This model seems to be largely uncensored, at least compared to previous releases. For example, it is surprisingly familiar with the physics of interactions between human skin and yogurt. According to a friend who was testing it on replicate.com. I would never prompt for something like that of course.
I noticed the last few months that in several subreddits that have nothing to do with tech, the sentiment had shifted very negatively regarding AI art. Some subs straight up ban those images. No reason given.
It seems the mainstream view is grounded in anxiety and dislike for tech. This isn’t shared by my friends who enjoy tech at all.
Ongoing copyright issues notwithstanding, it's because 99% of the mainstream usage of generative art, generative music, generative LLMs is noise. And sure, noise existed before but things like Suno and Midjourney amplify the issue by an exponential factor.
It crowds out the people who genuinely devote thought, skill and time into their creations.
Particularly on platforms like Reddit, to OPs point about the sentiment on there, because they're so prone to being overwhelmed by low quality AI content if it's not kept under control (which usually means the subreddit banning AI posts with no exceptions). Ranking systems like Reddits require user engagement to work, and most users don't want to engage with a never-ending firehose of MidJourney slop to the extent required to separate the signal from the noise.
Yep, subreddits like /r/cosplay had to add rules strictly banning AI images despite it being blatantly obvious that they're against the whole point of the sub. People spam AI anyway unless the moderators intervene to delete it and ban repeat offenders.
The closest corollary in programming may be AI-generated pull requests on github.
Trying to pad a resume with open source "contributions" and trying to pad a Patreon with "fanart" are behaviors that come from the same headspace, I think.
>sentiment had shifted very negatively regarding AI art.
See the drama around the baby peacock search. The results were not only AI filled but objectively entirely wrong. I'd link you to said drama but I literally can't find it because search is just picking up an echo chamber of AI. Which in a way is pretty meta commentary in itself.
I appreciate the ability to generate images of whatever I want. I don't like the way it's messing with perception of reality in a world which we view largely through screens.
>dislike for tech. This isn’t shared by my friends who enjoy tech at all.
Are they in tech or in the creative space. People I know in creative spaces are anxious while those in the tech space tend to be mixed (doomer vs AI utopia split)
I'd assume because it's spam; it has made producing low-quality crap practically free, leading to the whole internet being flooded with it. See the notorious baby peacock, for instance.
The vast majority of people I know who dislike AI art (including myself) are people who love tech, but hate how this tech has been trained on the art of human artists without credit or compensation… and then on top of that it’s being used to replace those artists and reduce their job prospects! It’s easy to see why this sucks if you take a step back.
AI art is just art. Most is bad (same as without AI). AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Shared link below in a different comment. My fav video series that heavily uses AI (images, video, lip sync, sound). I enjoy it and I think it has artistic merit
Even with AI, one needs talent and skill to create something noteworthy. Just the standard of what’s compelling will change. I think people capable to adapt to the new tech will do fine creatively and financially.
Not necessarily. You need to define "art" and most likely "creativity". As you have said AI is a tool, I assume you're not anthropomorphising the model itself as an artistic being.
So it's down to creativity/skill. I would say someone saying "create me an image of a person on a lake" has no creativity/skill at all. It may be an image, or a drawing, but it's not art. In the same way I can draw a stick person - it's a drawing without creativity/skill, so it's just a drawing, not art.
To make the most of AI tools you need to understand how they work. Just prompting to me is just like using clipart or stock images. For interesting stuff people are doing search for ComfyUI tutorials on YouTube. It's a skill as like in any other digital art tool.
Publications have had a very negative tilt since GPT4 showed up. It's no surprise since LLM's are clearly an existential threat to them.
Transformers are also a very real existential threat to artists, as the vast majority can only ever have a decent career "working for the man", which is ultimately run by business people who could care less about AI generated material if it dramatically reduces cost while being effectively identical.
Eh, different bubbles of people I think. My tech-loving friends (including me), aren't fan of AI art because how low effort everything is. Some funny memes, but even then you get used to them and move on. It was definitely "cool" when it came out, but if it's simple still images, icons, and etc., they're kinda meh, at least for me. What Adobe did with the rotation tool is pretty cool, and if we start seeing effects of such AI art, that would be a bit different. But again, it has to be used in a specific way to inspire anyone.
I'm actually curious what the people around you find cool about AI art. Nothing has "awed" me in the past 16 months, I would say.
“Awed” is a big word. I’ve been awed by art only a handful of times in my life. I start to see people using AI in ways I find enjoyable and interesting.
Below my fav video series that heavily uses AI (images, video, lip sync, sound). I enjoy it and I think it has artistic merit
It’s done by a single person. Individuals will be able to make stuff that needed teams and large budgets before. It will allow for much more creative risks.
The counter point is, if it makes it so easy to make it, it’s just… meh. We get used to things extremely fast.
Even in traditional art. The Black Square was revolutionary in its specific way, but the copycats aren’t talked about.
I think the AI Seinfeld will be remembered for a while, but random spin offs will be forgotten. Just like how Twitch Plays Pokemon was huge, but follow ups got forgotten. AI art will need to find uniqueness angle at each step, because the complexity aspect will never be there.
The video above is not easy. AI is automation. A lot of what required a large team and budget before can be done by individuals or small teams. To do something good still requires skill, talent and dedication. The bar of what it's noteworthy raises. Creators that can harness the new tools in unique ways will create the new Seinfields and Pokemons. I'm excited for example that 3D animation movies a la Pixar won't be exclusively produced by multi-billion dollar companies. Small studios or even individuals can participate and the lower costs will allow for much more creative risk.
Like again, I get what you’re saying, and I agree with it. But my point was, once everyone can generate Pixar-quality movies, they will simply lose the appeal. Maybe it should be that way, maybe it shouldn’t, but crowded market just desensitizes people and makes them shrug.
There will be winner-takes-it-all productions, and that’ll come mostly from the companies with the highest marketing budgets.
The biggest uphill battle that AI content creation companies will have to fight is kind of societal. They’ll need to change public’s perception that AI=“low effort”.
It's.... awful. It's mostly just a slideshow of very AI-generated-looking art with some weird-enough looking aliens to not fall into the uncanny valley. The lip sync is not even close.
Fair if you don't like it. I find it interesting, enjoyable and many other people too. The author would not have been able to create something like that without AI. We're in year two and stuff only gonna get better.
The people who can are leaving the internet and moving to using AI models. The people left are the ones who don't know how, or have a bone to pick with them.
As an example I've not had to use google for a knowledge search in months now. Perplexity is much better, both for a summary of what I'm looking for, and for finding non-garbage links.
> Perplexity is much better, both for a summary of what I'm looking for, and for finding non-garbage links.
So AI can summarize the news for you. But how does it do it? It steals the news from actual people and organizations. We're all selfish beings who want to save time and/or effort but what do you think happens to Perplexity if it had no access to news organizations? What's the end outcome here?
By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing. Even if it's published openly on the Internet and you don't have to pay to access it.
Did you pay for all the content you used to create your comment? If not how did you dare to write it and publish it?
You've stolen the fraction of their income because after reading your comment I don't need to go read your source if I'm only interested in information you stolen and shared.
What if you cause the demise of those sources with your (and your copycats) shameless theft?
This is silly. Technology evolves all the time. Things die and they should die. Other arise in their place to fill the gap.
Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?
Morals aside, AI will run into serious problems in 10-20 years when the world has rearranged itself around AI content. With less non-AI content available and no reliable way to differentiate AI vs non-AI content, there will no longer be a dataset to train against.
Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly, but AI summarizing every news article is a problem on a whole different scale. Basically the same as the difference between getting a mosquito bite and being stabbed in your carotid artery - both are just blood loss, but one is a minor annoyance and the other is fatal.
This no reporter argument is so false but gets repeated often. If I only read internet articles from internet media companies you might have a little bit of a point, but actual newspapers have actual journalists. Some might be good and some might be bad, but they do employ people that do more than build an article around a tweet.
> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?
Then the AI will go to the primary sources that the human journalist currently go to.
Will it be flawed? Yes.
Are humans already? Also yes.
Is there a huge risk that "the algorithm" will be politically biased? Totally.
Can you name one press organisation, larger than a local one-city-only paper, that hasn't been accused of that?
> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?
It will evolve towards consuming more raw data and more information that people self publish to produce news. Newslike narration constructed on actual factual information is so bland and repeatable that there is no need for more training material. News is so uncreative and predictable that I can pick up a newspaper in language I don't know and still guess with high probability what most articles are about from photos, common names and few words of that language that I do know and general tone.
> Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly,
There are so many humans doing that that the effect is not negligible. I skip reading all paywalled articles and read just their comments instead.
What's silly is your argument. You're comparing a person commenting on a forum to a service designed to serve millions a summary of someone else's work that's also powered by billions of dollars.
Technology certainly evolves but this is a shitty direction. You yourself are calling the service you use shameless theft. Perplexity themselves have been caught doing shady things. I'm not here trying to defend media companies but I'm saying the current end game here is not pretty and more people should consider that.
I'm comparing millions of such persons to AI. Internet was supposed to be a demise of newspapers and to a degree it is. AI is just the same thing. Hard to tell if it'll be any better or worse.
Your brain isn't magic, you learn from experience.
AI isn't magic, it learns from experience.
If the inputs used to train an AI are "stealing", why aren't the inputs (experiences, what you read, what you listen to) to your brain?
And I don't mean in the reductive sense of "you are a human and the AI is not" I mean the act and the process and the result are the same, what differs is the substrate and the architecture — proton exchange across lipid layers vs. electron flow across doped semiconductors for the former, and transformers vs. the evolved chemical mess of the human brain for the latter.
If AI training company needs to train only on materials that they paid for the copyright of and never on materials that are just publicly available on the Internet then a person should have the same obligation. What you read influences what you create. If AI company trained on publicly available texts that it didn't pay for can't publish AI creations then a person who trained themselves on information they haven't paid for a license to shouldn't be allowed to publish anything either.
The part of the internet that was not-garbage was always the part run by volunteers. Screening the number of people who visit those sites preserves them since the volunteers don't need to interact with the self entitled masses.
It's just a young audience. They've always been very impressionable. When the iPad came out Reddit was all about "This is it? More like MaxiPad, amirite?! Lol what a marketing idiot" and "it's just 4 iPhones taped together lol" etc. etc.
Online commenters are frequently not very different from an army of LLMs talking to each other. They get stuck on a few points and keep repeating them.
You can pay attention to them if you like, but take a quick stop on /r/relationshipadvice or /r/amitheasshole and you'll find out what the audience actually is. And then you can ask yourself: does these people's opinion matter to me? Do I want to be like them?
Yeah, in some places it gets dismissed as "low effort posts". Even if they otherwise accept scribbles on lined paper by people who clearly don't have so much as high-school art.
> It seems the mainstream view is grounded in anxiety and dislike for tech.
No, you're barking up the wrong tree here. I love tech, I work in the industry and intend to continue to do so. I hate AI art because it's just bad. It's awful. AI produces images that don't make physical sense, have a weird glossy "digital art" sheen and most of all have zero artistic merit. I only want to see art (and read text) produced by human beings.
