Midjourney?

[Sirius Glass]

And anyone tempted to call out on conspiracy theories, I’d remind them that the conspiracy theorists were laughed at for mentioning that there would be more than one dose, here we are at the 4th “booster” assorted with various threats by the good ole authorities.

They also talk out the three or four sides of their mouths because they also claimed that a vaccine could not be made for COVID and that vaccines never work, cause autism, diabetes, arthritis, hair loss and basket ball sized testicles. They blow smoke up others noses about any and everything they know nothing about and are the laughing stock of anyone with an ID above 80 and a real education.

 

[Don_ih]

The human involvement is present though imho. The computer and software were made by humans, the internet image banks that the software accesses were largely made by humans (assuming I understand correctly what the software is doing), the little haiku instructions are given to the software by a human, the scale/color/cropping/editing/printing/display decisions all made by humans, etc etc.

The issue many working artists will have is that this takes their work away.
That the computer and software were made by humans is equivalent to pencils and paper being made by humans. However, no one is using them to make the art. The instruction set is equivalent to a customer's request. "I want a grand dramatic landscape that's reminiscent of LOTR", for example. That's not making art - but the person who fulfills the request is making art. The human involvement is managerial - not constructive.

Great for a publishing company, though. You'd never have to hire an artist to make a book cover, again. Just type in "I want Fabio on a horse spanking an albino that looks like the Queen of England." and you get something beautiful. Ready to pump out royalty-free - even though it's made of tiny bits of possibly millions of existing, human-made artworks. Well, that's until it finishes making its own database of AI-generated art.

 

[Sean]

Let's try to stay on topic, which seems to be AI involvement in the art space.

I've been following Dalle2 and the others for a while. The thing with AI is it advances exponentially. So by the time you type "Yeah, but it could never do x, y, z" it is already doing x, y and z and likely more.

I would imagine AI will be the most disruptive thing we will ever witness. It's hard to predict where this will all go.

 

[Vaughn]

How soon (if not already) will all service calls be handled by AI (in the approbiate language and/or accent of the caller)?

I already have gotten computer-generated voice messages.

 

[Sean]

How soon (if not already) will all service calls be handled by AI (in the approbiate language and/or accent of the caller)?

I already have gotten computer-generated voice messages.

I just hope there is adequate focus on what to do if AIs begin wiping out millions of jobs. It could lead to mass abundance or mass greed. I'm hoping for mass abundance, where it drives the cost of living to nearly free, and all you need is maybe $500 a month to have a nice life. At that point a basic income for all of say $500 a month would cover you.

 

[Vaughn]

I doubt there will be sufficient natural resources that can be safely had to supply mass abundance for the masses...even with 'free' energy from fusion. We might need to re-evaluate what will be considered abundance. Community, water, food, shelter, music, art, education, peace...have that in affordable abundance.

Necessities may not necessarily include a batch at the beach, a nice motorcar, and trips to Australia. And things might have to be kept more local...the competition from other countries for imported food will grow. AI may actually help with working all this out, but people still make the decisions.

 

[warden]

The issue many working artists will have is that this takes their work away.

That will happen to some of them, true enough. I've been in the product development business for too long, and have friends in the prototype and toolmaking/mold making businesses that have seen their livelihoods challenged by CNC machining, rapid prototyping, and now 3d printing. They all had to quickly decide the best course for them when the technological leaps threatened their traditional ways.

 

[4season]

I've been wanting to check out Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Future Shock and The Third Wave in order to see how well their predictions have played out to date. But my library system doesn't seem to have them, so I'll have to find another way.

 

[brianmquinn]

I read Future Shock in the early 1980s and then got a used copy from ebay to re-read during COVID. He was hit and miss on his predictions but really dead on with OVERCHOICE!

 

[albada]

Notice that I do not comment on AI? I worked on it for years. Among other things I learned is that there is a lot of the opposite of artificial intelligence, it is called real stupidity.

I call that AS -- Artificial Stupidity.

 

[Sean]

I have been playing on the AI art generation tool tonight. It is quite astonishing to see 100s of original creations streaming by. It is still early days but I believe the art world will quickly be in a state of crisis over this.

I told the AI to make a painting of what God thinks about humanity right now:

This image above never existed until that moment. It's not grabbing it from a google image search or anything like that, it is creating it out of thin air based on what it knows.

What is most fascinating is to throw unusual thoughts at it and to see how it interprets it artistically. It is both fascinating, creepy and incredible. This is also very very early days. I feel like this will remove all physical talent in the art world and have everything shift to art direction of these AIs.

Imagine graphic design and an AI that can "modernize my website design", and spits out 100 variations for you to choose from. It is kind of sad what this is going to do in the art/design space.

In this one, I told it to paint AI as the destroyer of human art:

And then there are those giving the AI direction to create photo-realistic works:

And it does this in about 30 seconds.

It's one of the most mind blowing applications of tech I have ever seen.

 

[Don_ih]

The same thing will happen with music, if it hasn't already.

As for graphic design - the past 50 years have seen that go from a very hands-on, technical and creative field to one that is mostly adapting existing images from stock photo companies to more-or-less existing templates (you know, like pamphlets, facebook posts, web-banners). It may be some time before an AI is nuanced enough to completely replace that job. However - for companies that need artwork for their products, this thing really fits the bill.

 

[warden]

This image above never existed until that moment. It's not grabbing it from a google image search or anything like that, it is creating it out of thin air based on what it knows.

