2023-01-21 from the editor of ~insom
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Hi. No one needs to read this but I want to get the thoughts
out of my head on AI generated art. Feel free to skip.
I'm specifically talking about Stable Diffusion, which is
the only thing I've really used, and that I have a local
copy of, so I'm not limited by cloud computing credits or
however people are limited on the public / proprietary
models.
I'm not like, a _booster_ of this tech -- it's going to take
another already underpaid field and make it worse, and in
many cases used a bunch of artists' work uncompensated to
help to kneecap their field. Pretty dark.
That said, the technology itself is amazing that it works at
all. And it's probably not going away now. I feel like we
can wait out blockchain until it dies off, but as AI art
generation can be used to make labour cheaper for capital
it's almost guaranteed to stick around.
I get that it's fun on social media to joke about how it
can't count fingers, but the real answer to that is just ...
scale. I have an RTX3060 video card and I can generate ~200
images on a text prompt in a couple of hours, and I can
train a model on around a 1000 images to a reasonable degree
in about 12. Running things locally changes the dynamics
entirely:
Yes, many images are unusably bad, ranging from "a little
off" to "many mouthed eldritch horror" but when all you've
done is sink a dollar's worth of electricity into something,
only one of those 200 images needs to be usable. It turns
the process into curating and selecting from a large body of
possible images. Also: retouching and cropping still exist,
so even if you end up with one of those 6+ fingered hands,
it doesn't render the whole thing unusable.
IMO, when the marginal cost of creating things through
automation drops so close to zero, humans end up getting
fucked. Self checkouts are bad, but they let one person
supervise 6 lanes, so companies put up with their badness.
Google Translate is highly flawed but it's free for most
uses and real translators are (justifiably) expensive. AI
images look weird but even cheap illustration is orders of
magnitude more expensive. People will lower their standards
-- very far -- for something that's free or cheap. I'm
guilty of this too -- I've literally ordered two or three of
the same part from AliExpress in the hope that at least one
of them will actually be real (and not a fake or a clone) --
it's still often cheaper than buying one of that same part
from Digikey.
On a personal note: as someone who has tried on and off to
get better at drawing, knowing that this technology exists
is extremely demotivating. Even if I put in regular practice
for the rest of my life, it's very likely that someone with
a dollar worth of GPU time will always be able to create
something which _looks_ better than I can produce. I used to
just be comparing myself to artists (which is, itself, a
negative habit) -- now I'd be comparing myself to _anyone
with a tool_.