Some random predictions about what AI image generation tools will do/are doing to art:
1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important.
2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.)
4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.
> 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
> 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist.
It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
> 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve.
> 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form.
AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :)
I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.
It's kind of like the difference between something being enjoyable for you, and something being widely popular?
In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?
There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.
Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.
Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.
I agree with everything you said, except that #1 is clearly wrong. I can prove it with one word: autotune.
At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.
On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
It may seem like this, but up to now, you haven't been able to divorce a story from its creator because every story has an author, whether it's a novel like Harry Potter or a movie that has a writer and director. When you're experiencing the story, in the back of your mind, you always know that there is someone who created the story to tell you some kind of message. And so you can't experience something like a movie without trying to figure out what the actual message behind the movie was. It is always the implicit message behind the story that makes it valuable versus just the elements of the story.
The story has more weight because it is the distillation of somebody else's life and most likely, if it's a successful story or book, it is the most important lesson from that person's life and that's what makes it more valuable compared to the random generation of words from a computer.
The food analogy is that a cookie baked and given to you by a friend is going to taste far better than anything you buy in a store.
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life.
And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life
1. I meant artists writ large, not specifically movies. My point being that community management, PR, having a brand, etc. are becoming a key element of an individual artist’s career. Examples of this abound – see the recent Markiplier film as a case in point. That movie did well because Mark’s audience wanted to help him, not because it’s such an original genius concept for a movie.
But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?
> You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
You misunderstand their point: it's not that AI can't make art that looks cool, it's that a portion of society (mostly artists but a certain amount of lay people) who consider the act of prompting AI for art to not have any cultural cache, or even to be socially distasteful.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
I reckon we copy God - who is a creator - which means we're creators too - and our creations will copy us. But the created won't ever match the creator.
Well, there are definitely people who care about the vision and style of movies from certain directors. It's not so much "story" like plot, but story in the sense of a "brand story" where there's recognizable elements in all the work, repeated themes, changes and decisions and evolution to how they approach things.
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.
>"You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
This is a contradiction that is so blatant I don't even know what language you're speaking. The definition of that phrase is the exact opposite of what you're saying.
"You're currently here" is the always existing point which is achieved at the moment.
>gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
No it doesn't, because unless progress is reversed or undone, you can always point to your current success and say that the critics have been wrong so far. In fact, that's exactly the argument you're making here, which is why it's so weird that you're twisting it into its opposite.
If you want people to understand you, then you actually have to articulate what you're thinking instead of wrapping it in layers of euphemisms and hoping that the recipient nods along because they happen to agree for a completely irrelevant reason (e.g. "I like AI" or "I like space") to the argument presented.
>It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.
I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.
I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
> When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.
I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.
That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.
AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.
The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important
We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.
I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.
I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.
This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.
Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?
This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
Football anime doesn’t involve real people or stakes. AI can introduce a storyline, characters, etc. It won't necessarily be as popular as the real sport but I doubt the audience is zero.
The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
We'll get to the point, if we're not already there, where you won't be able to tell if the artist actually did the work or just could have done it, and to which extent. Everything in the process can be essentially faked. If you put a massive emphasis on proving human work, you're essentially conceding you cannot tell without some sort of notary certification. We're in the lab diamond stage and clutching at some artificial authenticity.
> 4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand.
Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
It's a harrowing situation to watch simpleminded idiots in forums proclaim that artists, some even naming top talent, are going to be useless and that they can steal their handiwork just by naming them in prompts. And people actually dare to say this with such audacity. Those who create GenAI likely do not realize what lowlife impulses some of these individuals have.
No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent.
It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.
I don’t know that this has to be the way. One thing that is really going to confound this very common idea that taste and quality and personal characteristics will win the day, is that you can use AI to represent all of these to other people.
It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.
I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
My prediction: KNOWLEDGE of whether something is made by AI or a human will be alpha and omega, and will eventually be regulated used in commercial contexts. You will always be able to generate something, but if you somehow get exposed presenting it as human made, the sanctions will hurt you.
1. This sounds more like influencer marketing, I think people are already sick of it.
2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of.
> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
Regarding point 2: I think most people cannot destinguish between "genuine" creativity and artificial almalgamation of training data and human provided context. For one, I do not know what already exsists. Some work created by AI may be an obvious rip off of the style of a particular artist, but I wouldnt know. To me it might look awesome and fresh.
Furthermore, I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
I think we fall into the trap of seeing art from a consumption point of view. “Of what use is a human vs AI piece of art to Me?” Art is residing in the productive space too, the artist is considering not his/her utility but his/her presence in the world. Maybe what you describe is the way forward for art monetisation but not for art, and we know experientially how the production of real art is not always in tandem with its appreciation.
I am also glad the
commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.
Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
This is a great and worthwhile discussion. People are loosing sight of what art is. The art is the idea, not the medium. And just because something is easy, doesn't mean it will be good.
I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.
>2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.
Should a randomly-shuffled deck of cards be considered art? After all, the card shuffling machine created something which statistically has never existed before. Every shuffled deck should belong in a museum, right?
On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.
I think the most important is number 2. People are now looking for things that are made by humans. Most detest AI slop. And if they find out that you are peddling slop, you lost trust.
It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.
Crucially, chest is also thriving as a spectator sport - and what's drawing the views is not the high-level matches: people are far more interested in more fast-paced and casual content, where the personality of the streamer can shine through.
On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.
Re: But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.
Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.
N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
I'm building my personal home right now. The AI image models have been a game-changer in designing the look of the house. My architect did an OK job, but the details that Nano Banana added really bring the house up a notch. I just do hundreds of renders from the basic 3D models and I find looks that I like and iterate from there. We are implementing the renders from Nano Banana over our Interior Designers designs. We would not have hired the Interior Designers again after using Nano Banana to do our interiors.
I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.
Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.
Part of the job of interior design is delivering the promised images in … yknow, physical reality? How are you going from nano banana images to actual plans, materials, finishes, products, paint codes, … ?
Not everyone can afford the best interior designers, my sister had hired one to design the interiors of her new cafe.. the designer did not provide any renders, just a basic CAD drawing. Then I used nano banana pro to create some renders from the photos of the empty space. These turned out great, and she decided to ditch the designer and use the designs created by nano banana. The cafe has opened now, and it looks great!
not the op, but this is what i did too and bypassed the designer. I iterated with nano banana and gave the result to the company that builds the kitchen. the middleman is gone now.
A designer knows things from experience and would be aware of small details that if not designed correctly, become very apparent when built in reality.
The interior designer doesn't really do squat. They can do plan drawings and have some off the shelf cupboards and furniture. They don't implement anything
NB Pro can do some seriously impressive edits around interior decorating - see the prompt that replaces the window with a mirror which correctly reflects the room. It's not perfect, but it's still damn impressive.
I'm deeply impressed, especially with the "replace window by mirror". It did not only do the window thing right, it also changed the illumination of the whole room while keeping all the other details unchanged.
Same! I redid my backyard entirely and needed ideas. Gemini took a pile of dirt and gave me countless ideas, improved my plans, recommended materials, etc. a designer gave me two out of the box ideas that Gemini didn’t come up with, but it did everything else perfectly. (Designer said, put a patio out in the yard and put your table there, and take your ugly shed and make it the center of attention, since you’ll never succeeed trying to hide it)
Same thing here. I took a picture of some gravel/grass and asked it to show me what it'd look like with tiles. I showed it another part of the property, and asked it to show me what it would look like with a raised lawn. Super impressive to be able to see a cloudy idea in the physical realm like that.
Can you write a bit more about your workflow? I've been thinking about doing the same, but since I'm very non-interior-design minded have struggled to ask the right things.
Like...
What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos?
Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?
Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?
I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr
Mine was far more lightweight, but u just uploaded pics of my yard and prompted manually a bunch of times. Sometimes id find reference images to give as context, draw on the image to call out specific areas, etc.
It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.
I actually built an app to accomplish this exact thing as I was finishing building my home and was clueless when it came to interior design. I'm genuinely astonished by the capabilities of these models with regards to this, and it feels vastly underutilized by the general populace. Being able to try out multiple paint colors in seconds, or add real furniture or wall decor from Ikea, or move objects around instantly - it still blows my mind.
The cost of doing more complex designs is analogous to the cost of doing more complex builds.
If you can afford the extra cost for someone to figure out how to build the blue sky designs that nano banana spits out, maybe you can afford something more thoughtful and interesting than a shitty mashup of other peoples mcmansions.
Out of curiosity: what is your input to the model? A CAD file or a drawing?
I find it does a good job at isometric views from floor plans. However, I needed Gemini 3.1 Pro to be able to have a chance at rendering 3D human point of view images from floor plans.
Any chance you'd be willing to share an album? I've considered doing this for my own home and I'd be psyched to study practical examples. Honestly this would make one helluva blog post (imo).
Is any of this intrinsically a strength of Nano Banana, while not of other models/generative tools? Have you tried doing the same with say Klein, ZIT, etc.?
