Some of these are very obviously trained on webtoons and manga, probably pixiv as well. This is very clear due to seeing CG buildings and other misc artifacts. So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting. So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
While being very pro AI in terms of any kind of trademaking and copyright, it still make me wonder what will happen to all the people who provided us with entertainment and if the quality continue to increase or if we're going to start losing challenging styles because "it's too hard for ai" and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It doesn't feel the same as people being replaced with computer and machines, this feels like the end of a road.
It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone.
Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences.
There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
Disclaimer: I'm an artist with 30+ years of experience.
Downgraded to AI training? Nonsense. You forget artists do more than just draw for money, we also draw for FUN, and that little detail escapes every single AI-related discussion I've been reading for the last 3 years.
Not an artist myself. I think some artists may become more like head chefs in some Chinese restaurant, who is more like QA and give direction to cooks to improve their work. I think it is hard to notice the details and give concrete feedback if you are not working on it professionally for a long time.
The issue is whether the artists creating things for love of the game will be crowded out even further by studios churning out slop (or in HN terms, Minimal Viable Products) for cash. There are probably 15 disposable reality TV shows created for every scripted sitcom or drama that needs good writers, set designers and directors.
> So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
Doesn’t sound too bad? It sounds like the premise of a dystopian novel. Most artists would be profoundly unhappy making “art” to be fed to and deconstructed by a machine. You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine. “Art” is not drawing random pictures. And how, pray tell, will these artists survive? Who is going to be paying them to “draw whatever they like” to feed to models? And why would they employ more than two or three?
> it still make me wonder (…) if we're going to start losing challenging styles (…) and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It already does. There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
> You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine.
That's the definition of commercial art, which is what most art is.
> “Art” is not drawing random pictures.
It's exactly what it is, if you're talking about people churning out art by volume for money. It's drawing whatever they get told to, in endless variations. Those are the people you're really talking about, because those are the ones whose livelihoods are being consumed by AI right now.
The kind of art you're thinking of, the art that isn't just "drawing random pictures", the art that the term "deconstruction" could even sensibly apply to - that art isn't in as much danger just yet. GenAI can't replicate human expression, because models aren't people. In time, they'll probably become so, but then art will still be art, and we'll have bigger issues to worry about.
> There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
Now that is just marketing communications - advertising, sales, and associated fraud. GenAI is making everyone's lives worse by making the job of marketers easier. But that's not really the fault of AI, it's just the people who were already making everything shitty picking up new tools. It's not the AI that's malevolent here, it's the wielder.
The problem I have with the whole copyright AI thing is that the big ones benefit. If you reference any famous Copyright in chatgpt etc. you will get blocked but a small artist's stuff is not.
We probably should just stop enforcing copyright. “Stealing” my idea doesn’t deprive me of its use. Think about what the US market might look like if scaling and efficiency were rewarded rather than legal capture of markets. That large companies can buy and bury technology IP to maintain a market position is a tremendous loss for the rest of us.
"Might makes right" is how we got here. Airbnb and Uber can break hotel and taxi regulations openly, but if you start your own ride-for-cash service, the state will shut you down for any number of by-law violations. They have law firms and lobbyists on retainer and you don't. Similarly, copyright infringement could be a jail sentence for you, but a "legal gray area" for them.
I find it interesting that you echo the concerns of people who defend artists’ copyright claims, while stating that you are very pro AI in terms of copyright.
It’s a very emotionally loaded space for many, meaning most comments I read lean to the extremes of either argument, so seeing a comment like yours that combines both makes me curious.
Would be interesting to hear a bit more about how you see the role of copyright in the AI space.
At first it will obviously make it easier for artists to create what they want at the expense of doing everything yourself which will take the fun out of it. At first we might see some raise in the money some people can make, but as I said the choice artists will have in the end is being someone who draws pictures for a machine to be trained on.
I also think AI is the next evolution of humanity.
Not GP, though I agree with their views, and make my money from copyrighted work (writing novels).
The role of the artist has always been to provide excellent training data for future minds to educate themselves with.
This is why public libraries, free galleries, etc are so important.
Historically, art has been ‘best’ when the process of its creation has been heavily funded by a wealthy body (the church or state, for example).
‘Copyright’, as a legal idea, hasn’t existed for very long, relative to ‘subsidizing the creation of excellent training data’.
If ‘excellent training data for educating minds’ genuinely becomes a bottleneck for AI (though I’d argue it’s always a bottleneck for humanity!), funding its creation seems a no-brainer for an AI company, though they may balk at the messiness of that process.
I would strongly prefer that my taxes paid for this subsidization, so that the training data could be freely accessed by human minds or other types of mind.