> AI produces images that don't make physical sense
Der Kuss is an oil-on-canvas painting with added gold leaf, silver and platinum. It is widely praised and held in high regard.
To me, it looks like the man has a broken neck, and the woman's been decapitated, her head rotated 90° and reattached to her torso by the ear.
This isn't to say that AI art is flawless on the first go — just that quite a lot of famous "good" art has exactly that specific flaw too.
Even though GenAI is getting better, and even though competent users know how to work around this with the right kinds of effort, normal people don't study the thing they want to get an image of before asking an AI to make it for them, and therefore will generally fail to notice when the image they've just made is still very wrong at at least one entire layer of abstraction about how the things it's depicting function or relate to each other.
An overwhelming majority of the kind of "art" people are producing with these Slop Generators is supposed to make physical sense - it just doesn't.
Have a look at the dreck in the linked article. The software was not asked to produce a picture of an impossible waterfall that couldn't exist in our physical world. Everything about the prompt indicates the user was looking for a physically real scene. The picture of the girl in a meadow even used hashtags to indicate to the algorithm that it was expected to produce an instagram-like photo, but there's a seed pod floating in mid air, her dress is missing a critical strap, the lacework of the dress doesn't make sense and the direction of lighting is totally inconsistent across different parts of her figure.
None of which contradicts my point, that the output's flaws are things the users themselves don't notice.
For example:
> The software was not asked to produce a picture of an impossible waterfall that couldn't exist in our physical world.
And, given my lack of knowledge of waterfall geology, I have no idea why that's impossible.
> her dress is missing a critical strap
Her left shoulder? I've seen real dresses where one of those slips off sideways for whatever reason. It's like the dress version of self-opening flies.
If you meant something else, I missed it.
I do see the seed pod; but (perhaps due to so many photographers using fill lighting or photoshop, I don't know) I see nothing wrong with the lighting.
I see nothing noteworthy about the lacework either, but I wouldn't expect to as a guy whose total knowledge of things like that is "they are often intricate and frilly".
There are oftentimes things I can indeed spot in GenAI images, when I make them I often find it best to make four at a time, pick the one that was closest to what I wanted, then highlight the errors and do img2img for another cycle, for a dozen repetitions, to get what I want.
AI is just a tool in the box for humans to take advantage of. You can do bad and good stuff with it (most art is bad regardless of the tool). This is my fav video series that heavily uses AI tools (images, video, audio, lip sync):
Same argument could be brought against the printing press. In a sense, it was - that's how copyright became a thing in the first place.
Same for photocopiers, printers, general-purpose computers. If, at any point, some of that tech had "never have been invented or at the very least not released into the public", we wouldn't have e.g. photolitography and thus no modern microchips.
Copyright are a legal equivalent of a dirty hack to preserve some legacy behavior, that became a permanent fixture over time. Like with dirty hacks in code, you're going to get different responses from different people, depending on situation.
The first large scale use of the printing press outside books was to print indulgences:
> In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence (Latin: indulgentia, from indulgeo, 'permit') is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for (forgiven) sins".[1] The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions…"[3]
This directly lead to the reformation and two centuries of religious wars in Europe which proportionally killed more people than both the world wars combined.
The printing press has more blood on it than ink. By contrast the worst you can say about art models is that they are 'derivative' whatever that means.
Indulgences also paid for the art of the renaissance. It was because pope Leo X was so into art that he stepped up indulgences, causing Luther to protest. So renaissance art has more blood..?
i have to ask, do you also count world war victims as victims of the printing press because military orders and propaganda were printed on paper? is the the telephone, copper in the wires and electromagnetism itself also complicit in genocide, because they were used for communication in nazi germany?
> the technologies you mentioned helped spread very useful information, not worthless images devoid of meaning, artistic expression and thought
Both. They did both.
Cameras replaced most portrait painters, but they also gave us "Paint Drying" which is 10 hours 7 minutes long film of exactly what it sounds like — deliberately worthless images devoid of meaning as it's a protest.
And when I was a kid, the talking heads in the press were upset about cable TV introducing the UK to the cartoon channel, with a similar argument to yours.
i'm sorry, but you have to be extremely naive to think that all these companies actually respect people's work enough to verify that all their training data is properly licensed, and deliberately hinder themselves and put themselves behind their competitors by avoiding any copyrighted work
also obviously depends on the case, copyright law is often very stupid and broken, like there's no reason why this book written 100 years ago isn't in public domain, but scraping millions of images from artists' websites kinda is
But even if by "theft" you mean "copyright infringement" there is a strong argument for fair use, we humans consume large amounts of copyrighted content and are influenced by it in everything we do, I don't find it unethical or wrong in general, and I don't see how it should be any different for a machine, unless you are against job automation, but in this case you seem to be worried about "theft".
Edit: HN thinks that I'm posting too fast so my reply to the comment below here ahah: "Well, then we agree that it wouldn't be a problem if the model didn't output an image from the training dataset, which is extremely rare or essentially impossible with today's dedup steps used during dataset creation."
models will straight up return training data sometimes if you prompt them with like an image file name like IMG_1234.JPG though
i'd say that this is not the equivalent of a human glancing at an image and then have the memory of details of that image have some small influence on their way of thinking and imagining and creating, i'd say that's theft
We can’t prevent the technology from being invented, it was always going to happen (video games and VR was practically going to have this AI generated worlds).
It is just a matter of doing it right the first time such as having license/agreements or company building it based on their own images.
just because we can't prevent something from being invented, doesn't mean we can't prevent its spread: we limit technology all the time
like chemical weapons were invented, bioweapons were invented, meth manufacturing was invented, but we prohibit people from manufacturing them because they're harmful
same logic could apply to generative machine learning (obv not as harmful as above examples, but same idea)
That’s not what the OP said though, what you’re describing is basically regulations. All we can do is regulate to outlaw and punish those who don’t comply with it but that’s still not possible to limit.
Chemical weapons are still being developed (Russia used it in their war against Ukraine), bioweapons are still being developed, meth are still being manufactured all over in US if not smuggled in.
It seems pretty surprising to me that you can already tell where generative models are going, and that they should be stopped in their tracks immediately. Is there any documented harm yet?
literally any website containing images is in most cases overwhelmed with an unlimited supply of ai generated garbage
ai image generators are barely two years old, and have already caused a lot of damage in basically every sphere they interact with, i'd say you don't need a lot of foresight to be able to make a judgement here
reddit moderators and power users are terminally online, mentally and emotionally unstable people with strong (but invariably aligned with the establishment) opinions about the current thing, who act like political commissars and believe themselves to be the arbiters of truth.
what you see on there are not mainstream views, but the views of a tiny but undeservingly powerful minority. dissidents, detractors and apostates get silenced with extreme prejudice, threads where thousands of people disagree with their views get locked and purged, neutral subreddits get hijacked and opposing subreddits get targeted with infiltration and mass report campaigns by the likes of /r/againsthatesubreddits.
in other words, the views you see on reddit are a very, very, very poor indicator of real public opinions about a current thing like generative AI.
the unfortunate reality is that those people are mainstream views - they share the same views as mainstream media, which is owned by billionaires and supporting political establishment. reddit absolutely hates anything an inch to the left or right of establishment democrats, which is really extremely moderate to conservative in a global context.
Does Stable Diffusion 3.5 make Stable Diffusion 3 obsolete?
There are quite a few different versions (SD1.5, XL, XL Turbo, SD3) of Stable Diffusion still in use because the newer ones didn't definitively supersede previous versions.
It's offtopic, but I hate articles which talk about a very specific thing and put dozens of links into the text, but none links to the actual product or company.
My self-hosted Krita plugin is running on SD1.5 and SDXL and those are already very impressive albeit "dated" by the standards of October 2024. So I can't wait to try this out!
They chose to illustrate the article with a picture of a woman lying on grass, with one hand hidden and the other with 6 fingers? That's either a very self-aware or completely unaware choice.
No, you do count 5 fingers, with 5 knuckle joints. Assuming she has a thumb, that makes 6 fingers though.
I am really quite shocked that people don't seem to recognize a hand.
The thumb's metacarpal comes out basically from the base of the wrist, and its distal phalanx would end about where the proximal phalanx of the other fingers start. So the only way this hand would be somewhat anatomically correct would be that the thumb is hidden by the perspective.
Oh man you’re right I totally missed that. If that were a thumb, it would have to be some disgusting dinosaur claw thing because it’s way too far down the arm. That’s subtle, I bet they actually missed it.
It looks good and all but it won’t past any visual tests when you go more than 10 seconds vs even hobbyist vids. There is still a big gap if it does longer durations
> Prompt: a brave explorer standing on the edge of a massive waterfall, overlooking a vast, untouched jungle. The explorer is wearing a worn leather jacket and carrying an old map, as the mist from the waterfall rises around them. A glowing golden temple is barely visible in the distance, hidden among the trees.
Result: an explorer not standing on the edge of a waterfall, but instead a physically impossible waterfall in the distance. A glowing temple is very very very visible, totally unhidden by any trees.
This model seems to be largely uncensored, at least compared to previous releases. For example, it is surprisingly familiar with the physics of interactions between human skin and yogurt. According to a friend who was testing it on replicate.com. I would never prompt for something like that of course.
> For example, it is surprisingly familiar with the physics of interactions between human skin and yogurt.
Well, that's a niche one.
... go on..
Yes, please continue. What else did your friend tell you?
This is truly horrendous, some people say that it can generate a woman lying in the grass!
I noticed the last few months that in several subreddits that have nothing to do with tech, the sentiment had shifted very negatively regarding AI art. Some subs straight up ban those images. No reason given.
It seems the mainstream view is grounded in anxiety and dislike for tech. This isn’t shared by my friends who enjoy tech at all.
Have others here been experiencing this?
Ongoing copyright issues notwithstanding, it's because 99% of the mainstream usage of generative art, generative music, generative LLMs is noise. And sure, noise existed before but things like Suno and Midjourney amplify the issue by an exponential factor.
It crowds out the people who genuinely devote thought, skill and time into their creations.
Particularly on platforms like Reddit, to OPs point about the sentiment on there, because they're so prone to being overwhelmed by low quality AI content if it's not kept under control (which usually means the subreddit banning AI posts with no exceptions). Ranking systems like Reddits require user engagement to work, and most users don't want to engage with a never-ending firehose of MidJourney slop to the extent required to separate the signal from the noise.
The tendency for people to spam AI images in contexts devoted to sharing images of real stuff is particularly irritating.
Yep, subreddits like /r/cosplay had to add rules strictly banning AI images despite it being blatantly obvious that they're against the whole point of the sub. People spam AI anyway unless the moderators intervene to delete it and ban repeat offenders.
The closest corollary in programming may be AI-generated pull requests on github.
Trying to pad a resume with open source "contributions" and trying to pad a Patreon with "fanart" are behaviors that come from the same headspace, I think.
Art has been an extremely saturated field even before transformers showed up.
So AI art has reached Jazz stage.
>sentiment had shifted very negatively regarding AI art.
See the drama around the baby peacock search. The results were not only AI filled but objectively entirely wrong. I'd link you to said drama but I literally can't find it because search is just picking up an echo chamber of AI. Which in a way is pretty meta commentary in itself.
I appreciate the ability to generate images of whatever I want. I don't like the way it's messing with perception of reality in a world which we view largely through screens.
>dislike for tech. This isn’t shared by my friends who enjoy tech at all.
Are they in tech or in the creative space. People I know in creative spaces are anxious while those in the tech space tend to be mixed (doomer vs AI utopia split)
I'd assume because it's spam; it has made producing low-quality crap practically free, leading to the whole internet being flooded with it. See the notorious baby peacock, for instance.
The vast majority of people I know who dislike AI art (including myself) are people who love tech, but hate how this tech has been trained on the art of human artists without credit or compensation… and then on top of that it’s being used to replace those artists and reduce their job prospects! It’s easy to see why this sucks if you take a step back.
AI art is just art. Most is bad (same as without AI). AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Shared link below in a different comment. My fav video series that heavily uses AI (images, video, lip sync, sound). I enjoy it and I think it has artistic merit
https://x.com/dmarcos/status/1848835003079397646
Even with AI, one needs talent and skill to create something noteworthy. Just the standard of what’s compelling will change. I think people capable to adapt to the new tech will do fine creatively and financially.
>AI art is just art
Not necessarily. You need to define "art" and most likely "creativity". As you have said AI is a tool, I assume you're not anthropomorphising the model itself as an artistic being.
So it's down to creativity/skill. I would say someone saying "create me an image of a person on a lake" has no creativity/skill at all. It may be an image, or a drawing, but it's not art. In the same way I can draw a stick person - it's a drawing without creativity/skill, so it's just a drawing, not art.
To make the most of AI tools you need to understand how they work. Just prompting to me is just like using clipart or stock images. For interesting stuff people are doing search for ComfyUI tutorials on YouTube. It's a skill as like in any other digital art tool.
Publications have had a very negative tilt since GPT4 showed up. It's no surprise since LLM's are clearly an existential threat to them.
Transformers are also a very real existential threat to artists, as the vast majority can only ever have a decent career "working for the man", which is ultimately run by business people who could care less about AI generated material if it dramatically reduces cost while being effectively identical.
Eh, different bubbles of people I think. My tech-loving friends (including me), aren't fan of AI art because how low effort everything is. Some funny memes, but even then you get used to them and move on. It was definitely "cool" when it came out, but if it's simple still images, icons, and etc., they're kinda meh, at least for me. What Adobe did with the rotation tool is pretty cool, and if we start seeing effects of such AI art, that would be a bit different. But again, it has to be used in a specific way to inspire anyone.
I'm actually curious what the people around you find cool about AI art. Nothing has "awed" me in the past 16 months, I would say.
“Awed” is a big word. I’ve been awed by art only a handful of times in my life. I start to see people using AI in ways I find enjoyable and interesting.
Below my fav video series that heavily uses AI (images, video, lip sync, sound). I enjoy it and I think it has artistic merit
https://x.com/dmarcos/status/1848835003079397646
It’s done by a single person. Individuals will be able to make stuff that needed teams and large budgets before. It will allow for much more creative risks.
The counter point is, if it makes it so easy to make it, it’s just… meh. We get used to things extremely fast.
Even in traditional art. The Black Square was revolutionary in its specific way, but the copycats aren’t talked about.
I think the AI Seinfeld will be remembered for a while, but random spin offs will be forgotten. Just like how Twitch Plays Pokemon was huge, but follow ups got forgotten. AI art will need to find uniqueness angle at each step, because the complexity aspect will never be there.
The video above is not easy. AI is automation. A lot of what required a large team and budget before can be done by individuals or small teams. To do something good still requires skill, talent and dedication. The bar of what it's noteworthy raises. Creators that can harness the new tools in unique ways will create the new Seinfields and Pokemons. I'm excited for example that 3D animation movies a la Pixar won't be exclusively produced by multi-billion dollar companies. Small studios or even individuals can participate and the lower costs will allow for much more creative risk.
Like again, I get what you’re saying, and I agree with it. But my point was, once everyone can generate Pixar-quality movies, they will simply lose the appeal. Maybe it should be that way, maybe it shouldn’t, but crowded market just desensitizes people and makes them shrug.
There will be winner-takes-it-all productions, and that’ll come mostly from the companies with the highest marketing budgets.
The biggest uphill battle that AI content creation companies will have to fight is kind of societal. They’ll need to change public’s perception that AI=“low effort”.
It's.... awful. It's mostly just a slideshow of very AI-generated-looking art with some weird-enough looking aliens to not fall into the uncanny valley. The lip sync is not even close.
Fair if you don't like it. I find it interesting, enjoyable and many other people too. The author would not have been able to create something like that without AI. We're in year two and stuff only gonna get better.
The people who can are leaving the internet and moving to using AI models. The people left are the ones who don't know how, or have a bone to pick with them.
As an example I've not had to use google for a knowledge search in months now. Perplexity is much better, both for a summary of what I'm looking for, and for finding non-garbage links.
> Perplexity is much better, both for a summary of what I'm looking for, and for finding non-garbage links.
So AI can summarize the news for you. But how does it do it? It steals the news from actual people and organizations. We're all selfish beings who want to save time and/or effort but what do you think happens to Perplexity if it had no access to news organizations? What's the end outcome here?
By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing. Even if it's published openly on the Internet and you don't have to pay to access it.
Did you pay for all the content you used to create your comment? If not how did you dare to write it and publish it?
You've stolen the fraction of their income because after reading your comment I don't need to go read your source if I'm only interested in information you stolen and shared.
What if you cause the demise of those sources with your (and your copycats) shameless theft?
This is silly. Technology evolves all the time. Things die and they should die. Other arise in their place to fill the gap.
Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?
Morals aside, AI will run into serious problems in 10-20 years when the world has rearranged itself around AI content. With less non-AI content available and no reliable way to differentiate AI vs non-AI content, there will no longer be a dataset to train against.
Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly, but AI summarizing every news article is a problem on a whole different scale. Basically the same as the difference between getting a mosquito bite and being stabbed in your carotid artery - both are just blood loss, but one is a minor annoyance and the other is fatal.
If news agencies still had reporters that would be a problem.
They haven't since the 1980s.
Everything that you say as some sort of doom and gloom prediction about the future _is the world we've lived in for the last 40 years_.
This no reporter argument is so false but gets repeated often. If I only read internet articles from internet media companies you might have a little bit of a point, but actual newspapers have actual journalists. Some might be good and some might be bad, but they do employ people that do more than build an article around a tweet.
Here's a random newspaper that you're saying doesn't have reporters: https://www.tampabay.com
> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?
Then the AI will go to the primary sources that the human journalist currently go to.
Will it be flawed? Yes.
Are humans already? Also yes.
Is there a huge risk that "the algorithm" will be politically biased? Totally.
Can you name one press organisation, larger than a local one-city-only paper, that hasn't been accused of that?
> Serious question - what do you think will happen to AI that currently relies on human reporters if everyone switches to getting their news from AI and the reporters lose their jobs?
It will evolve towards consuming more raw data and more information that people self publish to produce news. Newslike narration constructed on actual factual information is so bland and repeatable that there is no need for more training material. News is so uncreative and predictable that I can pick up a newspaper in language I don't know and still guess with high probability what most articles are about from photos, common names and few words of that language that I do know and general tone.
> Individual humans summarizing the news can reduce revenue for news organizations slightly,
There are so many humans doing that that the effect is not negligible. I skip reading all paywalled articles and read just their comments instead.
What's silly is your argument. You're comparing a person commenting on a forum to a service designed to serve millions a summary of someone else's work that's also powered by billions of dollars.
Technology certainly evolves but this is a shitty direction. You yourself are calling the service you use shameless theft. Perplexity themselves have been caught doing shady things. I'm not here trying to defend media companies but I'm saying the current end game here is not pretty and more people should consider that.
I'm comparing millions of such persons to AI. Internet was supposed to be a demise of newspapers and to a degree it is. AI is just the same thing. Hard to tell if it'll be any better or worse.
> By this logic if you are commenting on anything you haven't paid for you are stealing.
Can you expand on this? Because I'm not following the flow of your logic AT ALL.
Your brain isn't magic, you learn from experience.
AI isn't magic, it learns from experience.
If the inputs used to train an AI are "stealing", why aren't the inputs (experiences, what you read, what you listen to) to your brain?
And I don't mean in the reductive sense of "you are a human and the AI is not" I mean the act and the process and the result are the same, what differs is the substrate and the architecture — proton exchange across lipid layers vs. electron flow across doped semiconductors for the former, and transformers vs. the evolved chemical mess of the human brain for the latter.
If AI training company needs to train only on materials that they paid for the copyright of and never on materials that are just publicly available on the Internet then a person should have the same obligation. What you read influences what you create. If AI company trained on publicly available texts that it didn't pay for can't publish AI creations then a person who trained themselves on information they haven't paid for a license to shouldn't be allowed to publish anything either.
So you use it to get links back to the internet. I expect the non-garbage links part won't last long, in the AI age.
The part of the internet that was not-garbage was always the part run by volunteers. Screening the number of people who visit those sites preserves them since the volunteers don't need to interact with the self entitled masses.
That clickfarms will die is no great loss.
I am seriously concerned about who will generate new content when everyone is interacting with the internet with AI crawlers.
The same people who wrote the original wikipedia articles before power mods locked them out.
It's just a young audience. They've always been very impressionable. When the iPad came out Reddit was all about "This is it? More like MaxiPad, amirite?! Lol what a marketing idiot" and "it's just 4 iPhones taped together lol" etc. etc.
Online commenters are frequently not very different from an army of LLMs talking to each other. They get stuck on a few points and keep repeating them.
You can pay attention to them if you like, but take a quick stop on /r/relationshipadvice or /r/amitheasshole and you'll find out what the audience actually is. And then you can ask yourself: does these people's opinion matter to me? Do I want to be like them?
As a glass half full guy, I appreciate Reddit and CNN/Fox comment sections for compartmentalizing all of these people away from the rest of us.
Yeah, in some places it gets dismissed as "low effort posts". Even if they otherwise accept scribbles on lined paper by people who clearly don't have so much as high-school art.
> It seems the mainstream view is grounded in anxiety and dislike for tech.
No, you're barking up the wrong tree here. I love tech, I work in the industry and intend to continue to do so. I hate AI art because it's just bad. It's awful. AI produces images that don't make physical sense, have a weird glossy "digital art" sheen and most of all have zero artistic merit. I only want to see art (and read text) produced by human beings.
>I hate AI art because it's just bad. It's awful. AI produces images that don't make physical sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persistence_of_Memory
I take it you dislike Escher as well then
> AI produces images that don't make physical sense
Der Kuss is an oil-on-canvas painting with added gold leaf, silver and platinum. It is widely praised and held in high regard.
To me, it looks like the man has a broken neck, and the woman's been decapitated, her head rotated 90° and reattached to her torso by the ear.
This isn't to say that AI art is flawless on the first go — just that quite a lot of famous "good" art has exactly that specific flaw too.
Even though GenAI is getting better, and even though competent users know how to work around this with the right kinds of effort, normal people don't study the thing they want to get an image of before asking an AI to make it for them, and therefore will generally fail to notice when the image they've just made is still very wrong at at least one entire layer of abstraction about how the things it's depicting function or relate to each other.
An overwhelming majority of the kind of "art" people are producing with these Slop Generators is supposed to make physical sense - it just doesn't.
Have a look at the dreck in the linked article. The software was not asked to produce a picture of an impossible waterfall that couldn't exist in our physical world. Everything about the prompt indicates the user was looking for a physically real scene. The picture of the girl in a meadow even used hashtags to indicate to the algorithm that it was expected to produce an instagram-like photo, but there's a seed pod floating in mid air, her dress is missing a critical strap, the lacework of the dress doesn't make sense and the direction of lighting is totally inconsistent across different parts of her figure.
None of which contradicts my point, that the output's flaws are things the users themselves don't notice.
For example:
> The software was not asked to produce a picture of an impossible waterfall that couldn't exist in our physical world.
And, given my lack of knowledge of waterfall geology, I have no idea why that's impossible.
> her dress is missing a critical strap
Her left shoulder? I've seen real dresses where one of those slips off sideways for whatever reason. It's like the dress version of self-opening flies.
If you meant something else, I missed it.
I do see the seed pod; but (perhaps due to so many photographers using fill lighting or photoshop, I don't know) I see nothing wrong with the lighting.
I see nothing noteworthy about the lacework either, but I wouldn't expect to as a guy whose total knowledge of things like that is "they are often intricate and frilly".
There are oftentimes things I can indeed spot in GenAI images, when I make them I often find it best to make four at a time, pick the one that was closest to what I wanted, then highlight the errors and do img2img for another cycle, for a dozen repetitions, to get what I want.
But most people don't look that closely.
It's like this: https://xkcd.com/1015/
AI is just a tool in the box for humans to take advantage of. You can do bad and good stuff with it (most art is bad regardless of the tool). This is my fav video series that heavily uses AI tools (images, video, audio, lip sync):
https://x.com/neuralviz/status/1848176393282326595
I enjoy it and I think has tons of artistic merit
Good. Every time I see AI "art" it's just someone with the worst taste spewing their slop everywhere. It drowns out actually good art.
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Same argument could be brought against the printing press. In a sense, it was - that's how copyright became a thing in the first place.
Same for photocopiers, printers, general-purpose computers. If, at any point, some of that tech had "never have been invented or at the very least not released into the public", we wouldn't have e.g. photolitography and thus no modern microchips.
Copyright are a legal equivalent of a dirty hack to preserve some legacy behavior, that became a permanent fixture over time. Like with dirty hacks in code, you're going to get different responses from different people, depending on situation.
the technologies you mentioned helped spread very useful information, not worthless images devoid of meaning, artistic expression and thought
also, even in absence of copyright, the unprecedented scale of art theft that these technologies necessitate would be morally questionable
The first large scale use of the printing press outside books was to print indulgences:
> In the teaching of the Catholic Church, an indulgence (Latin: indulgentia, from indulgeo, 'permit') is "a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for (forgiven) sins".[1] The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions…"[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence
This directly lead to the reformation and two centuries of religious wars in Europe which proportionally killed more people than both the world wars combined.
The printing press has more blood on it than ink. By contrast the worst you can say about art models is that they are 'derivative' whatever that means.
Indulgences also paid for the art of the renaissance. It was because pope Leo X was so into art that he stepped up indulgences, causing Luther to protest. So renaissance art has more blood..?
If only he'd had art models to reduce the need for indulgences to fund art.
printing press has legitimate applications besides printing indulgences, ai image generators have no legitimate applications
one technology could be used to do bad things, the other technology is guaranteed to only be used to do bad things
> the other technology is guaranteed to only be used to do bad things
That would require all images to be bad.
Why can't I have a daugerotype of a Victorian era werewolf Prime Minister standing in front of 10 Downing Street? What harm does that cause anyone?
>ai image generators have no legitimate applications
They are amazing replacements for the clone tool from photo shop.
>one technology could be used to do bad things, the other technology is guaranteed to only be used to do bad things
One technology is used to make pictures, the other to commit genocide. My dude, I don't often say it, but go out and touch grass.
i have to ask, do you also count world war victims as victims of the printing press because military orders and propaganda were printed on paper? is the the telephone, copper in the wires and electromagnetism itself also complicit in genocide, because they were used for communication in nazi germany?
> the technologies you mentioned helped spread very useful information, not worthless images devoid of meaning, artistic expression and thought
Both. They did both.
Cameras replaced most portrait painters, but they also gave us "Paint Drying" which is 10 hours 7 minutes long film of exactly what it sounds like — deliberately worthless images devoid of meaning as it's a protest.
And when I was a kid, the talking heads in the press were upset about cable TV introducing the UK to the cartoon channel, with a similar argument to yours.
There is no theft; this is simply how any being, human or not, works, or else you would be a caveman.
i'm sorry, but you have to be extremely naive to think that all these companies actually respect people's work enough to verify that all their training data is properly licensed, and deliberately hinder themselves and put themselves behind their competitors by avoiding any copyrighted work
They clearly do not avoid copyrighted work, where in my reply did you infer the opposite?