Nano Banana was the first generative image tool that seemed to understand architecture. I have some 18th century engravings that I've been trying to get AI tools to visualize as though they were photographs of real structures, and the results were comically bad until Nano Banana came along. I remember seeing the announcement, dropping a sketch into Gemini with the prompt "Make this a photo" and it preserved all the features and dimensions, but added photorealistic textures.
I still do a lot of modeling of historical buildings in Sketchup and Twinmotion, but Nano Banana has really helped me with more easily visualizing a world before photography.
These image gen models are getting so advanced and life like that increasingly the general public are being duped into believing AI images are actually real (ex Facebook food images or fake OF models). Don't get me wrong I will enjoy the benefits of using this model for expressing myself better than ever before, but can't help feeling there's something also very insidious about these models too.
It's more likely than not that every single person who uses the internet has viewed an AI image and taken it as real by now.
The obvious ones stand out, but there are so many that are indiscernible without spending lots of time digging through it. Even then there are ones that you can at best guess it's maybe AI gen.
People will continue to retreat into walled, trusted networks where they can have more confidence in the content they see. I can’t even be sure I’m responding to a real person right now.
Maybe not an actual argument for anything, but even before these image models everyone that used the internet had seen a doctored image they believed to be real. There was a reason that 'i can tell by the pixels' was a meme.
At the point now where basically any photo that isn't shared by someone I trust or a reputable news organisation is essentially unverifiable as being real or not
The positive aspect of this advance is that I've basically stopped using social media because of the creeping sense that everything is slop
people only notice when they are prompted to look for AI or scrutinize AI
a lot of these accounts mix old clips with new AI clips
or tag onto something emotional like a fake Epstein file image with your favorite politician, and pointing out its AI has people thinking you’re deflecting because you support the politician
Meanwhile the engagement farmer is completely exempt from scrutiny
Its fascinating how fast and unexpected the direction goes
I actually think this was a good thing. Manipulating images incredibly convincingly was already possible but the cost was high (many hours of highly skilled work). So many people assumed that most images they were seeing were "authentic" without much consideration. By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn that they can't believe what they see on the internet and tracking down sources and deciding who you trust is critically important. People have always said that you can't believe what you see on the internet, but unfortunately many people have managed without major issue ignoring this advice. This wave will force them to take that advice to heart by default.
I remember telling my parents at a young age that I couldn't be sure Ronald Reagan was real, because I'd only ever seen him on TV and never in real life, and I knew things on TV could be fake.
That was the beginning of my journey into understanding what proper verification/vetting of a source is. It's been going on for a long time and there are always new things to learn. This should be taught to every child, starting early on.
I used to also have this optimistic take, but over time I think the reality is that most people will instead just distrust unknown online sources and fall into the mental shortcuts of confirmation bias and social proof. Net effect will be even more polarization and groupthink.
> By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn that they can't believe what they see on the internet and tracking down sources and deciding who you trust is critically important.
Has this thought process ever worked in real life? I know plenty of seniors who still believe everything that comes out of Facebook, be AI or not, and before that it was the TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
Most people choose to believe, which is why they have a hard time confronting facts.
> By making these fake images ubiquitous we are forcing people to quickly learn
That's quite the high opinion on the self-improvement ability of your Average Joe. This kind of behavior only comes with an awareness, previously learned, and an alertness of mind. You need the population at large to be able to do this. How if not, say, teaching this at schools and waiting for the next generation to reach adulthood, would you expect this to happen?
When it comes to graphic content on the internet I usually consume it's for entertainment purposes. I didn't care where it came from before and don't care today either. Low quality content exists in both categories, a bit easier to spot in AI generated, so it's actually a bonus.
I feel like there is one or two generations of people who are tech savy and not 100% gullible when it comes to online things. Older and younger generations are both completely lost imho, in a blind test you wouldn't discern a monkey from a human scrolling tiktok &co
Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.
In reality: millions of boomers are scrolling FB this very minute reacting to the most obviously fake rage/surprise/love bait AI slop you've ever seen.
People already have access to every form of niche pornography they could dare to imagine (for absolutely free!), I really doubt that 'personal taste' is the part that makes OF models their money. They'll be fine.
I don't think so. Talking to people in this space, I've found out about broad camps. There are probably more:
-They simply aren't into real women/men (so you couldn't even pay a model to do what they're looking for).
-They want to play out fantasies that would be hard to coordinate even if you could pay models (I guess this is more on the video side of things, but a string of photos can put be together into a comic)
-They want to generate imagery that would be illegal
Based on this, I would guess fetish artists (as in illustrators) are more at risk than OF models. However, AI isn't free. Depending on what you're looking for, commissions might be cheaper still for quite a while...