Copyright isn’t anything more than a paywall, in my opinion. Art isn’t for revenue generation - it’s for catalyzing revenue generation.
Audiences too. People loses interest fast for anything that something faceless can provide, whether the thing is machines or humans, or whether the act is drawing art or assembling iPhone.
I think "text" is irrelevant, the distinction is between art and the synthetic, where art might be written or visual. It's a vague term that's often used to mean "graphics", confusing matters, and the meaning of art is endlessly debated, like the meaning of intelligence.
Obviously we have synthetic graphics (like synthetic text). So something else must be meant by "art" here.
I think the “paper rock cross blade” short films by Corridor is absolute great and can by all accounts be called art and if they make a 3rd they will probably use this model.
In terms of losing styles, that is already been happening for ages. Disney moved to xeroxing instead of inking, changed the style because inking was “too hard”. In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw a burst of cartoons with a flash animation style on TV because it was a lot easier and cheaper to animate in flash.
I disagree with the positive characterisation. Those videos have a funny schtick of exaggerating anime tropes for a couple of minutes and that’s the extent of it. The animation is all over the place, reactions, expressions, mouth movements often fail, style changes from frame to frame. It maybe kind of works precisely because it’s a short exaggerated parody and we have a high tolerance for flaws in comedy, but even then the seams are showing. Anything even remotely more substantive would no longer have worked.
You know, I wouldn't short what AI can do in the future, even if not trained on lots of art. It does not seem far out to me to think an AI could be trained to identify in images concepts like structure, balance, contrast, composition, narrative, etc, and then to pursue generation of such in procedural, iterative loops of drawing/painting using test time compute and a prompt for an objective.
>So this is obviously trained on copyrighted material.
Is it? I have no knowledge of this product, but I recall Novel AI paid for a database of tagged Anime style images. Its not impossible for something similar to have happened here.
AI is just going to absolutely blow the bottom 50% out of any market it's in.
Examples:
Disney isn't going to start using AI art. But all those gacha games on the iOS app store are ABSOLUTELY going to. And I suspect gacha apps support at least 10-100x more artists than Disney staffs.
Staff engineers aren't going anywhere - AI can't tell leadership the truth. But junior engineers are going to be gutted by this, because now their already somewhat dubious direct value proposition - turning tickets into code while they train up enough to participate more in the creative and social process of Software Engineering - now gets blasted by LLMs. Mind you, I don't personally hold this ultra-myopic view of juniors - but mgmt absolutely does, and they pick headcount.
Hmm yknow I could actually see Big Books getting the "top" end eaten by AI instead of the bottom, actually. All the penny dreadfuls you see lining the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Vs the truly creative work already happens at the bottom anyway, and is self-published.
Also, as someone who's watched copyright from the perspective of a GPL fanboy, good fucking luck actually enforcing anything copyright related. The legal system is pay to play and if you're a small (or even medium!) fry, you will probably never even know your copyright is being violated. Much less enforcing it or getting any kind of judgement.
I think many artists will see that if they publish anything original then AI companies will immediately use it as training data without regards to copyright.
The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.
IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
AI will do the same for illustration.
It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.
I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.
Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.
Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.
> music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
Is there data for this? I feel there's more musicians than ever and there's more very talented musicians than ever and the most famous ones are more famous than ever so I would like to see if that's correct.
I don't think future tense is appropriate here as it's been few years since appearance of open weights image models. We're already transitioning into the gap phase between Napster to Vocaloid.
I wonder if there is a mitigation strategy for this. Is there a way to make (human-made-art) scraping robustly difficult, while leaving human discovery and exploration intact?
It is a fluke visual training sets are far less amenable to sabotage than textual ones. Not that I suggest engaging in such a horrible, terrible, very bad manners, do I?
> Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting.
The rise of GPT slop is making it increasingly clear to me that this distinction doesn't exist, and it's just an under-appreciation of the skill that goes into good writing. That thing where LLMs generate overly-wordy mealy-mouthed text is just what bad writing looks like: the writing equivalent of a bad drawing. Subtle inaccuracies and ill-fitting metaphors are just the text version of visual artifacts.
Not to diminish the plight of art and artists, but it's the same as the plight of writers and writing. Writers are also having their copyrighted works used against their will to destroy their own industry. LLMs also need big human-written datasets to keep the magic running, that are drying up as they get poisoned by their own output.
Literally the first proper anime series (not including movies or like DBZ) that I ever watched. Still fondly remember it and still salty about how the director killed it. It would be the greatest gift of a lifetime if anyone ever either finished the series or rebooted and completed it.
