve that from a human labor standpoint will be similar, but the time that takes to render wise will vary orders of magnitude based on your resources. Not to mention that a workflow with a realtime refresh rate is qualititavely different frome one that runs 0.1fps.
bArray · 2 years ago
Trying it now and will update later (as a comment), takes a little while to download and install.

One note about the installation on Ubuntu is that you need to install Krita first, run it, and then copy the plug-in to the desired folder - otherwise there is nowhere to copy it to.

bArray · 2 years ago
Tested on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 under Ubuntu with 4GB VRAM. Initially tried with a 4Kx4K canvas size, but it seems too much and fails. I lowered the canvas to 2Kx2K and it seems to just about be okay.

My test prompt (to compare against other models):

> (masterpiece, best quality), a giant made of rock, highly detailed, rock texture

For Cinematic Photo XL this produces a picture of rocks. For Digital Artwork XL I get a nice scene with a complex rock structure. Both take about two minutes.

It seems to work well and the integration into Krita seems quite nice. The settings are suitably simple, but would be nice if more was exposed in an advanced window or something.

axytol · 2 years ago
They list under hardware requirements "a powerful graphics card with at least 6 GB VRAM is recommended. Otherwise generating images will take very long"

Does anyone have any idea what would very long mean on a 4GB VRAM card?

simbolit · 2 years ago
user @bArray 35minutes ago:

"Tested on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 under Ubuntu with 4GB VRAM. (...) lowered the canvas to 2Kx2K and it seems to just about be okay. My test prompt (...) produces a picture of rocks. (...) I get a nice scene (...) Both take about two minutes."

Zelizz · 2 years ago
My very-rough feeling about it from playing around with Stable Diffusion is that it takes about 4x as long if it runs out of GPU memory and needs to shuttle data back and forth from system memory. There are a lot of variables though - on my 3070 with 8GB of RAM, I can get very impressive 512x512 images in about 10 seconds with somewhat low sample counts, or I can set it to a higher resolution and sample count with 2x upscaling and get a really sharp image in around 2 minutes.

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