Even ignoring the model censorship making high quality sexual imagery/videos not possible, this is a crazy take. You think OF models are making money because it's the only way to see a nude man/woman with particular characteristics on the internet?
You're completely misunderstanding what the product being sold is.
You can’t really because these powerful models are censored.
You can create lewd pictures with open models but they aren’t nearly as good or easy to use.
It stands for "OnlyFans" a website originally for creators to engage directly with their audiences but quickly became a website where women sold explicit pictures of themselves to subscribers.
Jaded, but if I knew there was a possibility of a bunch of incriminating footage of me (images, video, etc.) out there in the pre-AI days, I would do my absolute best to flood the internet with as many related deepfakes (including of myself) as possible.
Oh we’ve seen nothing yet of the chaos that generative ai will unleash on the world, looking at Meta platforms it’s already a multi million dollar industry of selling something or someone that doesn’t exist. And that’s just the benign stuff.
This has been true for a while with digital art, photoshop, etc. Over time, people's BS detectors get tuned. I mean, scrolling by quickly in a feed, yeah, you might miss if an image is "real" or not, but if you see a series of photos side by side of the same subject (like an OF model), you'll figure it out.
Also, using AI will not allow you to better express yourself. To use an analogy, it will not put your self-expression into any better focus, but just apply one of the stock IG filters to it.
> a series of photos side by side of the same subject
Cameras are now "enhancing" photos with AI automatically. The contents of a 'real' photo are increasingly generated. The line is blurring and it's only going to get worse.
It's shitty, but I think it's almost as bad that people are calling everything AI. And I can't even blame them, despite how infuriating it is. It's just as insidious that even mundane things literally ARE AI now. I've seen at least twice now (that I'm aware of) where some cute, harmless, otherwise non-outrageous animal video was hiding a Sora watermark. So the crazy shit is AI. The mundane shit is AI. You wonder why everyone is calling everything AI now. :P
It seems like a low level paranoia - now I find myself double checking that the youtube video I'm watching isn't some AI slop. All the creators use Getty b-rolls and increasingly AI generated stuff so much that it's not a far stretch to have the voice and script all be auto generated too.
I suppose if the AI was able to tell me a true and compelling story, I might not even mind so much. I just don't want to be spoon fed drivel for 15 minutes to find it was all complete made up BS.
What they've chosen as examples to illustrate the strength of the new model surprises me.
The "cubism" example seems like it would be a closer fit to something like stained glass or something. I don't think the thing really understands what cubism was all about. Cubist painters were trying to free themselves from the confines of a single integral plane of perspective by allowing themselves to show various parts of the image from different viewpoints, different times, different styles, etc.
The division of the image into geometric shapes is just a by-product of that quest, whereas the examples here have made it the sum total of the whole piece.
This feels to me like an example of how LLMs still don't "understand" what the art means, and are just aping its facade.
I had a similar thought before realizing that I'm pretty sure what they were demonstrating wasn't art style, but adherence to correct physical dimensions and construction of the buildings referenced, that was then expressed in an art style (or reasonable facsimile thereof). The before prompts would just conjure a random building out of thin air, the after prompts searched the web for reference material and then used that in image generation.
And actually, the link I saw a bit ago was this [0] which is more in-depth and has a lot more examples + prompts.
I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
I believe this is the reason for a return to interest in analog media with both my generation (millenials) and gen-z. I do wedding photography on the side, and the past ~2 years have seen a huge increase in requests for film photography, either exclusively film or as an add-on to digital. Offering film has been one of the best things I've done for my side hustle.
Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.
The best weddings I've been to had a photo booth where you can have photos printed out (any number) and texted to you. I think that's the best way to do it. I agree, people like physical photos still. I've bought my wife several different ways to print photos, including a smaller portable printer, and one of those Instant photo cameras.
Interesting how this matches the Matrix timeline. According to Agent Smith, 1999 represented the height of human civilization before things started to decline.
Not only 1999 prevents humans from becoming too advanced and invent new AI again, it is a believable and comfortable era. A perfect time, perfectly balanced between analog and digital.
This is something I predicted when image/music/other creative art models first came out, as many were crying that art as a medium was dead thanks to Stable Diffusion. And it does seem like I've been right (so far).
The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.
When film photography came out in the 1830s, painters and intellectuals were really mad about it commoditizing and cheapening images compared to paintings.
* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]
* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. [...] But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
Had a meeting with a friend the other day, discussing the 'times' and all that is happening around us.
I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.
I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.
It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
You know, all of a sudden, I am starting to lose interest in meticulously drawn Mermaid diagrams in README, perfect grammar and spelling in doc reviews, or neat generated general photographs. They are all correctly presented, of course. But the ideas are mostly wrong, too.
I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)
The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.
I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
I don't fully agree. Perhaps you're right when it comes to images as a whole, but I think individual images themselves still capture that emotional value for me.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
Yeah I mean edge of tomorrow is a great concept though and would have worked without him. Whereas a movie that’s got less going for it like MI 5 will seem bland once he’s commodified
I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.
They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.
Probably some of us here remember paintings before the photography era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few painting per YEAR to look back on. The feel of paintings back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
> images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
> AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP.
> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.
Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?
The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.
The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.
I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.
All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
I really don't get that. I look at pictures I've taken in a digital world and I'm moved, just as I am when I see pre-digital pictures. Perhaps older images are sometimes "more special" but that's an artifact of the distance between who I was then vs now. Why would I stop feeling an emotional attachment to photos just because I have many? I really can not understand this at all.
I think you're being tricked by nostalgia. It's about the fact that of course older photos you remember have a stronger emotional tie to you (they've had more time to form that bond), and it just so happens that older photos are not digital.
In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.
I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?
Strictly speaking, I don't think it is the generation or creation that diminishes their value. it is the consumption.
You said it too:
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.
The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).
Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.
Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.
There is more to that, globalization. Now we have 8 billions humans. They are connected to the same infospace (internet) and share much more and more diverse content. Which means a lot more of emotional/interesting/helpful things. While each of them becomes less emotional.
Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.
My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.
I guess some of the appeal of those sparse photos is the element of fantasy and imagination. Wondering what it could have been. Looking at a low quality yellowing wedding photo of your grandma... It allows you to think and wonder. Seeing it in 4K video or a volumetric 4D gaussian splat in VR robs you of all that sentimental mystery.
Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.
"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
There's already a book about this: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)[0]
> The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
There is still room for art. Any photographer sees lots of pictures, but can tell the good from the bad, and find pleasure. They don't dismiss photography altogether.
Every time in human civilization there's a new technology, existing humans rail against it and want the Good Old Days back, existing children grow up to get used to it, the generation-to-be-born knows it as the normal baseline, then maybe future generations rediscover the past and take the best things about how things used to be without being held back by how bad they were. (see retro games made after retro games died)
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.
I've often had an "addictive" personality and now I see it as an over satiation, in a semantic way, sort of thing. When I found something I liked I would over saturate my self in it, and lose interest and move on faster than others I knew.
Feels like what you described describes that inner personality trait better than I have heard before.
Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )
People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.
A kind of the same happend to music. With a LP or a tape, you had to listen to all songs. Later with a CD you just skipped the not so good songs. And with MP3, you don't even bothered to save not so good songs. And now with TikTok etc. a song just have to be 20sec but has to bang hard for this short time.
> They were rare
> and special
> and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
None of these things are true for me as a millennial in the 35-45 age group. And my family was poor to boot, and we were still drowning in photos and photo albums.
Don't disagree but being the social animals we are, images and videos will never not be important. Things will always feel better when I can connect it with a friendly face.
The source, personal significance, and intent of images and videos will matter a lot, though. I'll cherish photos of my family members forever, regardless of technical excellence.
Or a photo of my freshman dorm room during exam season. Subpar image quality, lousy lighting, etc. but so many memories, positive and negative, are elicited by that fleeting glimpse from an era of excitement, boredom, stress, uncertainty, and optimism, not knowing where I was going in life, when I'd ever look back at that snapshot, but deciding on a whim to grab it during a break from cramming topics now long forgotten.
But I roll my eyes at the idea of injecting my likeness into a short clip depicting random over-the-top action sequences, no matter how photorealistic, because I've never wanted to do that.
Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.
“Still” isn’t the right word. Once Polaroid stopped making the film, closed their factories, and sold or junked their machines, their supplies did the same, and so some of the components stopped being manufactured and available for purchase. What’s sold now as Polaroid film was a reinvention of the same idea. And it’s notably not as good. The dwindling stock of unused true Polaroid film is getting absurdly expensive as a result.
The one factory you refer to was the last one, and was purchased by the Impossible Project (now Polaroid BV). So they were able to save one set of machines. But the actual process of making the film was lost. So it’s an old set of machines making a new but similar product.
I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.
The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.
Not the format.
However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.
To what extent were they correct and to what extent not? Is their correctness also linked to the correctness of the similar argument today or you're just noting the analogy?
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.
Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.
The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.
What a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo...
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
I hear this often and it's such a strange view of art, like the only thing that matters is scale and speed. It's a perspective so colored by mechanization that it fails to account for other philosophies in art. Think of what, say the Arts and Crafts movement was all about!
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
There is a tremendous amount of "art" that is produced for purely commercial reasons. It employs many thousands of people. These roles are definitely threatened by image generators.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
Art is about creating something from scratch. This isn't creating anything but cobbling together elements of scraped/stolen content to generate an imitation of prior work.
An aspect of art is this pursuit of pushing boundaries within the confines of what is considered good. Would an artist with an infinite image generator be interested in pushing said boundaries? Maybe but they will definitely miss out on getting stuck on an idea and coming up something completely new
AI isn't a tool for creating art in the same way as a paintbrush or clay. AI is describing a painting you want, then having someone else creating the artwork for you. You aren't doing art in the same way hiring a sculptor isn't doing sculpting.
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
I think of it more as that AI will destroy the profit motive in all things, not just art. What we used to think of as talent/skill/experience will no longer be scarce, because anyone will be able to make anything with a prompt. The perceived value will be in wholes built of valueless parts (gestalts).
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
(McKenna tangent). I like this version of that talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0yfxDe6jE. It's about 12 minutes and animated with some hand-drawn whiteboard drawings. Good stuff.
That's true, but you forgot a key piece in this puzzle. The AI can only produce things that already exist. It can combine new things, this is why you can it for a picture of Jesus planting a flag on the Moon. But it only works because Jesus is a concrete concept that already exists in our world. If you ask for a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon the result will be nonsensical.
Nano Banana 2 has an image search tool that looks up pictures of things and uses them in the context (and arguably, an agent could eventually figure out who jacquesm is and hunt for a photo).
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
I have the creativity of someone not at all creative (couldn't even come up with a good analogy) and the stuff I created with AI art tools is awful compared to what I see from "AI artists" on social media.
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Ironically we live in a time that, overall, is probably better for artists than the world any of those guys grew up in. People have always valued art but not the artists, and many artists through history, including the famous ones, died broke with their works only posthumously attaining value.
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
It was until ~2021 and it going rapidly downhill. I know some people that are really good at art and they got work on commission from publications, venues and so on. They have seen a significant drop in their bookings and the ones that they do get negotiate hardball because (1) everybody else is desperate too and (2) if they can't get to a deal then AI is now an alternative for the not-so-discerning public which was a fairly large chunk of the usecases.
So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.
And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...
I'll just be extremely candid: a lot of people don't give a shit about these art pieces or art in general. It's okay if you do, there is nothing wrong with that, but it's a myopic view that the world would be worse off if we didn't have a portrait of Mona Lisa.
I disagree. On the one hand, yeah, On This Day... 1776 is terrible, and it is sad to compare it to Requiem for a Dream or Pi, but even in this age where AI is available, we see tons of critically successful art being made without the use of AI.
Absolutely not a chance. You see, in the past there was nothing to train it on. And that's sort of the point: the only reason that this AI image generation works at all is because it is lifting on the hard work of the people that had the skills, put the time and the effort in.
So far it does feel more iterative than an entirely new leap in terms of capabilities, but I haven't run it through the more multimodal aspects such as editing existing images.
That being said, it actually managed the King Louie jump rope test which surprised me.
This will stay useless for editing personal pictures so long as virtually every prompt with a person in it is met with "I can't edit images of some people". For whatever reason, they've made the celeb detection so ultra-aggressive that almost everyone is detected as a (lookalike) celeb.
Readit News
1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important.
2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.)
4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.
> 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
> 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist.
It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
> 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve.
> 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form.
AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.
In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?
There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.
Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.
Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.
I’m fairly certain the original comment was referring to instances where the artist is the character/primary subject.
At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.
On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.
It may seem like this, but up to now, you haven't been able to divorce a story from its creator because every story has an author, whether it's a novel like Harry Potter or a movie that has a writer and director. When you're experiencing the story, in the back of your mind, you always know that there is someone who created the story to tell you some kind of message. And so you can't experience something like a movie without trying to figure out what the actual message behind the movie was. It is always the implicit message behind the story that makes it valuable versus just the elements of the story.
The story has more weight because it is the distillation of somebody else's life and most likely, if it's a successful story or book, it is the most important lesson from that person's life and that's what makes it more valuable compared to the random generation of words from a computer.