Sean, did you read the article in post 31? Perhaps the software you're using works differently but some of these products are definitely using prior art (including artists' signatures and watermarks) to make new work. I don't know how else a prompt that includes Vermeer's girl with a pearl earring could spit out anything without starting with an image of that work.

Edit:
Another rather frightening quote from an Atlantic article - “DALL-E is trained on the creative work of countless artists, and so there’s a legitimate argument to be made that it is essentially laundering human creativity in some way for commercial product.”

I put myself on the waitlist for DALL-E today. I want to see for myself what's happening here.

 

[warden]

A timely article by Kotaku's Luke Plunkett on the possible implications of AI-generated art:
https://kotaku.com/ai-art-dall-e-midjourney-stable-diffusion-copyright-1849388060

That was a good read, thanks. I liked this quote:

“I think AI art, just like NFTs, is a technology that just amplifies all the shit I hate with being an artist in this feudal capitalist dystopia, where every promising new tool always ends up in the hands of the least imaginative and most exploitative and unscrupulous people.”

 

[NB23]

I worked in AI for years. The goal then was to make machines that people could not detect that the machines made the decisions. We are still not there yet and AI is not going produce a scient being since all it can do is learn, not develop new ideas or concepts.

Well yeah.
But men are men. Some give directions and many execute. The concept of Arrny, of being employed...
And there are evil men.

AI not being able to develop itself dies not matter, it’s about who’s controling it.

Anyhow, this misjourney thing is just another step in the development of a very sophisticated AI. We humans are really, really stupid.

 

[Don_ih]

these products are definitely using prior art

They would analyze and decompose every image they get, indexing against descriptions and titles and genres and artists and anything else that might be relevant. The AI can extract the smallest detail from a work to use in another or to use to model another. Essentially, it can use all the artwork it has seen as molecules to make a new piece, guided by the language that indexes it.
The result is not quite like a collage made out of the tiniest bits of photos, because it can apply a known style as a brush stroke. There's no point unless the result is convincing.

 

[Don_ih]

AI not being able to develop itself dies not matter, it’s about who’s controling it.

And what it's being used for. And the danger of making something human redundant. Humans are accustomed to having onerous tasks eliminated by devices, tools, and automatic processes. Having an AI that can produce endless numbers of Pink Floyd album covers would appeal greatly to a lot of people.

 

[markjwyatt]

I want to know how you get to Samy's?? Route 66 is too busy to ride one's bicycle. Tesla? Helicopter? I heard that California is banning all film cameras by 2035, everything is going electric.

We are the resistance, and we stand strong. Don't take away my Kodachrome Ektachrome.

 

[markjwyatt]

I want to know how you get to Samy's?? Route 66 is too busy to ride one's bicycle. Tesla? Helicopter? I heard that California is banning all film cameras by 2035, everything is going electric.

Mail Order from Freestyle.

 

[markjwyatt]

The trouble with AI is that it is only human...

In other words, it should be AHI...artificial human intelligence.

The ultimate human break-through in understanding the universe will be when we can create artificial non-human intelligence. Imagine that...a computer built based of whale intelligence!

42

 

[markjwyatt]

That is only the beginning. The grand scheme being to make AI efficient. This is the baby step to reading the human mind, and of course controling. The iphone already reading the retina being another baby step.

And anyone tempted to call out on conspiracy theories, I’d remind them that the conspiracy theorists were laughed at for mentioning that there would be more than one dose, here we are at the 4th “booster” assorted with various threats by the good ole authorities.

Yes, we are in hell. This is where we live.

The external world is becoming more controlled. In your mind and in your art you are still free.

 

[markjwyatt]

Let's try to stay on topic, which seems to be AI involvement in the art space.

I've been following Dalle2 and the others for a while. The thing with AI is it advances exponentially. So by the time you type "Yeah, but it could never do x, y, z" it is already doing x, y and z and likely more.

I would imagine AI will be the most disruptive thing we will ever witness. It's hard to predict where this will all go.

I remember in the early 1980s wondering if digital photography could ever really compete with film.

 

[markjwyatt]

Sean, did you read the article in post 31? Perhaps the software you're using works differently but some of these products are definitely using prior art (including artists' signatures and watermarks) to make new work. I don't know how else a prompt that includes Vermeer's girl with a pearl earring could spit out anything without starting with an image of that work.

Edit:
Another rather frightening quote from an Atlantic article - “DALL-E is trained on the creative work of countless artists, and so there’s a legitimate argument to be made that it is essentially laundering human creativity in some way for commercial product.”

I put myself on the waitlist for DALL-E today. I want to see for myself what's happening here.

Didn't electronic music producers already go through this? They are using cuts form other's music and apparently getting away with it.

 

[Vaughn]

The external world is becoming more controlled. In your mind and in your art you are still free.

I see it as the opposite. Compared to living in a small tribal unit, there is not much difference in the level of our 'freedom' now. Social restraints are/were as strong as US Supreme Court decisions.
And one's mind -- difficult to free oneself of one's Self.

I like the walk-a-bout idea of the natives of Oz. Experience what life is like without the social structure around you. Return with a different perspective.

 

[Sean]

I put myself on the waitlist for DALL-E today. I want to see for myself what's happening here.

If you have the Discord chat app you can use the system:

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

Discord is the easiest way to communicate over voice, video, and text. Chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.

discord.com

just go to a "newbie" channel and type: /imagine
then enter a "prompt" for the AI

Yes, it does seem to be influenced by other art and artist styles, you can say "in the style of x-artist", one reason I said the art world might be in crisis soon. Some of the illustrations it can make are pretty solid. These are a few of them it made from some of my obscure prompts: