I think Ezra Klein said it just reduces the cost of BS to zero
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Ok, then. F*ck AI:
“It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin of Russia and other world leaders — but not China’s president, Xi Jinping.”
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Not listened to it yet, but this might be somewhat relative to this topic: Gadget Detective - A selection of free tech advice & tech news broadcasts by Fevzi Turkalp on the BBC & elsewhere / 19th April 2023 - Using Artificial Intelligence for Art on BBC Radio London
Not sure if this is relevant or whether I should be reviving such an old thread?
Financial Times data correspondent John Burn-Murdoch has an interesting column (£/€) on AI already taking white-collar jobs. He has a twitter thread that has the main points.
Even more tangentially, Sean Carroll is sceptical of the idea of AGI or the use of AI to generate art:
Coincidentally I attended a photo club presentation last night by a photographer that has embraced AI and tried many/most of the platforms out. He began his presentation with some quotes by artists/painters at the dawn of photography, the gist of the quotes was savaging photography as not art and photographers as not artists.
It seems to me, that many painters veered away from attempts to literally capturing a scene about the same period as the rise of photography. I am sure photography was as big a dislocation for painters as AI to traditional photography. Periods in Western art history - Wikipedia
We are at an inflection point and do need to figure out what it means to us when we create an image and view images.
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And pictorialist photographers tried to ape painting
It’s a reasonable point and requires some thinking through, like you say, but just because there are some parallels to technological innovation in the past doesn’t necessarily mean the outcome will follow a similar course
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Well, I would tend to see these AI generated/enhanced images as some kind of art. For sure.
But it is no photography. The same way as photos are postings.
I have been ruminating about this, and this is what I am currently thinking. Photography, interpreted broadly, serves the following purposes:
- Documenting events, personal or public.
- Creating art.
- Generating images that attract attention on the web, mainly social media.
Of these, the third is novel (not older than a decade or so, in its current form). I am guessing that this will fall to ML first, but being flooded by these kind of images will make people desensitized after an adjustment period. (Pope doing backflips… click to next image). The legal system will have to deal with deepfake etc, but if it does not, after a while people will ignore that too.
Artists may end up using ML, but have to be careful. A certain artistic style is appreciated most when it is unlike what came before, and ML is by definition relying on existing imagery to create new pictures. It may become easy to have ML paint whatever kind of image, but this does not mean that it will be appreciated as art, the entry cost is so low that anyone can do it for cents of computer time.
Finally, I guess the documentary function of photography will be mostly unaffected. For public images, this does not mean that people won’t try to fake them, but reputable news sources will sanction this kind of behavior. For private images, there will be little motivation to generate them by ML.
Personally, for me as an amateur photographer, the “private documentary” function is the most important. I take images to preserve memories, of important personal events and travel. I do not post these online and only show them to a small group of people. I am very happy that my parents did this during their own youth and my childhood, and love to look at those photos, even though they are not much to speak of from a professional perspective. But personally they are important.
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Pretty much agree, I think. Only thing I can add is that art is embedded in a market at this point. Rarity value or the “touch” of the artist, even if just conceptual because a bunch of low-paid grunt art graduates actually made the stuff, seems kinda essential. Photos are also infinitely replicable but a market for singular or even just numbered prints has “developed”.
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I guess this falls into a discussion about what counts as art. It’s also pretty cheap to tape a banana to a wall, and anyone can do it, and yet it is “art” to some people.
In a way with stable diffusion it’s already easy to mix styles and create certain things that haven’t been seen before, even if they have no character or particular depth to it, but it’s good food for thought.
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I have opted out from that discussion at the age of 18.
Frankly, I don’t care — I know what I like in music, painting, photography, and theatre, and several other art forms, and a generic definition would not add anything to my life, because in every genre there is stuff that I am pretty sure is art but I do not enjoy it and would not pay for it. “Art” as a label is useless to me.
That said, after having seen people pay for NFTs, I am positive that people will be using ML to create ephemeral junk (that may or may not be art? but who cares), some of which will sell of tons of money. This is an interesting phenomenon, but there are so many interesting things in life that I can just continue to ignore this.
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Art tangent:
There’s an argument to be made that democratising what is considered art, taking it away from the old tweed-jacketed arbiters of taste, and saying almost anything can be art, has had an unintended consequence. By creating a relativistic void of aesthetic value in place of the (yes, exclusionary, Western, patriarchal, etc.) canon, means monetary value tends to rush into the vacuum and what sells for a high price is what sells for a high price, given utility value is more or less nil. #veblengoods
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I agree with you. I believe there’s inherent aesthetic value to most things and it’s not all subjective like there has been a big push for everyone to believe. Sure we can be molded by a myriad of things but there are objective beauty that even people who grow up outside a lot of those molds can appreciate.
I believe that mass production of media has had a negative impact on people’s tastes as a whole and keeps being a detriment to society, even putting personal tastes completely aside.
I’m not even close to being educated enough to really weigh in on this topic so it’s just my 2c.
Cool, now we’ve 4 cents between us!
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Back from the tangent (which conclusions I fully share and put another 2c in) to photography.
I think the first and hardest hit will be / are already the typical stock photographer and the stock photo traders.
News photography has already been hit by the mobile phone. Either the reporter shoots the image for the newspaper/site himself or they use an image of a member of the public, mostly without compensation except for “exposure” by having the name under the image.
I think the classical portrait photographer will be gone next. Just shoot the face somehow acceptable with a phone and let the AI do the rest from cosmetics over styling to post processing. If there is depth information in the image it gets much easier - and that will come. Product shots? The same. Even without the product but just a CAD file.
That leaves Art. And that will stay.
And the camera market will take a hit. A real one and then be reduced to a even smaller number of brands for high end stuff. But perhaps there will be home brew scene - descendants from the Raspberry Pi and similar.
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Agree that this is already happening, as the FT report suggests. Uber Eats has been using AI to create (sometimes to hilarious effect) images of food items that they deliver.
As in all AI pursuits, the hardest hit jobs are the professional prompt-completers.
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Portrait photography is not primarily about equipment or technique. Good portrait photographers engage with their subjects to get good photos. It is at least 50% an interpersonal skill. In my experience, very few people can do it well.
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Yes, for a portrait as a piece of art. But for your company home page mug shot? And that is, where the bread is.
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