The food analogy is that a cookie baked and given to you by a friend is going to taste far better than anything you buy in a store.
And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life
Art is not a problem to be solved.
But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?
You misunderstand their point: it's not that AI can't make art that looks cool, it's that a portion of society (mostly artists but a certain amount of lay people) who consider the act of prompting AI for art to not have any cultural cache, or even to be socially distasteful.
Deleted Comment
I reckon we copy God - who is a creator - which means we're creators too - and our creations will copy us. But the created won't ever match the creator.
Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.
This is a contradiction that is so blatant I don't even know what language you're speaking. The definition of that phrase is the exact opposite of what you're saying.
"You're currently here" is the always existing point which is achieved at the moment.
>gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
No it doesn't, because unless progress is reversed or undone, you can always point to your current success and say that the critics have been wrong so far. In fact, that's exactly the argument you're making here, which is why it's so weird that you're twisting it into its opposite.
If you want people to understand you, then you actually have to articulate what you're thinking instead of wrapping it in layers of euphemisms and hoping that the recipient nods along because they happen to agree for a completely irrelevant reason (e.g. "I like AI" or "I like space") to the argument presented.
Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.
I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.
I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.
I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.
That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.
AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.
The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.
Dead Comment
We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.
I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.
[1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design
Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.
Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).
Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.
I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.
This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.
Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?
This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand.
Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?
I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid?
Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent.
It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.
It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.
I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of.
everything else probably yes.
This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
Furthermore, I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
Deleted Comment
Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.
Because it's real.
How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.
On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.
It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.
On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.
Dead Comment
Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.
Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.
N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.
Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.
https://mordenstar.com/blog/edits-with-nanobanana
Like... What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos? Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?
Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?
It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.
If you can afford the extra cost for someone to figure out how to build the blue sky designs that nano banana spits out, maybe you can afford something more thoughtful and interesting than a shitty mashup of other peoples mcmansions.
Clearly i am triggered..
I find it does a good job at isometric views from floor plans. However, I needed Gemini 3.1 Pro to be able to have a chance at rendering 3D human point of view images from floor plans.
I still do a lot of modeling of historical buildings in Sketchup and Twinmotion, but Nano Banana has really helped me with more easily visualizing a world before photography.
The obvious ones stand out, but there are so many that are indiscernible without spending lots of time digging through it. Even then there are ones that you can at best guess it's maybe AI gen.
The positive aspect of this advance is that I've basically stopped using social media because of the creeping sense that everything is slop
a lot of these accounts mix old clips with new AI clips
or tag onto something emotional like a fake Epstein file image with your favorite politician, and pointing out its AI has people thinking you’re deflecting because you support the politician
Meanwhile the engagement farmer is completely exempt from scrutiny
Its fascinating how fast and unexpected the direction goes
That was the beginning of my journey into understanding what proper verification/vetting of a source is. It's been going on for a long time and there are always new things to learn. This should be taught to every child, starting early on.
Has this thought process ever worked in real life? I know plenty of seniors who still believe everything that comes out of Facebook, be AI or not, and before that it was the TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
Most people choose to believe, which is why they have a hard time confronting facts.
That's quite the high opinion on the self-improvement ability of your Average Joe. This kind of behavior only comes with an awareness, previously learned, and an alertness of mind. You need the population at large to be able to do this. How if not, say, teaching this at schools and waiting for the next generation to reach adulthood, would you expect this to happen?
Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.
Soon many real OF models will be out of job when everyone will be able to produce content to their personal taste from a few prompts.
-They simply aren't into real women/men (so you couldn't even pay a model to do what they're looking for).
-They want to play out fantasies that would be hard to coordinate even if you could pay models (I guess this is more on the video side of things, but a string of photos can put be together into a comic)
-They want to generate imagery that would be illegal
Based on this, I would guess fetish artists (as in illustrators) are more at risk than OF models. However, AI isn't free. Depending on what you're looking for, commissions might be cheaper still for quite a while...
You're completely misunderstanding what the product being sold is.
net positive to society
What in the world is a fake OF model?
Does "OF" stand for "of food"?
Also, using AI will not allow you to better express yourself. To use an analogy, it will not put your self-expression into any better focus, but just apply one of the stock IG filters to it.
Cameras are now "enhancing" photos with AI automatically. The contents of a 'real' photo are increasingly generated. The line is blurring and it's only going to get worse.
I suppose if the AI was able to tell me a true and compelling story, I might not even mind so much. I just don't want to be spoon fed drivel for 15 minutes to find it was all complete made up BS.
