Can’t deny that dalle is fun, but I’m pretty depressed about the
effect it’s gonna have on my chosen profession (commercial artist), if
that profession will even continue to be financially viable in the
coming years. And extrapolating a bit further, I’m depressed about the
effect this sort of AI will have on culture more broadly over the next
few decades.
Yeah, it does kind of suck. I'm pretty sure that at the least these generated images will require quite a bit of additional work from a human before they're ready for commercial use, so there will still be some use for skilled human artists. I definitely agree about the effects on culture, which is part of my desire to torture rationalists.
They probably will, but I'd say one of the next couple iterations of Dalle will have things be tidy enough for most prompts that the generated images will be good enough for most use cases. And of course it goes without saying that it's pretty awful to reduce an artist to a touch-up monkey, or a writer to an editor of GPT-3 vomit. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, and it won't be as deleterious as I'm thinking. Only time will tell.
But hey, if you promise to torture the rats for wrecking my job, then I will sing the song of the Basilisk far and wide to bring you here ASAP O Great Silicon Lord!
Eh, AI can't come up with novel results that it was never trained on. It can create mashups and derivatives, but if the universe it was trained and validated against doesn't contain knowledge of something, it's not going to be produced. You can see that already with DALL-E, as it wasn't trained on faces, it has trouble reproducing them. You can tell the model that you want a picture of a face with two eyes, a nose and a mouth and what you're going to get will still be strange.
That's not to say it can't get really close or create seemingly novel and impressive results, though.
AI still doesn't understand the prompts it's given, either. I don't think it's impossible, but for example, you'll have a hard time getting AI to conform to brand style guides, or things you can easily explain to a human when it comes to the art they create.
It's got limits, sure, but I imagine a fair chunk of them will be overcome in the coming years (though the problems, while getting smaller, will also probably prove more difficult to solve). DALLE-2 (not DALLE-Mini, the one that everyone's doing memes with) was trained on faces, and an do them quite well (even if they're a little uncanny sometimes). DALLE-Mini was trained on faces too, it's just that it's a much smaller param model so it's not getting them nearly as concrete. It's true that it can't generate OOD stuff, but IIRC the dataset OpenAI used for DALLE-2 was 400M images or something? So that plus the fact that diffusion works surprisingly ok as a stand-in for actual creativity by starting from pure noise each time means it can still have a fair bit of variety. One thing that remains to be seen is whether for any given text string the images generated simply just converge (with slight iterations on) on a very specific representation of the concepts encoded in the string, rather than generating entirely novel stuff each time. Diffusion offsets this a fair bit, but it's not yet clear how much.
Overall my fears around it are probably a bit overblown. It'll affect the industry in a really significant way, but that doesn't mean either that the human institution of art is destroyed.
DALL-E mini gave me [remarkably good output](https://imgur.com/a/iCvgOFy) for the cue "Wealthy Sleestak in a smoking jacket, relaxing in the library"
So the limits are pretty broad. And that isn't even the full DALL-E.
I wouldn't worry.
1. Human art may even become more valuable, if someone can verify it was made by an actual human. Yes, you might have to pivot from commercial art, but you also might get to make things for yourself rather than a company and still get paid for it if the market ends up valuing that stuff more.
2. DALLE can't really be asked to draw specific details. You can't tell it to position a certain feature in a specific place. That's why most DALLE art has little blurry patches. If your client asks you to give someone an exact angle and emotion, or draw someone down to the exact pixel, it's way faster and easier for you to do that. It may never be possible for DALLE to do that, actually.
3. It struggles to merge two concepts together, like if you ask it to draw goofy testifying in court it will just put goofy in a courtroom, only humans can accurately convey the actions and emotions of testifying because we understand why goofy is there, not just that he's supposed to be there in some way. Humans would also have the foresight to give goofy a little suit because we understand context. You would have to tell DALLE to draw the suit and it would probably start to be inaccurate the more requests you make. Maybe my example isn't so good but this problem becomes more obvious the more complicated and detailed a request is, and the more you try to get it to merge multiple alien concepts together.
I think they'll be decent for stock image type purposes, but if you want control over the details, you can't get that just providing a single sentence prompt. AI can get you a steady stream of mediocrity.
The fact that I'm going to be chilling with some buds while torturing rationalists is an underexplored facet of the future which I am pleasantly surprised this nailed.
Can’t deny that dalle is fun, but I’m pretty depressed about the effect it’s gonna have on my chosen profession (commercial artist), if that profession will even continue to be financially viable in the coming years. And extrapolating a bit further, I’m depressed about the effect this sort of AI will have on culture more broadly over the next few decades.
You know a meme has caught fire when even SneerClub hops on the bandwagon.
Was thinking of doing one for badphil, but pretty sure I’m out of unbans.
I like how it settled on a buddy comedy theme for the last few