> where in my reply did you infer the opposite
here
> There is no theft
Copyright infringement is not theft.
not legally i guess, but in spirit i'd say it is?
also obviously depends on the case, copyright law is often very stupid and broken, like there's no reason why this book written 100 years ago isn't in public domain, but scraping millions of images from artists' websites kinda is
Well there is no theft ahah
But even if by "theft" you mean "copyright infringement" there is a strong argument for fair use, we humans consume large amounts of copyrighted content and are influenced by it in everything we do, I don't find it unethical or wrong in general, and I don't see how it should be any different for a machine, unless you are against job automation, but in this case you seem to be worried about "theft".
Edit: HN thinks that I'm posting too fast so my reply to the comment below here ahah: "Well, then we agree that it wouldn't be a problem if the model didn't output an image from the training dataset, which is extremely rare or essentially impossible with today's dedup steps used during dataset creation."
models will straight up return training data sometimes if you prompt them with like an image file name like IMG_1234.JPG though
i'd say that this is not the equivalent of a human glancing at an image and then have the memory of details of that image have some small influence on their way of thinking and imagining and creating, i'd say that's theft
We can’t prevent the technology from being invented, it was always going to happen (video games and VR was practically going to have this AI generated worlds).
It is just a matter of doing it right the first time such as having license/agreements or company building it based on their own images.
just because we can't prevent something from being invented, doesn't mean we can't prevent its spread: we limit technology all the time
like chemical weapons were invented, bioweapons were invented, meth manufacturing was invented, but we prohibit people from manufacturing them because they're harmful
same logic could apply to generative machine learning (obv not as harmful as above examples, but same idea)
That’s not what the OP said though, what you’re describing is basically regulations. All we can do is regulate to outlaw and punish those who don’t comply with it but that’s still not possible to limit.
Chemical weapons are still being developed (Russia used it in their war against Ukraine), bioweapons are still being developed, meth are still being manufactured all over in US if not smuggled in.
It seems pretty surprising to me that you can already tell where generative models are going, and that they should be stopped in their tracks immediately. Is there any documented harm yet?
blackmail, deepfakes, misinformation, impersonation?
literally any website containing images is in most cases overwhelmed with an unlimited supply of ai generated garbage
ai image generators are barely two years old, and have already caused a lot of damage in basically every sphere they interact with, i'd say you don't need a lot of foresight to be able to make a judgement here
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It is not solely due to dislike of tech but rather the copyrights being violated and artists losing revenue to it.
reddit moderators and power users are terminally online, mentally and emotionally unstable people with strong (but invariably aligned with the establishment) opinions about the current thing, who act like political commissars and believe themselves to be the arbiters of truth.
what you see on there are not mainstream views, but the views of a tiny but undeservingly powerful minority. dissidents, detractors and apostates get silenced with extreme prejudice, threads where thousands of people disagree with their views get locked and purged, neutral subreddits get hijacked and opposing subreddits get targeted with infiltration and mass report campaigns by the likes of /r/againsthatesubreddits.
in other words, the views you see on reddit are a very, very, very poor indicator of real public opinions about a current thing like generative AI.
the unfortunate reality is that those people are mainstream views - they share the same views as mainstream media, which is owned by billionaires and supporting political establishment. reddit absolutely hates anything an inch to the left or right of establishment democrats, which is really extremely moderate to conservative in a global context.
Does Stable Diffusion 3.5 make Stable Diffusion 3 obsolete?
There are quite a few different versions (SD1.5, XL, XL Turbo, SD3) of Stable Diffusion still in use because the newer ones didn't definitively supersede previous versions.
It's offtopic, but I hate articles which talk about a very specific thing and put dozens of links into the text, but none links to the actual product or company.
The stuff: https://github.com/Stability-AI/sd3.5#stable-diffusion-35
Also relevant: https://github.com/huggingface/blog/blob/main/sd3-5.md
Yeah, I feel like articles like this shouldn't be posted, but instead the link to the source.
That's to reduce bounce rate and keep you on the page for the ads. Notice that all the hyperlinks are same domain. Yes, it's annoying.
News by StabilityAI: https://stability.ai/news/introducing-stable-diffusion-3-5
How does it compare to FLUX?
My self-hosted Krita plugin is running on SD1.5 and SDXL and those are already very impressive albeit "dated" by the standards of October 2024. So I can't wait to try this out!
Given how badly sd3 flopped, curious if this is better.
They chose to illustrate the article with a picture of a woman lying on grass, with one hand hidden and the other with 6 fingers? That's either a very self-aware or completely unaware choice.
Wait am i counting wrong?
No, you do count 5 fingers, with 5 knuckle joints. Assuming she has a thumb, that makes 6 fingers though.
I am really quite shocked that people don't seem to recognize a hand. The thumb's metacarpal comes out basically from the base of the wrist, and its distal phalanx would end about where the proximal phalanx of the other fingers start. So the only way this hand would be somewhat anatomically correct would be that the thumb is hidden by the perspective.
Oh man you’re right I totally missed that. If that were a thumb, it would have to be some disgusting dinosaur claw thing because it’s way too far down the arm. That’s subtle, I bet they actually missed it.
Flagged for the website getting an advertisement past ublock origin.
It looks good and all but it won’t past any visual tests when you go more than 10 seconds vs even hobbyist vids. There is still a big gap if it does longer durations
> Prompt: a brave explorer standing on the edge of a massive waterfall, overlooking a vast, untouched jungle. The explorer is wearing a worn leather jacket and carrying an old map, as the mist from the waterfall rises around them. A glowing golden temple is barely visible in the distance, hidden among the trees.
Result: an explorer not standing on the edge of a waterfall, but instead a physically impossible waterfall in the distance. A glowing temple is very very very visible, totally unhidden by any trees.
Kind of amazing how these releases went from, the most mind blowing thing ever, to basically, meh, in a few months.