Dead Comment
The "cubism" example seems like it would be a closer fit to something like stained glass or something. I don't think the thing really understands what cubism was all about. Cubist painters were trying to free themselves from the confines of a single integral plane of perspective by allowing themselves to show various parts of the image from different viewpoints, different times, different styles, etc.
The division of the image into geometric shapes is just a by-product of that quest, whereas the examples here have made it the sum total of the whole piece.
This feels to me like an example of how LLMs still don't "understand" what the art means, and are just aping its facade.
And actually, the link I saw a bit ago was this [0] which is more in-depth and has a lot more examples + prompts.
[0] - https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash/
Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
What a time to be alive.
Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.
Not only 1999 prevents humans from becoming too advanced and invent new AI again, it is a believable and comfortable era. A perfect time, perfectly balanced between analog and digital.
Also for VHS camcorder footage
The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.
* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]
* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]
[1] https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography
[2] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/10/16/photo-mortal/
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
Yes, it’s crude, and you have to do the face tagging, but I think it’s a huge improvement over not having that.
I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.
I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
To each their own, but I think Andor is, by far, the best post-ROTJ output.
Mandalorian started strong, with cool spaghetti Western vibes, and then ended up devolving into mediocrity too. In my opinion.
Haven't watched Andor yet.
You could ask "how many more movies should we make?" and the answer would be "there is no limit, I always want more"
"I like this thing therefore more of it is obviously better"
I think it takes maturity to say "I like this thing and I don't want more of it."
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
And we were lucky if even 1 picture per roll was worth keeping long term. And my family almost never looks through those photo albums.
Digital picture frames with a curated rotation of old scans and new digital pictures are what made pictures great for my family.
I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)
If this becomes a trust signal, you can prepare for next gen models to do stick figure hand-drawn-like diagrams with spelling mistakes.
Scott Alexander has written about it:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.
They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.
Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?
The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.
The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.
I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.
All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others
In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.
I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?
You said it too:
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.
The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).
Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.
Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.
Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)
And with all that the worst is yet to come...
I dare say, the feel of photos from back then is much stronger than of the photos taken today. See e.g.:
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/413363/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/619173/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.
My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.
Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.
"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
> The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
[0] https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
But I think it's more because of growing up with it have now pc, money. Not because people rediscover pixel games.
I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
Feels like what you described describes that inner personality trait better than I have heard before.
I see what you did there and know exactly the political economist you are talking about, but if you Speak His Name, the shrieking hordes descend.
Deleted Comment
My parents took way more photos with film than I do with my cellphone camera.
None of these things are true for me as a millennial in the 35-45 age group. And my family was poor to boot, and we were still drowning in photos and photo albums.
Or a photo of my freshman dorm room during exam season. Subpar image quality, lousy lighting, etc. but so many memories, positive and negative, are elicited by that fleeting glimpse from an era of excitement, boredom, stress, uncertainty, and optimism, not knowing where I was going in life, when I'd ever look back at that snapshot, but deciding on a whim to grab it during a break from cramming topics now long forgotten.
But I roll my eyes at the idea of injecting my likeness into a short clip depicting random over-the-top action sequences, no matter how photorealistic, because I've never wanted to do that.
Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.
In economic terms it's diminishing marginal utility.
I think this is still true if you shoot film today.
The one factory you refer to was the last one, and was purchased by the Impossible Project (now Polaroid BV). So they were able to save one set of machines. But the actual process of making the film was lost. So it’s an old set of machines making a new but similar product.
I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.
The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.
Not the format.
However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.
https://xkcd.com/915/
Deleted Comment
Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.
The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.
Deleted Comment
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
Artists aren't doing it for the money. With advanced tools like these they wouldve iterated much faster and created much grander designs.
Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits.
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
That's engineering, if that.
Art isn't, and has never been about that.
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
The only thing AI art makes possible that wasn't possible before is the scale of slop
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
Deleted Comment
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KZ2ZtTsHqO0
https://g.co/gemini/share/028ab360006b
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Let's give him 2015 tech instead. Imagine if he used Illustrator to create the Mona Lisa. Is that much better?
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.
And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...
People who actually care about art, if given a chance to see it, yes.
Of course, it being done by Davinci is not some random fact about the painting - as if a painting is a mere artifact.
Here's some of my captions that tend to trip up even state-of-the-art models.
https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-pro-2-tests
So far it does feel more iterative than an entirely new leap in terms of capabilities, but I haven't run it through the more multimodal aspects such as editing existing images.
That being said, it actually managed the King Louie jump rope test which surprised me.
Seriously thanks - will update the site.