1. Haruhi is based on light novels, so has to actually perform to get a release. Japanese market is upside down, the anime often goes to free to air to support a manga release where the real money is made (I have no idea how this works economically this is just how its explained to me) as there isn't any more manga or light novels to release, the likelihood of another season is low. It was sort of always a passion project.
I tested this out with a promotional illustration from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The model works quite well, but there are some temporal artifacts w.r.t. the animation of the hair as the head turns:
> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p
video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.
I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.
There are so many glitches even on the very first example. Arm of the shirt glitching, moving hair disappear and appear out of no where. Rest is just moving arm and clouds.
Readit News
Art is something that cannot be generated like synthetic text so it will have to be nearly forever powered by human artists or else you will continue to end up with artifacting. So it makes me wonder if artists will just be downgraded to an "AI" training position, but it could be for the best as people can draw what they like instead and have that input feed into a model for training which doesn't sound too bad.
While being very pro AI in terms of any kind of trademaking and copyright, it still make me wonder what will happen to all the people who provided us with entertainment and if the quality continue to increase or if we're going to start losing challenging styles because "it's too hard for ai" and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It doesn't feel the same as people being replaced with computer and machines, this feels like the end of a road.
As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower.
In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.
The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators.
The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.
The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
It will be like furniture.
A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone.
Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences.
There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct.
You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
Downgraded to AI training? Nonsense. You forget artists do more than just draw for money, we also draw for FUN, and that little detail escapes every single AI-related discussion I've been reading for the last 3 years.
Doesn’t sound too bad? It sounds like the premise of a dystopian novel. Most artists would be profoundly unhappy making “art” to be fed to and deconstructed by a machine. You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine. “Art” is not drawing random pictures. And how, pray tell, will these artists survive? Who is going to be paying them to “draw whatever they like” to feed to models? And why would they employ more than two or three?
> it still make me wonder (…) if we're going to start losing challenging styles (…) and everything will start 'felling' the same.
It already does. There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
That's the definition of commercial art, which is what most art is.
> “Art” is not drawing random pictures.
It's exactly what it is, if you're talking about people churning out art by volume for money. It's drawing whatever they get told to, in endless variations. Those are the people you're really talking about, because those are the ones whose livelihoods are being consumed by AI right now.
The kind of art you're thinking of, the art that isn't just "drawing random pictures", the art that the term "deconstruction" could even sensibly apply to - that art isn't in as much danger just yet. GenAI can't replicate human expression, because models aren't people. In time, they'll probably become so, but then art will still be art, and we'll have bigger issues to worry about.
> There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.
Now that is just marketing communications - advertising, sales, and associated fraud. GenAI is making everyone's lives worse by making the job of marketers easier. But that's not really the fault of AI, it's just the people who were already making everything shitty picking up new tools. It's not the AI that's malevolent here, it's the wielder.
Open it for all or nothing.
It’s a very emotionally loaded space for many, meaning most comments I read lean to the extremes of either argument, so seeing a comment like yours that combines both makes me curious.
Would be interesting to hear a bit more about how you see the role of copyright in the AI space.
I also think AI is the next evolution of humanity.
The role of the artist has always been to provide excellent training data for future minds to educate themselves with.
This is why public libraries, free galleries, etc are so important.
Historically, art has been ‘best’ when the process of its creation has been heavily funded by a wealthy body (the church or state, for example).
‘Copyright’, as a legal idea, hasn’t existed for very long, relative to ‘subsidizing the creation of excellent training data’.
If ‘excellent training data for educating minds’ genuinely becomes a bottleneck for AI (though I’d argue it’s always a bottleneck for humanity!), funding its creation seems a no-brainer for an AI company, though they may balk at the messiness of that process.
I would strongly prefer that my taxes paid for this subsidization, so that the training data could be freely accessed by human minds or other types of mind.
Copyright isn’t anything more than a paywall, in my opinion. Art isn’t for revenue generation - it’s for catalyzing revenue generation.
With AI tools artists will be able to push further, doing things that AI can't do yet.
10 years ago: "real real text cannot be generated like stock phrases, so writing will be nearly forever powered by human writers."
Obviously we have synthetic graphics (like synthetic text). So something else must be meant by "art" here.
In terms of losing styles, that is already been happening for ages. Disney moved to xeroxing instead of inking, changed the style because inking was “too hard”. In the late 90s/early 2000s we saw a burst of cartoons with a flash animation style on TV because it was a lot easier and cheaper to animate in flash.
Of course it can be, you're seeing it first hand with your very own eyes.
There's a difference, in my mind at least. "Art" is cultural activity and expression, there needs to be intent, creativity, imagination..
A printer spooling out wallpaper is not making art, even if there was artistry involved in making the initial pattern that is now being spooled out.
Deleted Comment
Is it? I have no knowledge of this product, but I recall Novel AI paid for a database of tagged Anime style images. Its not impossible for something similar to have happened here.
Examples:
Disney isn't going to start using AI art. But all those gacha games on the iOS app store are ABSOLUTELY going to. And I suspect gacha apps support at least 10-100x more artists than Disney staffs.
Staff engineers aren't going anywhere - AI can't tell leadership the truth. But junior engineers are going to be gutted by this, because now their already somewhat dubious direct value proposition - turning tickets into code while they train up enough to participate more in the creative and social process of Software Engineering - now gets blasted by LLMs. Mind you, I don't personally hold this ultra-myopic view of juniors - but mgmt absolutely does, and they pick headcount.
Hmm yknow I could actually see Big Books getting the "top" end eaten by AI instead of the bottom, actually. All the penny dreadfuls you see lining the shelves of Barnes and Noble. Vs the truly creative work already happens at the bottom anyway, and is self-published.
Also, as someone who's watched copyright from the perspective of a GPL fanboy, good fucking luck actually enforcing anything copyright related. The legal system is pay to play and if you're a small (or even medium!) fry, you will probably never even know your copyright is being violated. Much less enforcing it or getting any kind of judgement.
Deleted Comment
The result will be less original art. They will simply stop creating it or publishing it.
IMO music streaming has similarly lead to a collapse in quality music artistry, as fewer talented individuals are incentivised to go down that path.
AI will do the same for illustration.
It won’t do the same for _art_ in the “contemporary art” sense, as great art is mostly beyond the abilities of AI models. That’s probably an AGI complete task. That’s the good news.
I’m kinda sad about it. The abilities of the models are impressive, but they rely on harvesting the collective efforts of so many talented and hardworking artists, who are facing a double whammy: their own work is being dubiously used to put them out of a job.
Sometimes I feel like the tech community had an opportunity to create a wonderful future powered by technology. And what we decided to do instead was enshittify the world with ads, undermine the legal system, and extract value from people’s work without their permission.
Back in the day real hackers used to gather online to “stick it to the man”. They despised the greed and exploitation of Wall Street. And now we have become torch bearers for the very same greed.
Is there data for this? I feel there's more musicians than ever and there's more very talented musicians than ever and the most famous ones are more famous than ever so I would like to see if that's correct.
I wonder if there is a mitigation strategy for this. Is there a way to make (human-made-art) scraping robustly difficult, while leaving human discovery and exploration intact?
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
The rise of GPT slop is making it increasingly clear to me that this distinction doesn't exist, and it's just an under-appreciation of the skill that goes into good writing. That thing where LLMs generate overly-wordy mealy-mouthed text is just what bad writing looks like: the writing equivalent of a bad drawing. Subtle inaccuracies and ill-fitting metaphors are just the text version of visual artifacts.
Not to diminish the plight of art and artists, but it's the same as the plight of writers and writing. Writers are also having their copyrighted works used against their will to destroy their own industry. LLMs also need big human-written datasets to keep the magic running, that are drying up as they get poisoned by their own output.
Deleted Comment
1. Haruhi is based on light novels, so has to actually perform to get a release. Japanese market is upside down, the anime often goes to free to air to support a manga release where the real money is made (I have no idea how this works economically this is just how its explained to me) as there isn't any more manga or light novels to release, the likelihood of another season is low. It was sort of always a passion project.
2. The studio was firebombed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Animation_arson_attack
3. Season 2 was critically panned, but I dunno I thought it was pretty genius.
My suggestion, watch both series, then read the english translation of the novels.
The IP is likely doa anyway as it's on indefinite hiatus
https://goto.isaac.sh/neon-anisora
Prompt: The giant head turns to face the two people sitting.
Oh, there is a docs page with more examples:
https://pwz4yo5eenw.feishu.cn/docx/XN9YdiOwCoqJuexLdCpcakSln...
> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.
I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.
https://lllyasviel.github.io/frame_pack_gitpage
Looks incredibly impressive btw. Not sure it's wise to call it `AniSora` but I don't really know.
> This model has 1 file scanned as unsafe. testvl-pre76-top187-rec69.pth
Hm, perhaps I'll wait for this to get cleared up?
Given that OpenAI call themselves "Open", I think it's great and hilarious that we're reusing their names.
There was OpenSora from around this time last year:
https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora
And there are a lot of other products calling themselves "Sora" as well.
It's also interesting to note that OpenAI recently redirected sora.com, which used to be its own domain, to sora.chatgpt.com.
Probably to share cookies.
Deleted Comment